Fall of the Wall

Street, that is. But will it be a Fall? or just another threat by the upper classes, another falsely-posed disaster from which the producing classes must somehow rescue them?

Pat Buchanan says the Baby Boomers did this, but he doesn't know those of us who walked through life with trepidation, the Viet Nam vets, the women who would have married them if they had survived, the casualties of wacky ideas about drugs or sex, the ones who faced the challenges of their young adulthood with wounds either overt or hidden. The Sixties were bad to some of us too.

There were so many of us, and then the women wanted things for themselves to count on and do. In all the envious screeds railing against us I never saw anyone say how harsh it was, in the '70's, for those of us with just ordinary passion while the Uber-Kompetitors left us in the inflationary dust.

As indeed they are leaving us today -- gold dust, I guess. They made their push for all of our money, dumping retirement entitlements, guilt-tripping us into private investments while they were devising ever more complicated ways of leveraging our savings toward profits that would put them forever beyond the reach of the human features that would take down the rest of us: Illness, children, children's illness, children's wars, famine, destruction of environments, the coarsening influence of a damaged world.

Now they have become so indispensable that the tax burdens of all the rest of us are required to keep their banks in place and trading ... instruments neither of us understands but at least we are willing to admit it.

I just don't believe it. I don't believe we cannot weather this threatened chaos and emerge stronger women and men. We have lost so much that gave us character. Wouldn't it be worth the risk of chaos to get it back? Wouldn't it be better to let the better-tailored sweat for a change, too? What the Founders created -- that the world cannot live without. What Wall Street made threatens instead to destroy it.