Random Acts of Writing: Learning the value of money
By Craig Carter
Thursday, April 2, 2009 11:02 AM PDT
I think my outrage is broken. Maybe all the outrage I’ve felt over things like Wall Street executives extravagantly remodeling their offices on my dime and the people who played fast and loose with average peoples’ 401Ks and other investments and then ran away much richer has caused my outrage to overheat, and it blew a gasket or something. I just cannot for the life of me find the will to feel any outrage over the recent news that insurance giant AIG paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in retention bonuses to their executives after accepting billions in taxpayer bailout cash.
I wanted to write something scathing or just plain nasty about these people, but, like I said, my outrage is broken. Which leaves me to sit here, shake my head in disgust and actually think about this stuff.
Common decency and good old-fashioned sense would dictate the executives at AIG take a step back and say, “Naw, I don’t think we’re going to give out bonuses this year.” But as we’ve learned in the funky little soap opera that’s also known as our current economic mess, it would seem decency, morality and a sense of fair play are completely foreign to people who get filthy rich through the shuffling of papers.
Actually, I think I may have hit on the crux of the problem here. Maybe the problem is these people don’t actually work, they just shuffle papers. Hence, the people who just can’t for the life of them understand why taxpayers are outraged over their six-figure salaries and bonuses aren’t evil. They’re just clueless. (As if that makes this any easier.)
I’m reminded of the summer after my sophomore year in high school. Having never really worked in my entire life, my aptitude for the value of money was rather skewed. So my mom decided it was time for her baby boy to learn a lesson in how the world really worked, and she arranged to get me hired as a dishwasher at the restaurant where she worked her fingers to the bone as a waitress.
To be honest, I stunk at the job. I was slow and clumsy, and the cooks were always complaining I made so much noise they couldn’t hear the waitresses’ orders. However, I did learn the value of a buck. More importantly, I learned precisely what my parents had to do and endure to put food on the family table, a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs.
Thinking about this has caused me to conclude maybe the prosperity that was built on the flimsiest of foundations collapsed because we didn’t earn it, and we didn’t deserve it.
Just think about it. All these people who got filthy rich through the internet boom, and the later housing boom, got rich not from actually doing any work, but from just shuffling papers around. Most of them went straight from college, where they lived in a world insulated from hard work, to jobs at investment firms, insurance companies and brokerage houses, where they were even further insulated from hard work. So their view of the accounts they suckered regular folks to invest in 401Ks and such were abstract at best.
Maybe if these CEOs and other executives who are so vocally defending their “right” to bonuses in these hard times were forced to work on a construction site or to work the sales floor of a department store or do probably the hardest, most thankless job of all — serve food to ungrateful, impatient idiots — they’d realize the folly of accepting money for running their businesses into the ground. More importantly, maybe they’d respect people who really do work more than to try to sell the idiotic notion they earned those tainted bonuses.
So maybe, just maybe, the reason I don’t feel outrage anymore is because these folks don’t deserve and haven’t earned my outrage. They deserve, and they’ve earned, my pity.
Craig Carter, an Ontario resident, writes a bi-weekly column for the Argus Observer. Comments or questions for Mr. Carter can be directed to: Craig Carter, Argus Observer Newsroom; 1160 S.W. Fourth St., Ontario, OR 97914
