Sometime last week, the Federal Reserve add a second page to its list of failed banks. More accurately, it inserted a page break to “make the page more user friendly.” With the number of failed banks up to 52, it’s hard to know whether to start there or start with the fact that our attention can’t be held long enough to get to the bottom of one page listing all the banks. Of course, back when I was your age, it was news if A bank failed. Now it’s just boring.
Or so totally expected that a list which requires a second page (and one presumes will require further entries, if not further pages) is not any big surprise. Most people born after 1963 don’t really have the expectation that the institutions of finance which their grandparents built to benefit their parents will survive long enough to take care of us too. The Fed may give us a soft landing as far as these banks are concerned, but like the airbag after the crash, there may not be much left in the way of protection.
Again, not a big surprise, which leaves many of us with the choice to either stock up on peanut butter and ammunition before the horders get to it or walk away from the whole enterprise and find another way to take stock, so to speak. While the former would love to stem the tide of a growing global community, deny the ecological impacts of their consumption, and re-inforce their polemics in a self constructed echo chamber, I’m more interested in the latter’s appeal to a broad embrace of the richness of the whole human experience. We can store up our riches on earth, but I fully believe there are greater riches to be experienced by understanding where true wealth lies and giving it all away.