Welcome me back anyway!
I wound up in the hospital last summer, shortly after my last posting . . . and my recovery has taken much longer than I ever expected. Then again, I'm already living on borrowed time. When my lung disease was first diagnosed, I was told I'd be dead in 10 years . . . and that would have been July, 1988.
At least, I think I'm still alive. My ex-husband sent me a rather snarky email in February (after 15 months of utter silence, including NOT paying the total correct support amount he was ordered to pay under the court's order in our divorce) noting that I've been at death's door so long people are starting to confuse me with the decorative statuary.
I tried to be civil and reminded him that he had no one to blame but himself, as the crummy way he'd treated me got my Irish up, and thus I was prepared to outlive him if I had to do it on will power and one nerve.
I wish I'd said the first thing that popped into my head, to wit: "After 15 months, that's the best you can come up with? You'd better have an EKG and an EEG, for if your heart and the rest of your brain have atrophied the way your wit has, you're the one who's dead and who doesn't know it."
This is why I'd never be a great trial lawyer. I have the instinct for the killer comment, but I have too much self-editing going on in my head to use said instinct to its best advantage. Oh, well. I should not be unhappy that I am not a shark, now, should I?
Anyway, a lot of other things have happened in the last 10 months. I have many opinions to share, but I'm not going to try to catch up all at once. I just don't have the stamina. But I will make one or two pertinent observations for now, and return (I hope on a more regular basis) with more in-depth comments every day or two.
Pertinent observation the first: I don't care what anyone claims--the fundamental, underlying motivation of anyone touting a real free market economy is greed. Look what happens every time we de-regulate financial institutions. Their only obligation is to maximize the return for their investors (i.e., make as much money as possible for them, which is as good a definition of greed as I've ever seen). So they take more and more risks as regulations get looser and more non-existent . . . and the end result is the current sub-prime lending crisis.
When are we ever really going to learn the lesson of 1929? Regulate or crash. Maybe we never will learn, as those who have the most money can afford to ride out crashes (indeed, they make money off of other people's misery, as they can scoop up property cheaply when others have no choice but to sell), and the rest of us are so desperate to taste even a sliver of the American Dream pie that we buy into things we shouldn't because we really can't afford them.
That's sad. If we regulate and keep regulating, maybe individual profits are not as big as those seeking them want, but everyone gets to participate in relative safety.
Observation the second: Every time I hear more war news out of the Middle East, I am reaffirmed in my hypothesis that ending the Cold War was not necessarily a good idea. (A) While the Cold War was on, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the so-called superpowers kept an uneasy truce which kept our risk of being annihilated relatively low. The USSR, like it or hate it, kept the lid on all the extremist crap coming out of its allied countries in the Middle East, at its own expense, both in terms of money and manpower. (C) Now that the Cold War is over, Russia is reverting to its traditional suspicion and paranoia regarding the West, so we have the beginnings of another Cold War in fact if not in name.
Why, then, did we spend all the money we spent to take down the USSR? After all is said and done, the only thing we accomplished was to ramp up our own debt. Not only is the tension with Russia re-elevated, now we're the ones trying to keep the lid on the terrorists and extremists--at the expense of our own economy and --more importantly--our own young military men and women. This is foolishness. Utter foolishness.
More soon!
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