Monday Morning Blank

Just got back from our yearly attempt at elderly excess.

The folks I hang with during these outings are a pretty nice cross-section of the upper regions of the professional class, hell, one of them is probably a full-on one-percenter.  Now they are all retiring and living the good life.  I cannot stress enough how happy I am for them, they seem to have achieved their goal.

But I notice a certain angst with them, the political discourse has changed over the years, that will always be the case, but this time I sense a certain resignation that I have never seen before.  They are all intelligent and educated folks, and this time I believe that I felt resignation in their voices.

I think that they are seeing, for the first time, that there may well be an endgame.  I think that they also may also be understanding that the world might be working its way to a new way of doing business.  Worst of all, I think that they might be realizing that their positions are not all that stable in the new system that is being birthed.  They don't like the idea much.  Can't say as I blame them.

In a sense, the attitude of maintenance of the status quo has always been the hallmark of folks such as these.  They work hard, play by the rules, and expect to be rewarded for that brief foray into purgatory.  The retirement of golf and crafts was the carrot hung in front of these folks for the past thirty years to entice them to perform the obeisances necessary for a wildly capitalist and exploitative system.  They did what the chose to do and they did it well.

But systems themselves change.  The system we have changed into is where the folks at the top need to keep throwing others off the boat in order for the boat to stay afloat.  They are just now coming to the realization that their ticket that they have punched through dint of 25+ years of hard work may provide less than  what they anticipated.

 Now, some of you might be saying in your brains that these folks deserve it, that they were complicit in the deal going down.  No sir, that dog won't hunt.

In a very real sense, these folks are the folks that really will lose.  They put their faith in the system and rose as high as they could within the system.  They all started out as working class and clawed and scratched their way up from there.  They played by the established rules and succeeded.  It is not their fault that they weren't high enough on the food chain to avoid the coming unpleasantness.

So, just remember, these folks aren't the war criminals who were "just following orders" these were hard working folks who tried to contribute.  It wasn't until after they completed their tasks that they realized the game was rigged and they were pawns the same as the rest of us.