Green Arrows.

I had quite a week last week.

As did what we used to call the civilized world.

This may be apocryphal but that doesn't mean it's without value. The story goes that Mahatma Gandhi was visiting England and a journalist asked him, "What do you think of Western civilization?" 

Gandhi is said to have replied, "I think it would be a good idea."

It seems cruelty and exploitation and meanness are once again in full-flower. All those so-called Christian precepts, like loving your neighbor, helping those less fortunate, that it's easier to squeeze a camel through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven are today regarded as the punch-lines of giant cosmic dad jokes. It seems 97.9-percent of the world groans when they think of such things.

A friend, booked for a freelance job, was fired with no notice. Creatives aka little people, have to commit to holding companies. They're told it's a two-month gig. Then an account loss and the two-months disappear. They're out the same day. Of course there's no "contractural" obligation to keep someone on. But there very-well might be a human obligation to bring a little kindness to hardship.

A client, at the start of a rough-cut review, told GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company that due to the trump-derived economic uncertainty and its impact on charitable organizations, that she and her entire staff were let go. 

While people with hundreds of billions are getting richer and not paying taxes and transferring more wealth from you to them, people trying to help kids, or support science, or clean the oceans, or support medicine, are being fired, eviscerated.

Is this the world we want to live in?

Feral?

I ask you to consider this scene from Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life." And think about today's muskrat and trumpdump and thielian parallels.

I cannot think of more apt words for today than those I've pointed to above with my green arroz con pollo.

When I was a little boy I grew up with parents who were born out of the great depression. My father had no father and scraped by in 1930s Philadelphia with a blind, non-English-speaking mother and two older brothers who worked night and day to pay the rent. My mother told me stories of coming home from school and seeing her father-less family's furniture out in the street. 

They were scarred by this. And scars of such magnitude often become inter-generational.

My mother, when she was sober, often told me of life during those years. I remember saying, "But where did the money go?"

She'd answer, "There was no money."

I'd push, "No, the actual physical money. Where did it go?"

She'd not answer, not knowing or not thinking like I did.

Now, sixty years later, I understand where the physical money's gone. It wasn't sewn into mattresses or vaulted in banks. It was grabbed by the already-wealthy whose wealth increased like Potter's above.

Girls and Boys when your 401K loses a quarter of its value in a week, when trillions of wealth are said by the bought-and-paid-for-media to have "evaporated," that's a lie.

Your money, like your social security, like your medicare, like your tax-dollars are being stolen, transferred from you to those whom Teddy Roosevelt called, "The malefactors of great wealth."

When your taxes go up while the super-rich don't pay, that's a transfer of money from you to them. 

That's what's happening now about 39-times over.

I'll close with a few more green arrows. Compliments of Thomas Friedman in The New York Times (the news organ trump has been attacking for decades.)

Sounds a bit similar with what is going on in the ad industry, too?

It’s too late to hope not.