I've always hated those snobs who claim to know something you don't, and then hold their supposed insider news over your head like a club.
I first met such people in high school when, being a good, scared little Catholic boy who only loved his mom and tolerated his younger sister, I suddenly discovered a pull toward girls younger than Mom but older than Sis, and found, in those pre-sex-education days, that I knew nothing about them.
So I asked - and this is where I met the first experts, guys a year or two ahead of me on the Army-and-factory track my Franciscan high school maintained. These high-school guys, almost certainly virgins like myself, told me some feeble stuff about "what women want" and sent me off to make a fool of myself.
I next met experts after my active service in the Armed Forces, when I came back - from two-years-and-change with Uncle Sam - slightly different. I was more frightened, more cynical, addicted to drugs, a very different person from when I went in as an optimistic, foolish little American Legion patriot, a boy who actually thought some of the Vietnamese were his enemy and others were his allies.
These experts were usually religious in nature, thrust at me by my worried family, or psychologists and psychiatrists, thrust at me by a slightly overwhelmed Uncle who at least back then wanted to take care of the "boys" who'd tried to serve him.
All these experts told me to forget everything or give it all up to God.
Recovering from all that took years and was more a credit to time than to any expert.
Then I married, had three children and then a divorce I didn't want thrust upon me.
I started going to counselors of all stripes. New experts. Feminists, who said it was all my fault. Drumbeaters who said it was all her fault. And Freudians who said it was all our parents' fault.
Eventually, I realized it was simply that life, which never ceases to change, had changed my spouse and me from lovers, to friends, to antagonists. We (including the kids) were all better off in two semi-happy homes than in one unhappy house.
Which leads me to experts like Alan Greenspan, who has just suggested raiding Social Security while keeping tax cuts that hugely benefit only 2 percent of the people alive today. That's 2 percent who already have 40 percent, or more, of all assets generated by the American economy. This pirate in a suit is disguised as an expert instead of what he is - a spokesman for the greediest generation of American businessfolk in my lifetime.
Those of us who have been paying into Social Security for almost 40 years deserve our full benefits.
And anyone, nationally or locally, who threatens those benefits is more our enemy than Saddam Hussein ever was.
My suggestion is that if you're a reader of this column, and agree with even 50 percent of my weekly blatherings, you ask your dentist, doctor, broker, grocer, car-insurance salesperson, bartender, real-estate person - and anyone else profiting from you - whether they agree with this latest attack on the American middle and working classes.
If they say they believe in tax breaks for corporations, paid for by stealing your retirement, or your Mom's retirement, switch to someone else.
There are professionals with heart out here. Not everyone is a greedhead.
Greed - from local school officials who make sure they get theirs in salaries, perks and benefits, while allowing your kids to drink brown water for more than a decade, to super-wealthy national politicians who didn't serve in Vietnam (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice) and criticize those who did like Kerry and Clark, while making bucks on death - is as ugly a personal trait as untrammeled lust.
America and (to a lesser degree) Seattle are fast changing from places that believe in something for everyone willing to work for it, to places promising everything for those who find themselves on the top, and damn the consequences to the rest of us: the majority, left and right, loud or silent.
Locally and nationally, it seems to me (a mere columnist and no expert) that we are in danger of losing everything that once made us great, all because of the greed and lust for territory and power of a few.
Don't let them steal from you while they hide behind their experts.
Write Dennis Wilken at qanews@nwlink.com.
[[In-content Ad]]
