An acquaintance of mine for over 50 years said to me several months ago that I was in the position I am in because I have made poor choices over the course of my life. I felt infuriated at this heartless dismissal but didn’t respond because I was so emotionally raw at his comment. And for the past several days, I was reflecting on this & I recently re-watched the film, “Too Big to Fail,” and I began to think that perhaps my story was a microcosm of the bigger story, the macrocosm of the 1% in this country?

 

To try to keep it from sounding like a purely personal attack against my acquaintance, I’m going to refer to him as simply “M”. I now call him an acquaintance because he’s shown me far too many times that he’s not a friend. I recently turned 70 years old & all my life I have wrestled with deep-seated feelings of insecurity & inferiority.

 

I believe that in the beginning of our friendship, I was amusing to M. & he enjoyed hearing my stories about hitchhiking around the country & Europe. But as the decades passed, M. didn’t find me so amusing anymore & he tired of reading my critiques about the social & political state of America. Moreover, M. is a multi-millionaire & I think he’s become more defensive over the years because of his wealth & prestige.

 

As far as I can tell, when the rich are confronted by the 99% of us who weren’t born with a silver spoon in our mouths, they blame us & accuse us of being too lazy, too ignorant, or of having made “poor choices.” So, yeah, this essay is obviously going to sound very defensive but how could it not be? And when the wealthy dismiss us as basically losers because of supposed character flaws, I feel like they are rubbing salt in our wounds. And those wounds are more often than not, the results of the callous indifference of the privileged elite.

 

We must remind ourselves that the 1% write the laws that keep the majority of us in poverty not only economically but also criminally. Everyone knows that there are two sets of law in America, one set for the 99%, especially the working poor, & another set of laws for the power elite who can literally get away with murder if they have enough money to buy the highest priced lawyers.

 

M didn’t have to work his way through college, it was handed to him by his daddy just as his position in daddy’s insurance agency was. He clearly didn’t have to worry about getting fired. I know that this may sound like I’m making excuses or simply being a whiner but how else am I to tell my story if I don’t tell you the facts of my life?

 

I started going to community college when I was 19 years old. I dreamed of becoming a forest ranger but learned that I should’ve taken physics, calculus, trigonometry, etc. in high school. But because I went to secondary school in Paramount, CA, an “industrially-zoned” city, they didn’t even offer these subjects. We were all placed on a “vocational track.” By-the-way, I was reading at the 11th grade, sixth month level when I was in the sixth grade.

 

Like most young men around 18 to 20 years old, I was being pressured at home to move out & make my own way in life & it seemed impractical to spend a couple of years taking these prerequisites before I could even begin the four years necessary to become a forest ranger. So, I began taking business courses because they seemed the most practical & might help me get my foot in the door with some company?

 

The problem with the business courses I took was that they were extremely boring & easy. I soon surmised that to succeed in business, only two things were necessary i.e., greed & a lack of ethics. Think about the millions of young men & women who had their dreams shot down because they couldn’t afford to go to the right colleges for the careers they wanted to pursue.

 

You see, I was born on the proverbial “wrong side of the tracks,” and was raised by a single mother with my three siblings. And it seemed that my entire childhood & adolescence was one long series of crises. Being the eldest, it fell to me to look after my brother & sisters i.e., cook dinner for them, make them do their homework & chores, and protect them from harm. I believe that a large part of the reason why I did so much wandering & hitchhiking in my 20s was because I was trying to make-up for my lost youth due to all the responsibilities I had as a child & a teenager?

 

I seriously doubt that M ever had such burdens & responsibilities placed on him as he was growing up. I spent my 20s switching college majors several times & I dropped-out of many courses sometimes half-way or even three-quarters of the way through a semester. Community college in those days was dirt-cheap & you basically just had to pay for your books so dropping-out was no big deal as far as I was concerned.

 

And if I had to guesstimate, I probably had close to a hundred different what I dubbed, “Mickey Mouse” jobs in those years. I usually quit a job for one of three reasons besides just being bored & wanting to travel. 1) the work conditions were too dangerous, 2) a supervisor treated me like I was their personal whipping-boy like I was a slave & they were my master, 3) it simply wasn’t challenging. The highest price I paid for my seemingly “irresponsible” ways was being labeled a quitter or a loser by family members as well as “friends.”

 

You see, I’ve been a dreamer all my life & ever since I was in the second grade, I’d dreamed of visiting Switzerland. I was impatient to live my dreams & figured that if I waited until I was retired, my health would probably be shot & I couldn’t hike those Alpine trails or swim in those glacier-fed lakes, etc. So, I’d work at some Mickey Mouse job for a few months & sometimes I’d buy a one-way ticket to Europe & land with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket & stay as long as I could stretch my money out.

 

Returning to those rationalizations the 1% use to blame us for our misfortunes, if I was too lazy, why have I written over 8,000 pages on one book that is “published,” and three others that are still works in progress? Why did I write over 300 essays? If I’m too dumb or ignorant, why did I persist for 14 years & finally earn my B.A. in English literature with no help from my family?

 

For over 40 years, I have obsessively followed i.e., read, watched documentaries, written about, collected articles, listened to political programs, etc. about America & the world’s social & political histories as well as current events. I’d guesstimate that conservatively; I have spent at least 50,000 hours in these pursuits. Why?

 

Because I hate injustice, inequality, the unnecessary suffering, pain, humiliation, & sometimes death of billions of the poor, the working class, & etc. around the globe. People like M haven’t got a clue & don’t give a shit! They sit in their penthouse suites, their luxury offices, their mansions, their yachts, their jets & feel so smug & superior and dismiss the rest of us as inferiors & not worthy of what they inherited or stole from the 99%.

 

The movie, “Too Big to Fail,” reveals these immoral & heartless bastards in all their ignominious glory. I have said for many years that as a general rule, the bigger a corporation is, the more likely they are committing fraud & it’s probably become their standard business practice because they know that if they get busted, the fines almost always are less than the profits they made breaking the law, so they have no to little incentive to stop breaking the law.

A handful of America’s largest banks, hedge fund managers, the three major credit rating agencies, the insurance behemoth A.I.G., our entire financial services  industry forced the world economic system to the precipice of total collapse. Was this just a matter of “poor choices?”

 

The 1%’s “poor choices,” or fraud, caused tens of millions of people around the world to lose their jobs, their homes, their pensions, their health care, etc. Their hubris is breathtaking! The overwhelming majority of the American public made it very clear & said, Hell no, don’t bail the greedy crooks out but “our” government did it anyway.

 

And the architects of the bail-out, Hank Paulson, Timothy Geithner, & Ben Bernanke didn’t write into the legal paperwork the requirement that the banks would loosen-up credit requirements so that small businesses & individual borrowers could borrow again & help stimulate the dangerously sluggish economy. It was understood & believed that they would but guess what? They laughed all the way to the bank, didn’t make loans available to us, the suckers, & gave themselves lavish bonuses.

Lesson learned? Yeah right! The banks are bigger than before, deregulation still reigns supreme, and the fraudsters aren’t worried because the public will be forced to pay for their “poor choices,” yet again because they’re too big to fail.

So, I sit here slowly dying from cancer that I can’t afford to fight because Medicare will only cover 80% of the necessary treatment & Social Security is my only income. My “choice” is to pay the 20% out of the inheritance my beloved wife left to me & end up homeless & still die from the incurable cancer I have or to hang on to a semblance of dignity & hope that my end isn’t too excruciatingly painful.

 

Another “poor choice” on my part? Or the honest reality that the poor have no choice in this rigged system. And those compassionate conservatives & corporate democrats want to slash Medicare & Social Security. Their greed knows no limits & they have no humanity!

 

— Rob DeLoss, January 12, 2023

 

 

P.S.  Oh yeah, I almost forgot about another “poor choice,” I made. I was in the U.S. Army because I wasn’t even aware of college deferments & after six months, orders were coming down & half of us were to be sent to Germany & half of us would be sent to Vietnam. I kept going AWOL because they couldn’t ship you out while you were being court martialed. I’ve always referred to this as the most fortunate mistake of my life.