The Emerald Rose

         As most of you know I’m from the Boston, Massachusetts area originally, and as such still get the old Boston Globe daily newspaper on line every day. Yesterday I read a very disturbing report in there that made my blood boil a bit. So I waited for a day to pass before I actually wrote about it. Ready? Here we go!

        Bank of America just DONATED $10,000,000 to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. ” This surppasses the previous largest donation(2007) of $10M by State Street Corp., Citizens Bank, Liberty Mutual, and Merrill Lynch also gave $1M or more to the campaign this year.” WTF???

        Now I don’t begrudge the arts, and I in fact love the arts, all forms, music, art dance, ….all of it. BUT (sorry rant coming) now? In perhaps the worst economic period of this country since the Great Depression? Not only that, but the “Donors” are banks, insurance companies, stock brokerages and investment houses! Does that sound wrong to you???

         By my calculation roughly $25,000,000 was “donated” by the same folks (read a mortgagors) who can’t afford to work with folks losing their houses due to the recession and unemployment levels, folks who can’t find a job or even “make work” stuff to feed their families, folks whose entire foundations of retirement, i.e. their homes they have been paying on for thirty years, their IRA’s and investment portfolios to help them through their golden years and provide a “little something” for the children and the grand children, from the”donors”who have put interest rates on some revolving accounts at about 29.99%? Those folks?

         As Ricky Ricardo of the “I Love Lucy” show used to say, “Lucy,….essplane ‘dis to me!”

        Apparently the moral compass of this country is broken. I used to think it was at the government level, and the past two years of unabashed arrongance and disregard of our people by the “great politicians’ of our country, but they are now being matched by the arrogance and two faced actions of the great corporate community!

       The brazen balls to accept millions and billions of Dollars in “Bail outs” (which you, me and our children are going to be paying on for the next three generations at least) and then invest it overseas, and profit from it, and then telling us they are not in a position to assist the “poor folk”, yet they can stroke a check to the Museum of Fine Arts for $5,000,000 AND (I love this part) “donate” the other $5 Million in the form of an “in kind” art contribution of a painting by Ellsworth Kelly (who is he?) called ” Blue Green Yellow Orange Red” that is 22 feet long and made up of five panels, (uh…let me guess the color of each panel here).

          What the hell is Bank of America doing with a $5,000,000 painting? And it gives you cause to want to know what the hell else they have “stashed”, whereever it is banks stash stuff like that.(Probably hanging in the Board Room in San Fran or NYC) Where did they get the money for the painting?….The Good Tooth Fairy? Or perhaps it was the sub-prime “gottcha” mortgages they touted and which the government has “bail them out” of the debt on.

        Sorry, but I am a business man, I understand making money, giving back to the community, etc. but what difference is there now than in the days of slavery, where the masters made the money off the backs of those they exploited. I guess the real truism here is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,….but for the benefit of the richer of course! And they wonder where revolution ferments?

      Personal Note

        Managed to catch up , via Facebook (YUK!!!) with a friend I hadn’t seen in almost 45 years at least. We were both in Drum & Bugle Corps together and he has kept track better than I have of mutual friends and former corps members. (Quick Aside here, Drum & Bugle Corps ranks at or near the same level as the Espirit d’Corps of the Marines or other movement of size. It’s a “once in the Corps, always a Corpsman”,….(sigh) memories of all those days.)

         He flipped me a web site of one of our neighboring town Drum Corps and I was really schocked at how many of them that I personally knew, have passed away! Unfortunately that gives one pause to consider their own mortality, which in some ways can be a great “bummer” when we consider what we have actually done versus what we “could have done”. At best all we can hope for is that what we did was our best, and that we left a mark on this earth. I am reminded of my friend Mikie who died in 2006, and yet for a penniless guy who could barely feed himself, spent months living in the back seat of his car, and was also a friend from the Boston area, and yet every year about 20 to 30 of us get together on the anniversary of his death and remember him and toss back a shot of Sambuca for him.

          As I mused a few weeks ago when commenting on Ayn Rand’s philosophy and summary of death, “It is not I who cease to exist, it is the world around me that no longer exists.”

         Mixed bag for this blog, but now back to my regularly scheduled morning coffee and life liberty, and the pursuit of whatever. (It used to be happiness, but now the phrase “..give us this day our daily bread…” is to me becoming the plight of our elderly and eventually me, since I’m getting there in another thirty years or so. But the encouraging thing is that we can all go to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and regal ourselves in the splendor and magnificence of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Green Yellow Orange Red” for free on Senior citizens day of course. And make sure to go over to the section with the Mummies, I’m sure some of our friends will be there as well.

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        A little sick one for you,…BUT true. A friend of my wife’s just passed away at 93 years old, and last year her only son and heir, an out of work, bum , actually told her she would have to get more life insurance because he could not afford to bury her or pay all the taxes and insurance on her house after she died. (Perhaps he should apply to Obama and Pelosi and Reid for a bailout of some stimulus! You don;t even know what kind of “stimulus” I would offer the SOB!)