Hello! Your transparently ridiculous friend here, or more precisely ridiculously transparent friend...the one who believes you should/we should all be up front when it comes to the money we do or don’t have. I understand that smoke and mirrors are all part of the game but this game you are all playing is now ruining lives. You are leaving a trail of destruction in your wake—foreclosures and oil spills being just the tip of the ice-burg—not to be rude but the public is beginning to perceive you all as murderous thugs who are indifferent to life as we mostly know it.
So why is it that when I wish to bend an ear it is yours I turn to? I believe if I can bend your steely, sludge filled cochlea there might just yet be hope for us all. As obtuse as I may be when it comes to balancing a check book I may be the one best situated to see this whole shebang of toppling and regenerating stock quotes for the soggy cardboard edifice that it is. To the world of high finance I am the quintessential outsider (no longer victim but wizened observer).
My proposal is this:
We must all engage in a new openness regarding our personal finances and recognize the inarguable fact that, like the Greeks we live beyond our means and perhaps, like the Greeks, are in danger of having assumptions about what we deserve—like retirement at you know...forty, and so forth. These assumptions are based on what? Certainly they are not based on reality. We are all in debt whatever way you choose to look at it. Even you guys are in debt. The bonuses comprise the money you don’t throw at your debt obligations because having (as you all are so sure you do) the money smarts, you don’t want to tie up your money in petty matters like reducing the abstractions and distractions imposed by debt!
I’ve a name for this new plan of mine—Financial Streaking.
Henceforth we shall bare our financial souls.
I’ll be the first.
Just when people are least suspecting it, in the middle of a nationally televised football game for example, I shall rip off my facade and run across the pitch of our shared existence, plow through our collective dreams and so reveal the shallowness of the motivations at their core.
You’ll hear the sound of shock and awe as I determinedly streak, financially butt naked for all the world to see, dropping personal information like PIN numbers and passwords as I go.
Being human and all too frail my gumption and gall will run out quickly and so, if all goes to plan I shall needs must reach the changing rooms (preferably of my favorite team though truth being told I’m indifferent to football and use the analogy only to garner a populist connection to my otherwise whacky theme), having evaded security as I go.
Back on the field there it will lie, throbbing and sad, teetering on the twenty yard line, my dirty laundry, the truth of my financial instability, and in it the masses shall see therein reflected the paucity of their own dreams, based as they too often are on materialistic yearnings.
Yours sincerely,
Kristian Witherkay
