Being from the metropolitan New York area, the extravagant wealth of Wall Street wasn't some distant imagination of mine but something visible and tangible that I could see and (hopefully) one day experience first hand. Seeing it on the news everyday and meeting the fathers of friends who wore sharp suits and ties with crisp leather briefcases was a brief enough taste to make me want more...and to believe that I could not only taste it but even take a hearty bite.
As I grew up and the economy stalled and entered a dive it hasn't gotten out of yet, it became fairly evident that the extravagant wealth located on Wall Street was further than I previously believed, at least mentally. After a certain point, it was about as far from me as it was from the storekeeper in Lawrence, Kansas.
Reading the financial news sometimes makes a few of Shakespeare's tragedies downright cheery. I was only an infant when the last economically induced tragedy occurred on Wall Street. Even that didn't manage to leave such a wide swath of destruction. The current economic downturn now has seen the collapse of firms on Wall Street that had withstood several ups and downs, multiple terrorist attacks, the dot-com boom and bust. But due to some lending shenanigans, all of that is prologue.
Gone too are dreams and hopes of millions of Americans. There was a time when many thousands of people could have made a realistic play to be one of the multiple hordes on Wall Street, maybe even one of those who could have multiple homes only a Long Island Expressway ride apart. Now even the mere notion of being able to be a peon on the Great Wealthy Way has evaporated into the same air that retirements and dream homes and futures evaporated into.
Perhaps this is just a reminder for all of us that whatever rock we sit on, no matter how solid or adaptable, is never there permanently. It is only a matter of time before the winds of time and the streams of circumstances wash it away.
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