Blessings ripple when you share your heart
To those who are lost upon life's path.
Share your time, your love and your compassion
With someone who is facing a difficult situation.
Then let God do the rest
And you will be richly blessed.
For those around you will also find
That they are blessed because you took the time
To hold their hand when they were scared
And you prayed for them in their time of despair.
Now isn't that truly amazing
That God gives both of you His blessing.
That's how blessings ripple my friend.
Once you start sharing there is no end
To the blessings you receive from heaven above
And it all begins when you take the time to
share God's love.
Gail is a friend I met over the Internet. She lives with her
husband and children in Canada.
spirit-in-sky-paul-1.
An improbable meeting with a future major league baseball great and
Not Appropriate for “polite” conversation
I know not what you did last night or this morning. And, that is okay because it really is none of my business.
There is no shortage of euphemisms to convey this point of view: children are to be seen but not heard; mind your manners; you are entitled to your opinion, as I am to mine; etc
Renewal, rebirth, hope and spring are in the air. But these are to be found mostly in our Faiths. We are invited to express ourselves freely in matters of religion and politics. How freely, is almost continually, debated.
In the 1950s, the emerging middle class, aspirants to the middle class and middle America widely believed that certain subjects, namely politics and religion, were “off-limits” in “polite” conversations. Exchanging recipes and talking baseball were generally accepted as being fair game for “polite” disagreements. My recipe/team is superior to yours (although yours our nearly as good).
In the early 1960, manners in general and “polite” conversations in particular were increasingly under attack as cover-ups for hiding infringement upon basic freedoms of expression. By the mid-60s, the country was literally splitting apart. The great under and over 30 year olds divide. Trust no one over 30 versus kids nowadays are nothing but spoiled rotten, ungrateful brats. To political and religious divisions was added a third rail, baseball.
One evening in August 1964 stands out as a personal benchmark for me against the macro backdrop I have briefly sketched out above. I was 21 at the time and considered myself to be political aware. I had followed politics even in my pre-teen days, and volunteered in JFK’s presidential campaign when in HS. I believed that as a country we were committed to delivering on promises of equity and justice for all. And, why not? I had not, personally, encountered anything less. (except, over-looking the obvious; I was white and male). I shared in the numbing sorrow of President Kennedy’s assassination but held onto the belief that this was an aberration.
I would be graduating with a BA from S.F. State in June of next year and applying to law schools. I came so awfully close to being drafted and sent to Vietnam. But my political awareness came second to keeping my eyes squarely fixed on “my” ball and moving forward.
I would continue to see as many games as I could at Candlestick Park. Watching from the ice locker of left field, as Mays, McCovey, Cepada, the Alou brothers whacked on. I vaguely remember an “issue” of racial treatment by then coach Alvin Dark. But my own life was speeding up and my full attention was beginning to focus entirely on one person beside my self.
And, so it comes to that evening in San Jose of 1964 at San Jose State. I was there to pick up a girl that I had seen once before and even that was briefly. We were to meet at her apartment with a couple roommates and there dates. We would then, as a group walk over to watch the opening game of the football team. As people gather in the apartment, I am the elder at 21. The rest are fresh from HS graduation and are 18; my date was to become 18 in a week. Upon seeing and being with my date I was transported. I did not then drink, smoke or do drugs. But if a spaceship landed and my date wanted to board, I would join her without further thought. Of the six to eight other people in the apartment, only one do I remember speaking to. He introduced himself to me as, Bobby; Bobby Bonds. He was, like the rest, 18 (born March 1946). He exuded a presence that was palpable. And, indelible.
Fast forward, four years to 1968. Bobby would be playing in the S.F. Giants outfield along side Willie Mays. In his career spanning more than 20 years, he hits 300+ HR; had 1,000+ RBI; 3 X, GG. One of his children is Barry Bonds. Willie Mays is Barry’s god-father. Bobby died in August of 2003.
In 1968, I was an expectant father and married to my date of that August night in 1964.
Liza Zacherl Servelle was born August 27, 1946. The mother of our two young children, she died in an accident in July 1975 that also claimed the lives of our two daughters
In 1968, war in Vietnams continued claiming lives of young Americans and Vietnamese of all ages and would continue to do so until 1975.
In 1968, demonstrations continue to grow as does violence of all kinds. Martin Luther King, Jr. is killed. Robert “Bobby” Kennedy is killed. The whole world is watching as Chicago police fire on demonstrators. Ghettos in major cities across the country are aflame.
In 1968, Nixon is elected and escalates the war in Vietnam and attacks on demonstrators at home.
In 1968, the age divide hardens. The young rejecting everything of their parents: from dress to music to drugs to morals. And, over 30 side become ever more buttoned down and imposing whatever punishment they can against the “law-breakers” (often their own sons and daughters.
Turning back to my opening: I know not what you did last night or this morning. And, that is okay because it really is none of my business.
I now wonder, just what is my business.
Jeff Madrick’s Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present is an attempt to chronicle the emergence and persistence of this pattern.
The first thing you need to know about the cycle of financial overreach, crisis, and bailout is that it was not always thus. The United States emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated financial sector, and for about forty years those regulations were enough to keep banking both safe and boring. And for a while—with memories of the bank failures of the 1930s still fresh—most people liked it that way.
Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, however, both the political consensus in favor of boring banking and the structure of regulations that kept banking safe unraveled. The first half of Age of Greed describes how this happened through a series of personal profiles.
The nation's five largest mortgage servicers -- Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial -- have also been the focus of a federal investigation into whether the banks defrauded taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures
The recession might be officially over, but American views toward the institutions that brought the economic system close to collapse have never been worse.
According to a new poll by Gallup, 36 percent of Americans now say they have "very little" or "no" confidence in U.S. banks, the highest percentage on record since Gallup first started tracking that data. Those saying they have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in banks has also stagnated, stuck at 23 percent for the second straight year, after falling to a low of 22 percent in 2009.
Gallup, who has been tracking confidence in banks for over thirty years now, notes the steady decline of confidence in their release, pointing out that 60 percent of Americans had at least "quite a lot" of confidence in banks in 1979. That fell to 30 percent in the early 1990s, but then steadily rose to 53 percent in the mid-200s.
The percentage of Americans with a good deal of trust in banks has been nearly halved since 2007:
But we could also be talking about 1991, when the consequences of vast, loan-financed overbuilding of commercial real estate in the 1980s came home to roost, helping to cause the collapse of the junk-bond market and putting many banks—Citibank, in particular—at risk. Only the fact that bank deposits were federally insured averted a major crisis. Or we could be talking about 1982–1983, when reckless lending to Latin America ended in a severe debt crisis that put major banks such as, well, Citibank at risk, and only huge official lending to Mexico, Brazil, and other debtors held an even deeper crisis at bay. Or we could be talking about the near crisis caused by the bankruptcy of Penn Central in 1970
