Manipulation

I'm driving home the other day with a woman who hitches a ride to a near by town. She asks me while we're sitting in the middle of traffic surrounded by assholes who think if they squeeze by me and get a couple more feet of pavement they'll make it back to their miserables lives that much quicker, "Do you feel like you've changed this year," she said?

I'm thinking open heart surgery, the company's moving, I fucked up some stuff at work, I got on twitter ... what was she asking?

"With everything we've learned and everything that's happened," she's said, "you know with the banks and insurance. I feel really manipulated."

I've been depressed about that for three days. I mean really bummed out. I wish I'd never started paying more attention to the news. Ignorance really is bliss. Then I came across Taibbi's article on Goldman Sachs and watched Bill Moyer interview Wendell Potter. Throw in a couple of calls from credit card companies asking me to pay because I'm twenty minutes late on this months payments. Payments that never go down and seem to escalate regularly due to late fees and over the limit fees that are making some asshole rich and my week was pretty much shot.

The more I hear and the more I read and the more I look into this shit, inspite of mysel, the more it becomes apparent that everything is really nothing more than an instrument to suck money out of us and funnell it to some asshat who thinks $20 million in the bank is destitute.

I know that's pretty obvious and I may appear naive, but I'm left with a sense helplessness bordering on desperation. I've got this site and I've opened it up to submissions and maybe we can all bitch. Maybe even rant a little. Hey, at least I have that.