Silence is a deadly force

January 29, 2015

As I stated on January 1 2015, I am not a journalist and that I have only expressed my personal opinions and not those of anyone else.  I have not told Jonny or Robin that I told my story to the Universe, but were they to read it, I am sure they would have trouble following the story, simply because I left a lot of detail out and changed names to protect the identity of the people who were pulled into this nightmare.  I came across a beautiful passage, written by Pulitzer Prize winner author Rick Bragg in his memoir, (Vintage books, a division of Random House Inc. 1997)

"All over but the Shoutin'"

"But if you sit and talk to old Black people, the people who recall the time of my childhood, that time in history, they will tell you that there are degrees of meanness in this world, degrees of hatred, degrees of ignorance, and calculating those degrees, over decades, was a means of survival.  They will tell you that the depth of that meanness and hatred and ignorance varies from soul to soul, that white Southerners are not the same and symmetrical, like the boards in a white picket fence.  They will tell you that the depth of that meanness often depends on what life has done to a person, on the impressions left by brushes with people different from you, on those rare times when the parallel universes came close enough to touch."

And that passage, more or less captures the hate that ACS must have felt towards Greg as their lives intersected at a time just before an economic collapse.  ACS did well with his investments in the 90's, earnings must have been easier to attain, or perhaps he was less dependant on drink and younger and brighter, but he created a myth about his capabilities.  The calamity that was caused by the 2008 collapse left his underbelly exposed to criticism,and he no longer was the genius he made himself out to be.  His investment performance was public record and it did not look good.  The Go Zone was supposed to be there, shortly, to take out his investment - but it did't materialize.  I do not know the details, but I do know that his buddy from Tennessee did get $140 Million of Go Zone money.  ASC had been caught in the crazy whirlind that caught so many in mortgages they could not afford, perhaps he just couldn't blame someone else for the disaster or risk exposing how the grease machine really worked in the South.  ACS was never risking his own money he was risking the saving of others and acting like a big shot, Greg was the easiest person to blame, he was foreigner, he was an outsider and not one of 'them'.

After doing the math, getting $23 million as 'fine' money hardly seems like a good return on a $43 billion fund over a 6 year period, and of course it is not, but ASC took a year out of Greg's life, and the life of Greg's family.  I think that is what he was going after.  ASC did not destroy Greg, or even destroy MBI back in Hamilton where thousands of people go to work building seriously good grimmets.  What is difficult to accept, is the fact that there were other people on the 'Board', appointed by ASC after he took over the Alabama project, who remained silent, knowing what really transpired, they complied with their silence, just like other terrorist plots, or plots of dictators in history, you need many agents or deputies to participate.  Silence is as deadly a force as violence itself.

I will open my blog soon for discussion, but right now I want a little rest from thinking about why people are so mean, and why 'I am better than you' causes so much strife.