Doug Draper

"Money, it's a gas.

Grab the cash with both hands

and make a stash."

The lyrics of that song, from Pink Floyd 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, probably say more about the latter-day values of the baby boomer generation that went out and bought it in droves than do the lyrics of John Lennon's dreamy eyed, All You Need Is Love, recorded six years earlier.

"Money," as the Pink Floyd song goes on to say, "is the root of all evil today," and this week, it certainly looks that way.

It's been a week in which we witnessed stock prices on Wall Street and the Toronto Stock Exchange plunge so low that more than a trillion dollars in collective wealth vaporized this past Monday alone, leaving the economies of the United States and Canada teetering on the brink of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

And how did we get to this point, where mainstream newspapers like The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star and others across North America are using words like "meltdown" and "carnage" to describe the state of our financial markets?

Wasn't it only a few weeks ago that John McCain, the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency, declared that the "fundamentals of the (U.S.) economy are strong?" And here in Canada, we've got Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper insisting as recently as this Monday, while an estimated $100 billion was going up in smoke on the Toronto Stock Exchange, that "the fundamentals of the Canadian economy are sound."

Of course, what can Harper say? He's more than halfway through an election he hopes will finally deliver his former Reform/Canadian Alliance forces the majority government they've been dreaming of for years, and acknowledging the possibility of an economic free fall that could lead to a recession and further job losses would not help before Canadians go to the polls.

Then there is the U.S. president, George W. Bush, another member of a self-absorbed, give-it-to me-it's-mine baby-boomer generation and a branch off the same neo-conservative tree as Harper, whose zeal for getting government out of the face of his corporate friends and the free market economy helped grease the wheels for the financial turmoil we face today.

What should fry all of us is how willing Bush and his ilk were to write a blank cheque for $700 billion of taxpayers' money to the greedy brats on Wall Street who pigged out on selling bogus mortgages and loans to middle and lower-income people who hardly had a prayer of paying them back.

This predatory lending could not have succeeded if we lived in the kind of culture of the parents and grandparents of baby boomers who grew up in during the Great Depression and Second World War, where people where still believed in the idea of delaying self-gratification for the greater good of the community, and in never spending beyond their means.

In the early years of the Great Depression, during a 1933 inaugural address in which recently elected U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stated his immortal words, "We've got nothing to fear but fear itself," he made a clarion call to Americans to think beyond self-interest for the sake of their communities and country.

"If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well ... if we are to move forward," Roosevelt told a nation experiencing the darkest of economic moments at the time. "We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good."

None of our leaders have the courage to speak like that today and there's probably a reason for this

If you asked most baby boomers to make a sacrifice for the "larger good," many of them (and this writer is one of those boomers born between the Second World War and the mid-1960s) would say they'd rather have a tax cut.

As for the financial meltdown, let future generations pay for that - just as they'll be left paying for a decimated manufacturing sector, crumbling infrastructure, greenhouse gases and all the other messes we don't seem to mind leaving behind. After all, we are the "now" generation, as we used to put it. Let's live for today and to hell with someone else's future. If they can't take it, let 'em drown in our sea of greed,

Money, as the Pink Floyd song says, "is a hit. Don't give me that do goody good bull----."

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Doug Draper can be reached at drapers@vaxxine.com.