Editor's note: CNN contributor Bob Greene is a best-selling author whose current book is "When We Get to Surf City: A Journey Through America in Pursuit of Rock and Roll, Friendship, and Dreams."

CNN) -- As the country frets about extricating itself from the financial mess, there is one group of Americans to whom the rest of us owe the most sincere words of apology.

That group consists of the oldest of our fellow citizens -- the men and women who went through the Great Depression when they were young, who fought and endured World War II when they were just a little older, and who had hoped for a sense of peace and tranquility in their final years on this earth.

They don't deserve what they are going through. You hear it again and again from money experts: Take the long view of the economy. If you don't need cash from your stock market accounts in the next five to 10 years, leave it in there. Time will heal our current woes -- the economy, even when it's in tatters, runs in cycles. Just wait it out and be patient. Especially young people -- fiscal stability will arrive again in your lifetime. You'll see.

 

Nice words. Yet they leave out that one group of people -- the people who have a right to be terrified when they are told the economy will only be brutal in the short term. They leave out the people to whom the short term is all they have: our parents. Our grandparents. The men and women who never should have had to worry about their personal security again.

It's never wise to generalize, yet it is safe to say that, as a group, the men and women who endured the Depression and World War II played it straight when it came to putting their trust in financial institutions. They didn't try to game the system; they didn't believe in esoteric money schemes. As a group, they were cautious, because the two defining national events of their lives taught them that you can never really count on anything. They watched their own parents suffer during the Depression, they went overseas for years on end when our nation asked them to save the world, and when they came home, to the prosperity of the Eisenhower years, they crossed their fingers and hoped the good times were not an illusion.

The mistakes and tricks and reckless gambles of the supposedly sophisticated masters of Wall Street have wounded these men and women, many of whom, before the last year, had never even heard the names of the men who ran the biggest investment banks and brokerage firms. Which is why what those oldest Americans are going through is so unfair. Once more, in a lifetime that has been filled with sacrifices, they are having to pay the terrible price for decisions in which they had no say.

For a while, after Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" focused belated attention on the quietly heroic lives of our parents and grandparents, it finally seemed that the oldest Americans were being allowed to take a victory lap. One of the points Brokaw made was that, for all the pain those men and women lived through, they seldom complained. They just soldiered on.

That appeared to be the elegiac theme of their final chapter: a warm acknowledgment by us, to whom they gave a better world, that we understood and honored their steadfastness -- that we appreciated and were moved by the uncomplaining way they had made it through their hardest years.

We didn't realize that they would be asked to do it again, in 2009 -- we didn't realize that our parents and grandparents, the vestiges of their retirement income suddenly diminished and threatened, would be asked once more to stoically accept hardships they had done nothing to bring upon themselves.

Think of the disdain they must feel for the Wall Street titans who have hurt them. When they hear about a brokerage executive who spends $1,400 on a wastebasket, their first thought undoubtedly is not that the man has taken advantage of his shareholders, or of the federal government. Their first thought -- remember, these men and women were children of the Depression -- is that the man must be a fool, a complete and utter sucker, to pay someone $1,400 for such an item. If you grew up having nothing, your contempt for such an idiotic expenditure is just about absolute. And you wonder about a society in which a person who would spend money that way is expected to prudently handle the money of others.

All that the oldest Americans asked for, in their final years, is a sense of safety, of stability. Twice in the nation's history, they knew what it was like to go to sleep night after night with their stomachs knotted in fear. What we as a country owed them was nights, at the end, when they never again had to feel that dread in the darkness.

Now they are feeling it, and there is nothing that we -- their sons and daughters, their grandsons and granddaughters -- can do to convince them that their fear in the night is groundless. What they are being forced to go through now is -- in the most elemental sense of this word -- a shame. I hope they know how sorry we are.

Friends Only

The fallowing is copied from the book "Beauty" by Sheri S. Tepper and is the best discription of modern religion and where it is going that I have come accross.

"We have been thwarted at every turn by god. Not the real God. A false one which has been set up by man to expedite his distruction of the earth. He is the gobble-god who bids fair to swallow everything in the name of totally selfish humanity. His ten commandemnts are me first (let me live as long as I please), humans first (let all others living things die for my benefit), sperm first (no birth control), birth first (no abortions), males first (no woman's rights), my culture/tribe/language/religion first (separatims/terrorism), my race first (no human rights), my politics first (lousy liberals/rotten reactionaries), my country first (wave the flag, the flag, the flag), and above all , profit first.

We worship the gobble-god. We burn forests in his name. We kill whales and dophins in his name. We pave prairies in his name. We have retarded babies in his name. We sell drugs in his name. We set bombs in his name. We worship him everywhere. We call him by different titles and commit blasphemies in the name of worship.

We were given magic to use in creating wonder, and the gobble-god has sucked it dry. His followers reject mystery and madness and marvel. They cannot tolerate questions. They can believe any answer, no matter how false, so long as it is certaintly nailed firmly onto the cross of money. They yearn for the rapture to come, without knowing they have killed rapture forever. Fidipur is what is to come, and the Holy One, Blessed be He, will not forgive mankind for that."

I see us going in this direction myself if we do not slow down on our consumption/birth rate. Fidipur is not far in our futchers. One day all of humanity will be living underground in great buildings made of steal and machein, and every person will have a hundred square feet of living space (about the size of a hotel room) no windows, little food, and no happyness. We will have sucked the earth so dry that very few animals live, and those that do are slowly starving to death becouse everything must go to Fidipurs farms. Their is little we can do to reverse this. It is already to late for us. One day their will be to many of us, we demand to much of this world that we where born into. And it is tired of giving.

( The Man in the Box Part 1 )

Day 1: The first day of my vaction yippie! I've waited so long for this! Alaska here I come!

Day 2: 29 1/2 hours in airports. No smoking anywhere. Do you realy need to know anymore?

Day 4: Oh boy. Lost my lugage yesterday. Don't know if I'll ever see my stuff again. Hell I don't know if anyone will ever see me again. Terbulance my ass.  Plane crashed yesterday. Who would have thought that their was a tropical island anywhere near Alaska? Where in the hell did these people send me?!

Day 5: We found water yesterday! I think we had a party. Someone caught a fish 28 people and one fish. You do the math.

Day 6: If I go out hunting for my own food do you think I should share? Woman almost kicked my but yesterday for not telling her I had a pop tart in my purse. Damn it I paid for it, it's mine!

Day 7: Well I can't treat it as a mini - side vaction anymore. My mp3 player died. Fished this morning, caught 7 fish, still not enough for everyone. Someone will starve soon (probly me, I realy like coconut, but after the last 3 days of eating it and the posiblity of eating little else for a very long time has me a little disgusted with it right now) why is it always coconut anyway? Where the hell do mangos and kiwi's grow?

Day 8: No sleep last night. Their are canabels on the island. They played their drums all night. I don't think the cops will mess with them.

Day 9: Why will not one person go with me to make friends with the canabels? Just becouse they are canabels dosn't meen that's the only thing that they eat. Right?

Day 11: Whent to pay my new neighbors a visit. Language will seem to be a bairer but they have tryed to teach me some of their words. The head guy (I've loosly translated his name to "King eats no cum" but I"m fairly sure that this is not right, but it makes me smile and I think he thinks that I like him)

Day 12: They are haveing a feast in my honor tomarrow. How cool is that? Only one problem tho. I can't figure out if "Shimmieshankshank click, click" meens "Will you be my wife?" or "You look yummie". I didn't think it would be polite to ask. Thinking of building a boat tomarrow and leaving.

Day 13: The others think that I am crazy for making a boat and trying to float away. In return for their kind thoughts and well wishes I did not tell them that King eats no cum has decided that the all new all you can eat buffett will be open on the next full moon. They should have been nicer to me.

Day 14: A full day on the open sea. I realy didn't think this one thru. Should have brought a book. I'm soo bord.

Day 16: Picked up by a frieght ship this morning. I'm sun burnt, and tired. But I am well. I didn't bother to tell them about the others. Yesterday was the full moon.

Saddness has a visual. Figures. *sigh*

( Books and Authors )

Okay yesterdays ramblings aside. Time to paint a writen picture.

( The Reading Woman )

Wow. Stumbled across this today on the net.

Nene Thomas. Here is her link.   http://www.nenethomas.com/main/   I think that she is fabulous, and I look forword to seeing more great things from her!