The Market of Ignorance

Nobody’s Opinion: If you want to see real excitement these days, forget about balloon chasers, HlNl flu deaths, the weather warnings, or the latest discovery of what politician is making lewd passes to toes or interns, and just turn to your favorite cable news channel, whether it be CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and wait for it.

It happens every ten seconds---an expression of, “Oh…the DOW is UP!”

It doesn’t matter who declares it, they all do it. If you want to see expressions of real, honest-to-goodness joy, just watch any famous newscaster or pundit who is reporting the stock numbers. If the market is going up, they look like a bunch of five-year olds on Christmas morning. As if they just got that brand new X-Box, complete with all versions of Halo, and a year’s supply of gummy bears.

Just the other day, I was watching Sheppard Smith. His eyes lit up like Santa on a Bennie, as he impatiently waited for the Dow to reach over 10,000. Sheppard has the cutest smile and he can hardly contain his excitement. In his head, he had just made a whole bunch of money, without having to lift a finger. It’s a gambler’s addiction, and it’s clear to most of us…he has that “bug.”

No doubt he hangs with the crowd that gets the big tips, buys and sells at the right time, and keeps each other informed. And, even if they lose, they can turn it all around in a heartbeat because they’ve got the cash.

Neil Cavuto, likewise, could watch the world burn around him, but if the stocks were up, he’d be saying, “We must be thankful for what we have. Look around you, feeling blue? Your wife just left you? You lost your house? Well, don’t worry…the market is doing well. Count your blessings.”

Say what?

What’s just so remarkably funny to me is the fact that, to the many millions of Americans who watch this ‘joy’ every other second, it really doesn’t matter whether the stock goes up, down, sideways, throws up, grows a mustache, or does cartwheels on top of Barney Franks head…it doesn’t affect us one single bit.
We can’t really get that excited about it.

Why? Because for most of us, the thought of our 401-K’s making a couple of dollars, is not exactly on our “ode to joy” lists. And please…I’m supposed to feel sorry that Harvard lost money? The kids won’t get free breakfasts? Say that again?

The truth is, to make money in the stock market; you have to have money to play it. And right now, most of America is wondering what food group they are going to have to give up in the future just to pay their taxes. Gambling is not on the menu.

Well, what do I know? I never even knew what a stock was until well into my twenties. I would open up the paper, look at all the numbers and think…whoa. What does this all mean? D.O.W could just as well mean, “Don’t Ovulate in Winter”--that’s how much I knew about it.

So, why aren’t they teaching a mandatory class on how to trade stock in high school? Most high school students can’t even write a check, let alone know how to trade on the stock market. The only way in America you learned how to play the stock market, was if your parents taught you, like mister excitable himself, quack the duck, Jim Cramer. His dad taught him how to gamble at nine.

I was still climbing trees while Rockefeller was turning trades in his crib.

The motto has been,”Don’t teach the slaves to read…or how to play the market. " If the masses had been taught how to play the stock market in school, we might have seen more than tea parties after witnessing the greatest robbery scam ever committed in the history of the Milky Way. Wall Street, Congress, Presidents, and the Federal Reserve----gleefully destroyed our whole financial fabric by playing around with the stock market. They gambled, and made trillions, gave each other big bonuses, and then said, “Opps…who knew?”

Nevertheless, they keep on reporting this stuff as if it really matters to all of us. And yet, the truth is, it does-- because the real wealth of our nation is not in real money, it’s in thin air, and every up and down determines our very survival.
We went from agrarian, to industrial, to investments, to our now current “service” economy, where the servers really serve.

The cable owners know that most of America is suffering-- they know the stats. So who are all these stock markets updates for?

Themselves.

They need minute to minute information---so cleverly they just got the muddle masses to pay for it. The rich can keep up on all the latest stock reports. It’s a win-win for them, this continual ignorance of the masses.

And in-between joyful cable expressions, they remind to get that vaccine. They really don’t want any of us to get sick because—they are going to need us.

(No offense to Cavuto and Sheppard Smith is meant. I adore them both.)