I am no expert on our financial crisis.  As I have read newspapers and watched breaking news on television and the web, I have come to understand that this is a crisis of trust.  We have long allowed the Wall Street boys (as I worked for 7 years for one of the big investment firms, I can assure you they are mostly boys, no matter what their chronological ages) to create ever more exotic instruments, theoretically safe, but so esoteric that more than one reporter has characterized them as “not understandable by the people who were selling them.”  Wall Street has always bred a particularly virulent brand of greed.  This is nothing new.  And it is not new that they dig themselves into deep holes from which we, the country, are asked to extricate them.

What seems frightening now is that we are all in this hole with the greedy boys and don’t seem willing to pull ourselves out through this very imperfect bailout, due to vengeance and a rampant lack of trust.  The Republicans are blaming Democratic liberal policies, and Nancy Pelosi for her fiery speech about the necessity to get behind this bill, even if it did come from George Bush’s administration.  The Democrats are conveniently blaming well-meaning and conscientious Republicans for all of the policy of “their” president, one who now seems to enjoy no support at all from anyone, including his own party.  We the people have long distrusted politicians in general, but have voiced that distrust by not voting, a silent protest designed, I suppose, to condemn them all.  We need them now, and we need to support their hard decision-making.  They need each other to build the courage to move forward together.

If we are to get out of this thing alive, grandstanding has to stop, and distrust must be suspended.  I know what it feels like to be betrayed.  I know distrust in my bones.  I even sympathize with the Republican who said yesterday that he thought the bailout would pass, that everybody else would vote for it, so he could vote his constituency and vote no.  Paying the CEO of Goldman Sachs ONLY $500,000 annually during the period of recovery may seem like a slug in the nose to all of us who’ve never seen that much money in one year, but it may be the only way to get the greedy boys to come to the party, and the government to do its hard work to get us out of this.

Have we learned anything about trust and greed in this crisis?  I wouldn’t bet on reducing the greed motive .  I just wouldn’t.  There is too much testosterone alive and well in this world.  Too many opportunities for toy accumulation.  Witness the arrival of the yacht, the Maltese Falcon, in San Francisco harbor this week.  The yacht is owned by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist–maker of REAL money–according to a New York Times editorial on Sunday.  But this is still emblematic of greed and the imbalance of wealth in this country.

I hope, however, that trust can be restored in this crisis.  That our politicians can stop sniveling and finger pointing now and start working for resolution.  This isn’t easy after the last eight years.  Many of us feel we’ve suffered far too much already, Republicans and Democrats alike.  Perhaps we had to come to this crisis to see how destructive partisan politics actually is, and how distrust can kill an idea, a potential solution, and even a country.