Respect Authority

Dear mainstream media,

We get it. People are sad, scared, depressed and pissed off. We understand that shit is hitting the fan, and not just regular shit. Piles of shit like that one in Jurassic Park the doctor reached into (which somehow seemed to make Jeff Goldbloom’s character fall more in love with her, instead of vomit). We understand that this could have serious repercussions, and that it already has. We understand that we’ll probably never ever retire, not even to part-time jobs at bookstores, since the old people currently working at those bookstores won’t be able to retire either. Yes, we understand that buying books in the year 2025 will mean yelling into the hearing aids of 100-year-old Barnes and Noble employees who can’t afford to live on their Social Security alone. We’re ready to deal with that.

We get that people are flipping out and we know what numbers like 687 and 777 mean. Or at least we’ve perfected our technique of pretending to know what they mean. We’ve introduced words like “crisis” and “bailout” into our lexicon, we use these words with friends to sound smart. We probably sound dumb.

And don’t worry; we’re still looking to you. We’re still obsessively checking you out, seeing what you have to say, digesting tidbits and factoids and phrases we can repeat later. We won’t stop needing you anytime soon, because frankly we have no fucking idea what happened.

But we have a request, just one. For the love of all that is holy, please invest in some new photos. Please hire professional photographers, with big budgets and even bigger imaginations, and please station them as far away from the trading floors as possible. Because if we see even one more photo of a shocked-looking trader, we’re going to scream. Worse, we’re going to cry, sob even, and there’s a 98% chance we’re going to go on a killing spree. Targets would likely be those immediately around us (friends, peers, cubicle-mates) but we can’t promise it won’t go farther. We can’t promise we won’t set off some sort of homemade bomb simply to never have to see an “Oh my God, stocks are falling!” face again. So, are you willing to have the guilt of mass murder on your hands simply because Joe Finance in a navy suit couldn’t keep his emotions to himself? I didn’t think so.

Sincerely,
America