My cynicism is finally catching up to my age.

I think I've always been a little too willing to give the Powers That Be the benefit of the doubt. It never really occurred to me that some billionaires might not care about the country as a whole, that seniors might not care about their grandchildren's future, that an entire political party would be so concerned about their own interests that they'd throw the Constitution under the bus.

Way back my junior college political science course, I wrote a paper about the gas shortage, giving the gas companies an out. I assumed that beyond normal 'covering their ass' responses that politicians would vote their convictions.

I've never liked conspiracies theories, on the assumption that large groups just don't have their act together enough to pull them off. But I've learned that it doesn't take "collusion" so much as a shared willingness to fuck people over.

It has been a long learning process at the store. I've learned that not everyone cares about doing the right thing. That "ethics" is a concept that some people don't understand. That people will lie over a few bucks, and throw their reputation away for the most minor of advantages.

I figured that big corporations knew what they were doing, that they understood long-term consequences to their decisions. Instead, I've literally seen a majority of the companies I've purchased from over the last 35 years go bankrupt--to do the stupidest things imaginable, and to regularly put short term profit over long-term health.

I don't want to give up hope. But damn, it's getting harder.