COLUMN: Just Don't Want to Be the Guy at the Bottom

By Tobin Barnes
“It could be worse.”

It’s the cliched consolation you hear all the time when things are lousy.

“Well…it could be worse.”

It’s meant to make you feel better.

And it does.

Kinda.

But not a heck of a lot.

After all things are lousy.

And at the same time you’re hearing that things could be worse, you’re all too aware that they could be better, too. Aye, there’s the rub, as Hamlet says. “Things could be better” is the unsettling converse.

Just as easily better.

What if certain things hadn’t been allowed, and no one had been asleep at the switch.

Things could be lot better.

But, obviously, it’s not. Matter of fact, everybody says they’re definitely going to get worse before they get better.

Like this morning. I read in the headlines that unemployment has reached 7.2 percent, which is bad enough, especially for the people who are unemployed. And it’ll get worse. Maybe 8.2, or 12.2, or 20.2, or 25.2, like during the Great Depression.

Things could be a whole lot worse.

I can imagine scenarios that make my blood curdle. Like maybe last year’s national election didn’t go the way I was hoping it would (maybe not your scenario, but certainly mine), or even freakier, maybe last year wasn’t even an election year.

Now there’s a real horror show.

Yeah, things could be worse. A lot worse.

Imagine this. You and I could be Bernie Madoff investors. Ouch. In trying to get everything, we lost everything. (Of course, that would also mean that you and I had a lot of money at one time. But imagine!)

Bernie Madoff. Now there’s a rounder’s name for the ages. A screenwriter would blush to use that name in a script. But there it is: it’ll be front row, center in any rogue’s gallery of shysters. (Even if he’s eventually lawyered out of the whole mess.)

“He made off with all our money.”

And even after he’s arrested and sequestered in his multi-million-dollar New York condo, he’s still trying to squirrel away allegedly ill-gotten gains.

Madoff—a now infamous name that will live on in perpetuity.

So, buck up, somebody always has it worse than you, like a Madoff investor.

And as the somebody-always-has it-worse-than-you theory goes, somebody has it worse than that guy, and somebody has it worse than that guy, and then that guy.

Thing is, I’d hate to drill down to see what it’s like for the sad sack who’s the final guy at the very end.

Must be rough.

But, hey, it could be worse.