Financial crisis, hopefully, has killed this age of greed

I am perhaps one of the very few who don’t worry about the current financial crisis, even though I have a huge loss in stocks and other investments. In fact, I am delighted with this crisis. Here is why:

I was part of the Great Depression as a youngster and remember it well. I lived on a farm, the son of a sharecropper. I had no electricity, running water or other facilities until I entered the infantry in World War II.

Yes, I saw people desperate for work, hands open to free groceries and soup kitchens. I saw others sacrificing to help their children, even going hungry to give them food. People went to churches, open-air revivals, prayer sessions, reaching to God in hopes for a better life.

Compare this to James Cramer, who writes in a New York magazine article, “The Great Shakeout:”

“For two decades New Yorkers have been living in a Wall Street dominated world … carried to its decadent extreme by hedge funders with 32,000-square-foot Greenwich mansions and Gulfstreams at every airstrip. That age is over.”

Cramer further writes (and this makes me personally happy): “We’ll see a more chaste culture emerge from all of this on Wall Street and perhaps beyond.”

Having founded businesses and been active in the stock market, I could well be ready to jump out of the window, but I am surviving and positive about the future.

All this has taught me a lesson. No matter how successful we’ve been, my family lives a simple life, never spending for those “toys” of success that so many have flaunted. While stocks fall and our net worth shrinks, we know we can pay our bills, our taxes and still have money for our church and other necessities.

Yes, I am glad this current financial situation has flushed out the outrageous pay and bonuses of many top executives and shown their shareholders how they have had “different lifestyles,” cushioned from the daily problems of ordinary living.

Maybe, if some of these executives had curtailed their greed, looked at how the average family lives, and faced reality, they wouldn’t be, as described by their contemporaries, “desperate and scared.” Hopefully, this crisis has killed the age of greed and restored our nation to normalcy.

• Denton Harris, an entrepreneur, lives in Atlanta.