My friend Joan Waters Dunfey sent me a stanza of a Wordsworth poem which goes like this (could Wordsworth have had a more perfect name?):

Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind

Memory allows us to recollect the past; resilience allows us to go forward with lessons learned.

“The Remains of the Day” is a 1989 novel by British author Kazou Ishigur. It was made into a film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Hopkins played Stevens, the butler of long-standing to an English Lord who was a Nazi sympathizer and who hosted parties for like-minded individuals. Thompson was Miss Kenton, the housekeeper who had a deep affection for Stevens and Stevens loved her, but neither was willing to cross that line.

After the English lord died, an American purchased the estate and Stevens decided to take a motoring trip to visit Miss Kenton who had left to be married and whom he suspected had an unsuccessful marriage. As it turned out, Miss Kenton’s marriage had started poorly but had righted itself. Stevens has come to believe that his service to the English Lord was not as noble as he once thought and that his respect for the Lord was misplaced.

At the end, Stevens meets a man of similar age who reminds him that the past is the past and can’t be changed but that the future beckons and that the evening is the best part of any day.

For those who are in the “evening” of their lives, it is sometimes hard to believe that evening is the best part of the day. After all, there are hip replacements, cataract surgeries, and umpteen doctor visits. Your knees hurt and arthritis is always present. But, if you still have your wits, your “evenings” can be a peaceful and productive time. And you have a decided advantage: you have lived a long time, have seen a lot of things and a lot of people, have experienced ups and downs and , most importantly, know the truths and the lies because you have experienced each countless times. You have seen both heroes and charlatans; people to be admired and people to be scorned. In other words, your age brings a certain wisdom.

Which brings me to the subject of cryptocurrency. Why cryptocurrency? Because, like me, nobody really understands it or uses it and yet, in the memory banks of my brain, it resembles something that we have seen time and again.

Bitcoin is the best known of the cryptocurrency lot but there are literally scores of these cryptocurrencies. A simple explanation: it is “electronic” money you buy with “real” money and what you sell for “real” money. By real money, I mean things like the United States dollars which are backed by the United States government and are the “reserve” currency for most of the world. This means that central banks will convert their dollars into US Treasury Bonds because of their confidence in the United States economy and monetary system.

There is no safety net when a particular cryptocurrency nosedives to zero. It is notoriously volatile. For example, a single Bitcoin was valued at about $44K in January of 2024 but ended that year with a value of $94K, no doubt because Trump had been elected president with the full support of the cryptocurrency industry and it thought the best was yet to come.

President Trump is the “crypto” President since he has declared the United States will be the cryptocurrency center of the world. He and his sons actually have a company (he is the “Chief Crypto Advocate” of the company) and it has done very well since he has taken office, and cryptocurrency became the new shining nickel. How well? Just view The New York Times article on the Trump company.

There are those who call cryptocurrency a Ponzi scheme. I think a more appropriate characterization would be to call it a reverse Robin Hood scheme, meaning that the rich steal from the poor and keep it.

Cryptocurrency is poorly regulated, and its proponents maintain that is a fundamental strength. Transactions can be completed without anyone knowing anything about them. So, who are the winners?

The first winners are criminals who can pay for heroin, illegal guns, fentanyl, sex and other contraband transferred from one to the other and be paid with cryptocurrency and no one besides the crooks will ever know.

The second set of winners are aggressive investors who can drive up the price and then exit leaving the untutored holding the bag. The “value” of any cryptocurrency is what people will sell or pay for it. It has no intrinsic value, but only the value that sellers and buyers will assign to it at any given time. So savvy buyers can drive up the price by putting in buy orders and then cash out by selling.

Then there are the celebrities like the President who can convince foreign governments like Abu Dhabi of The United Arab Emirates to invest $2 billion in his cryptocurrency company. This investment was announced on Thursday, May 1. How far behind will be many “billion-dollar investments” from countries like Saudi Arabia and others.

And the losers? Pretty much everybody else. You really can’t use Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency to buy a pizza, a car or even a house. If you are not particularly sophisticated with respect to financial issues, the worst thing you can do is to invest in a cryptocurrency. However, a surprising number of unsophisticated people do just that as they buy when the price is rising, but then it stops and goes backward with predictable result: they lose.

So, my conclusions are as follows:

First, a number of these cryptocurrency characters are going to end up in prison. Witness Sam Bankman-Fried who is a current resident of a New York prison after presiding over the greatest crypto currency fraud ( FTX) yet uncovered. Bankman-Fried was ordered to return over $11 billion.

Second, any number of these characters, who deserve to go to prison, won’t. Many of these perpetrators will get away with financial chicanery.

Third, have we seen this before? You bet. This is what happens when garden-variety greed overtakes good sense and good people get hurt. Remember the Savings and Loan crises? Remember the financial meltdown in 2008. This is what my memory banks were telling me. We have seen this before.

Fourth, it seems that people are waking up as the Federal Reserve, in a recent report, indicates that less people are using cryptocurrency than in prior years.

Fifth, if Trump is doing it, we know that it is questionable. Here, he is enriching himself and using his office as President to do so. I don’t remember any other President who was so morally and ethically deficient.  He believes that he deserves anything he wants.

So what are the remains of this day?  The powerful will always take advantage of those not in power and will always feather their own nest.  But, according to most religions, they will have a very short shelf life.

The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) posit an eternal and very unpleasant fate for those who behaved poorly in this world. Even the reincarnation religions (Buddhism and Hinduism) maintain that “karma” will determine one’s reincarnated self. That being said, I think it more than likely that Trump returns as an insect.

Here’s hoping.