Paranoia in Maryland

I was in Aberdeen Maryland having breakfast at the local Days Inn and engaged in conversation with a couple from Canada. The husband, as it turns out, had been a bank manager in a French speaking community. he struggled with english but we were getting along and understanding one another well enough. He is retired now and he and his wife live just north of Vermont on a beautiful lake the southern edge of which spills across the Vermont border. We talked about the differences in the banking systems north and south of the border. He explained that they aren't experiencing the same severe mortgage problems that the US is contending with. Home prices there are more stable than here.

Suddenly, we  were interrupted by someone several tables away who had overheard our conversation. Heavyset and in his early 50s, he wore an earphone and a thick down vest. He had something he wanted badly to say and just proceeded to do so. Picking up on our conversation about banking he began a diatribe about the Federal Reserve and, in his words, the secret group of people who control every aspect of our financial system. As part of his rant he talked about having been admitted to the archives of the Federal Reserve where he found his evidence. He was talking so fast and from such a distance that I felt I must not be hearing important points that he was trying to get across because his ideas were not clear. At first I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he had gathered the information in some official capacity. I let him go on for a while in the hope that it would all begin falling into place. He jumped jarringly from subject to subject and so finally I stopped him in mid sentence and asked whether he gathered this information in some official capacity. No, he was just curious. Then he skipped to the Kerner Commission and the Kennedy assassination.

This guy was a fountain of unshakeable conspiracy theories. So I shifted the focus to him. He is presently working as a trucker. He had cashed out of his previous employers 401K program in order to enroll in "truck driver training school". His tuition came to $3,600. In total, his 401k was drained of $8,000 during that extended training period. He had thereby depleted all his retirement savings and was late middle aged. In addition to having been taxed on those withdrawals he was hit with an expensive penalty. Poor planning or lack of financial information, I thought.

Previous to all of this he had been a musician playing with some regularity the clubs in and around Savannah till that unravelled as did all of his other jobs. He said that trucking is working out but he is finding it hard to put away any savings. 

Very unfortunate life circumstance especially at a time when the trucking industry is struggling. I wish him well. His preoccupation with conspiracies takes valuable attention away from the life planning that might help him be more successful at his career pursuits. Perhaps they take the focus away from something too threatening within himself, but that needs attention.