Watching CEOs walk away from the carnage on Wall Street with million dollar severances, those of us who earn less than $17,000 per hour find ourselves asking a simple question: who are these people? Our curiosity is driven by watching men on television who seem to have burst into contemporary life like an undiscovered pack of aboriginals emerging from a rainforest. We know we’re not looking at the common, mundane criminal who holds up liquor stores or shakes down a business, but rather at something truly mysterious and entirely unique, like a serial killer. Where did these guys come from, we wonder, and how do they sleep at night? Do they even need sleep?

I grew up in a well-to-do suburb north of New York City, where almost everyone went to college. I didn’t run in the Wall Street circles, but these figures occasionally drifted into my world. What most surprised me in Wall Street types was their utter indifference to things not money related. There was making money, and then there were all the things that other people cared about. In short, these people held a callous value system entirely different from the rest of us with regard to what actually matters in life.

For how globally the web of wealth and influence on Wall Street spun (Hong Kong, London, Tokyo), the people managing that money were surprisingly provincial. Most attended elite graduate schools after a trip to college. Most of the parents were well off and hoped to continue this situation with their offspring – excessive wealth and opportunity always aim to breed greater wealth and opportunity in a vicious, tumor-like pattern. The path to Wall Street was straight forward: from good neighborhood to good college to good MBA program to Wall Street. With big money to be made there was no time or interest for venturing into the real world, where working people dwell.

Consider for a moment two prominent examples. Richard Fuld (the former head of Lehman) finished college in 1969, joined Lehman the same year, and got an MBA in 1973. He stayed put in the Lehman jungle for the next 35 years until a financial firestorm burned it to the ground. Richard Marin (of Bear Stearns fame) finished college in 1975, received and MBA from Cornell the following year, and headed straight to Wall Street. Herein lies the problem. Like so many others on The Street, they never went out into the real world and actually did anything.

Kids who grow up in affluent settings tend to develop little real understanding about money, similar to the way non-farmers don’t really understand the reality of producing food. The money just seems to come from somewhere, like frozen peas in the supermarket, dependable and abundant. The net effect is an outlook that treats the generation of wealth like a game of Monopoly. You can sink paper money into four hotels on Boardwalk, and if your plan blows up in your face you just walk away and start the game again later. On Wall Street reality is largely a game.

Out in the real world, the people who understand the true value of money actually go to work and create wealth. They build companies where losing a million dollars results in serious human consequences, not a write off. They scrimp and save, reinvesting gains in productive assets. While mechanical engineers design bridges and homes, the folks on Wall Street act as “financial engineers,” designing fantasy products. Despite claims to the contrary, investment banks don’t create wealth, they just shuffle existing wealth around. As we are now learning, this shuffling is largely a self-serving global game of Monopoly, a game that can’t be “won” despite the best minds and computer models on Wall Street.

We now hear cries about “the dangers of greed,” but this doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Everyone is greedy to some extent. But on Wall Street it’s different. It’s deeper, more dysfunctional, and more disturbing. It’s fully accepted and even encouraged, with caution being scoffed at. After much thought on the matter, my conclusion is: these are privileged children who never developed the necessary understanding of money and where it comes from, something absolutely essential to their work.

Think about a kid in a candy store with an unlimited budget and no parental oversight. We can tell the kid to self-regulate, but he’s still going to buy and eat until he pukes. And then a week later do it again. In a nutshell, this is what Wall Street did with everyone’s money. When they ran out of real money to consume they started in on candy money, fictional wealth in the form of derivatives, credit-default swaps and the like. If not for the market implosion, someone on Wall Street would probably have tried to sell derivatives backed by a pool of lottery scratch tickets.

Wall Street is currently in the middle of a “time out,” with the most egregious offenders being sent to their rooms. But like kids everywhere, the folks on Wall Street will ignore the warnings and come back for more if we let them. One bit of evidence? The “master custodian” of the bailout (the company chosen by the Treasury to purchase, service, and auction off toxic bank debt) is itself a Wall Street bank and a major holder of subprime mortgages. To believe that it will put the interests of Americans ahead of the interests of the banks is pure naivety. At this point, the kids are poised to start watching the candy store again.

But The New Kids on the Street have given us a great learning opportunity. We don’t necessarily need to punish them for their mistakes, but we do need to find ways to prevent their errors from re-occurring. President Bush’s oversight of Wall Street was similar to a parent smoking reefer with the kids. Our new president is an actual adult who may be able to keep the kids in line. But, despite his many talents, he won’t be able to do it alone. He’ll need an engaged public that demands real reform that benefits ordinary people. He’ll need people who call senators, mail letters, write articles, and don’t stop pressing until things are done right. Those people are us.

We are retaking control of the candy store, but we can’t afford to get complacent and lose our hold again. If we do, we may never be able to afford the good things talked about so fervently and hopefully during the past election.

Thomas Sullivan writes short essays from his home in the Pacific Northwest. His writing has recently appeared in a number of webzines, including Antipodean SF (Australia), Eleventh Transmission (Canada), The Short Humour Site (UK), Backhand Stories, and The Externalist. Thomas was a finalist at the 2008 Pacific Northwest Writers Association contest for his memoir Life In The Slow Lane, which recounts a hair-raising summer spent teaching driver’s education. Contact the author at tmpsull@hotmail.com.