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When Did We Stop Laughing at Ourselves?

September 1, 2023 by Gary Cardillo

Almost two years ago, my wife signed us up as members of St. Andrew’s South Golf Club, as it occurred to her I was spending too much time sitting behind a computer or working late into the evening, and my only outlet was doing yard work. Somewhere along the way, I became my father! I wasn’t doing anything fun in my spare time. Try explaining that to someone who spends half their year bundled up during the winter months, and they’ll think you lost your mind when you live on the water and close to a host of golf courses. Sure, there are more challenging courses than St. Andrews; for years, when asked why I didn’t join, I would tease and tell them that due to the relatively flat terrain of the course, that’s where they used to host the areas Greyhound races. Now before you think, “This guy must be some golfer,” let me tell you this course has gotten the better of me in more ways than one. While St. Andrew’s South may not be hosting the U.S. Open anytime soon, this club is second to none in terms of the people we’ve met and the friends we’ve made.

Golfers have their unique brand of humor. They can hit a great shot and tell you it’s just another of the many great shots they routinely make. And no one is quicker to tease you about the shot you just hit into the water or lost in the trees than the guys in your foursome. This may sound cruel to some, but that makes the sport so much fun, and the guys I play with will never miss an opportunity to celebrate your crummy shot. While there is no shortage of sarcasm, they are equally supportive of the good ones too….or at least they feign they are!

Unfortunately, that fun time on the course ended in April. I was playing in a small tournament with this cast of characters when I tore my rotator cuff, and I haven’t been able to play golf since. For anyone who has had this injury and gone through surgery and physical therapy, I can tell you it isn’t something you would put on your bucket list. Perhaps the most frustrating part of the recovery process is the sleepless nights, but there is always a silver lining with every challenge.

While the rest of the neighborhood was sound asleep, I was entertained by some shows and comedians we grew up watching. Between all the documentaries and infomercials, it was as if they were all waiting for me. There was Groucho Marx, All in the Family’s Archie Bunker, Sanford and Son’s Redd Foxx, Don Rickles, Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Rodney Daingerfield, and George Carlin, to name a few. Shows and comedians I hadn’t seen in what seemed like decades not only took my mind off the discomfort I was experiencing but somehow made me realize the stark difference in the things that entertained us back then and how many of those things couldn’t be said today. How did we become so thinned-skinned that we couldn’t laugh at ourselves or gain a better understanding of life’s injustices without going into the frenzy we see today? Can we blame it all on the media?

If you have ever played a sport, you know what teasing happens between your teammates and in the locker room. The nationally-ranked high school soccer team I played on was comprised of virtually every nationality you could imagine. I was one of the few American-born kids on the team, and don’t think we didn’t make fun of each other when we could barely understand what our teammate was saying. We laughed at our differences and celebrated the things we shared in common.

We had friends who were politicians and others whose political opinions differed from ours. Maybe it was a time when we didn’t feel like doomsday was right around the corner and the president our friend supported was in the process of driving the train over a cliff. To this day, we still can discuss our differing viewpoints without the thought of a friendship being compromised. I always felt it was better to listen and learn from other people’s experiences, which made the shows I mentioned earlier so special. While most watched them for entertainment or just a laugh at the end of a long work day, I developed an even deeper appreciation of them during these overnight hours.

As diverse as these shows and comedians were, their performances were all based on some form of social commentary. While we laughed at Archie Bunker referring to his son-in-law Michael as the “Meat Head,” most would agree it was Archie with his narrow-minded personal and political views. Richard Pryor and Redd Fox had us laughing till our sides hurt, but no one painted a better picture of the injustices so many people of color endured regarding their interactions with the police. Eddie Murphy’s SNL skit Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood, where he describes gentrification as “A magic trick where the white people pay money, and the black people disappear,” could never be shown on television today.

Don Rickles was an equal opportunity insulter. He made fun of every nationality and race you could imagine. If the celebrity guest or audience member wasn’t quick enough to catch on to his insult, he called them a “moron.” He always followed up with, “You know I’m kidding,” and then would roll his eyes to confirm that person was a moron. Try saying that to someone you don’t know today and see the response you get.

This leaves me with the last three, Robin Williams, George Carlin, and Rodney Daingerfield. No one was more quick-witted than Robin Williams. While we remember him for his rapid-fire one-liners, the diversity of his movies, such as The Dead Poets Society, Good Morning Vietnam, and The Birdcage, often shed more light on many of the social issues we faced then. In contrast, we remember Rodney Daingerfield not only for his iconic role in Caddy Shack but as the one comedian who always made fun of his deficiencies and bad luck. His “self-deprecating” sense of humor that always ended, “I get no respect,” was refreshing in many ways and made us take ourselves a bit less seriously. Unfortunately, like Robin Williams, Daingerfield fought depression most of his life, which was another life lesson so many quietly suffer from today.

I saved George Carlin for last, as he was perhaps the best regarding social commentaries. In an article written by Helbert Enrique Asprilla, entitled “Why George Carlin Is My Dead Mentor,” he reflects on the life of the late George Carlin, who was known for his “thought-provoking, stand-up comedy, tackling topics such as politics, languages, and the human condition.” Asprilla continues by saying, “Carlin offers a wealth of knowledge and insight, challenging social norms and encouraging us to think critically about the world around us. Whether through his commentary on politics and government, his observations on the human experience, or his critiques on authority and institutions, Carlin’s comedy has much to teach us about the absurdity of the world and the importance of questioning the status quo.” In one of his routines, “Life is Worth Losing,” Carlin relates, “We’re all just temporary custodians of our bodies…we’re just passing through, and this is just a stop along the way.” Asprilla concluded, “Carlin’s perspective on the fleeting nature of life can help us appreciate and make the most of the time we have, rather than getting caught up on the trivialities and materialism of the world today.”

 

While many of these comedic icons have passed, the life lessons through their work live on to this day. I’m convinced comedy is not just a respite from the everyday challenges life throws at us but is the antidote we need to put life into a bit more perspective and take ourselves a bit less seriously.

 

-Gary Cardillo

Filed Under: Events & Activities Tagged With: blog, florida, for sale, gary cardillo, laught at ourselves, newsletter, punta gorda, realtor, waterfront

March 2020 A Time of Adjustment and Opportunity

March 24, 2020 by Gary Cardillo

It seems like yesterday when the New Year started with a bang. The real estate market got off to its fastest start than we had seen over the past couple of years. People were giddy watching the stock market on its meteoric rise reaching an all-time high on February 14th of 29,398.
Restaurants were packed; sports bars were getting ready for college basketball’s March Madness and people were shopping and enjoying life “as usual.” Then came news out of China of a Coronavirus and since then the world has been in turmoil, or so it seems.
As I look back over my life I think of all the upswings and downturns in life I’ve personally experienced and Billy Joel’s 1989 hit song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” comes to mind. In just over 3 minutes, he takes us through a recap of history, highlighting man’s greatest achievements and the devastating events that impacted us all from wars, and worldwide epidemics, to political and social unrest.  Nothing summarizes this better than his choral lyrics:
We didn’t start the Fire
It’s been always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it.
So what have we learned from our experiences? Apparently, not much! Instead of looking back to how we overcame Polio, SARS, Ebola, H1N1 (Swine Flu), Aids and Influenza, we have driven ourselves into a panic that is being heightened by the media and the emotional roller coaster inherent in the stock market.
Now before you think I’m making light of this pandemic and oversimplifying the cautionary steps that need to be taken,
this newsletter is being written by someone who during the seventh grade missed over a month of school due to Whooping Cough. Back then it wasn’t common for someone to be out of school for over a month where homework, class notes and assignments had to be brought home with the expectation that I had to keep up as if I were attending class daily.
Throughout the years, I’ve not only experienced the same worldwide epidemics as most of you, but I’ve gone through economic downturns in the Texas economy in the late ’70s with the devaluation of the Peso and plummeting oil prices. While the rest of the country was experiencing great economic growth, Texas was in a recession. I remember gas lines, as do most of you, the stock market crash in 1987, subsequent recessions, Y2K, the crash in the housing market, and who can’t remember the devastation caused by Hurricane Charley with almost no advanced warning and how our area came back better and more improved than ever? Wow, with that recap I’m starting to sound like Billy Joel myself!
Writer and philosopher George Santayana wrote in his book, Reason in Common Sense, The Life of Reason, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” You would think our past experiences would have enhanced our coping mechanisms, but the example we are setting for this next generation is that of panic and hoarding, instead of seeing the opportunities afforded in challenging times and taking advantage of them.
One of my clients who does financial consulting, restructuring and sales growth for businesses recalls the 1987 stock market crash. He was working on Wall Street at the time and ready to go into a corporate meeting when it was delayed by 45 minutes due to brokers actively working the phones. Conventional wisdom would have you think there was a frenzy with everyone looking to sell, but they were swamped with investor calls from those looking to capitalize during the markdown downturn. He said it was during those times the “men were separated from the boys.”If you were to speak with the likes of Rich Dad, Poor Dad writer, and Entrepreneur Robert Kiyosaki and Warren Buffet, they will both tell you the times we are presently going through are the times that savvy investors wait for and then jump back into the market.
We saw the same thing in the housing market when Hurricane Charley scored a direct hit on Punta Gorda in particular. Most won’t recall that home prices within a week increased by $50-100,000 due to the demand and limited inventory. Then when the housing bubble burst, again some took advantage of great opportunistic buys in a market that had been over-inflated. Those who had bought their homes years before the unprecedented upswing in the market, found themselves still ahead of the game when the market corrected itself.
I feel when the economy is robust and we are seeing meteoric rises in the stock and real estate markets, for example, we get caught up in the excitement, much the same way we do when the team we are rooting for seems to be scoring at will. What we lose sight of during our euphoria is that adjustments or events are going to occur that are going to temper those gains, and those that anticipate those adjustments insulate themselves to a degree from the drastic downturns we are currently experiencing.
In speaking with Faiza Kedir, Director, Business Development Financial Advisor of the nationally recognized Private Wealth Asset Management company of Lansberg Bennet, she stressed how they are a non-commission based fiduciary, whose sole focus is protecting their client’s investments.
In a letter written to their clients a few weeks ago by Principal Financial Advisor and the company’s Chief Investment Officer, Michael Lansberg CIMA, CFP, it read in part:
Your performance is different than what you see on TV.
  • The markets continue to overreact to coronavirus fears.
  • We rebalanced accounts in January to lower stock and increase the allocation of bonds and gold.
  • Some of our proprietary indicators are showing a very high fear factor in the market.
  • We have used this opportunity to start to INCREASE our overall stock allocation in all our balanced accounts.
Does CNBC have you scared to look at your portfolio? You should sign onto the Landsberg Bennett client portal or the fidelity.com webpage and look at your balances instead of listening to all the gloom and doom on TV. Although you will be down from where we were January 1, we think you will be pleasantly surprised by your portfolio’s performance. 
 
In every balanced account (where we own any amount of bonds), we trimmed our stock positions in January to protect some of the gains from a superb 2019. This has given us some more downside protection in this recent sell-off as well as giving us some “dry powder” for when we see some attractive opportunities in the market.
We have been watching market metrics over the last week or so hoping for an opportunity where we would see an abundance of fear creep into the market. 
This morning, a number of our metrics gave us a clear sign that a great deal of fear and anxiety had entered the market and provided us an opportunity to start slowly buying at these lower levels.  
Baron Rothschild, an 18th-century British nobleman and member of the Rothschild banking family, is credited with saying that “the time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.” It appears to us as this may be starting to happen, figuratively not literally. 
We are not suggesting that the market 
cannot go lower from here, but we believe this is a good entry point to start adding to existing positions. For long term investors, volatility is a good thing that allows entry points into the market for those that have prepared ahead and have liquidity. We did and you do.
Michael W. Landsberg, CFP®, CIMA®

Principal, Chief Investment Officer

Not being one to make light of the current situation, just as there is a big difference between calm and complacency there is between panic and preparedness as you see from Michael Landsberg’s letter above.
As consumers, we are always in the market looking for good buys and now we are seeing sellers reacting to the market and making price reductions in their list prices.
Don’t think for one second the real estate market is only open a few months of the year. Some of our strongest selling months have been during the summer and fall, as buyers are not going to let the time of year dictate when they will pounce on an aggressively priced home. With affordably priced airfares we’ve seen more and more clients fly down in a matter of days so as not to miss a great buying opportunity. Just remember, this current situation will pass, but inclement weather and high taxes in many northern cities and states will remain and that is what has led to a very active real estate market these first few months.
The silver lining in all this is our real estate market is not characterized by over-inflated pricing, excess inventory and over-leveraged banking industry.
Our industry is very healthy and to coin a phrase from Denny Grimes, a Realtor who I have great respect, “We are selling water, warmth and a way of life,” and that is what will enable our state to thrive better during this time than those from other parts of the country.
-Gary Cardillo

Filed Under: Community Information Tagged With: blog, charlotte county, coronavirus, florida, florida waterfront, gary cardillo, newsletter, punta gorda, real estate, waterfront agent

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