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It was 55 years ago that a beekeeper from New Zealand achieved international fame when he and his Nepalese guide Tenzing Norgay reached the top of Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain.
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At his death on Friday at age 88, it's surprising how many people still remember and love Sir Edmund Hillary.
In fact, he still remains the New Zealander most admired by New Zealanders. He was also named one of Time magazine's 100 heroes and icons of the 20th century.
He was born in 1919 into the Hero generation that fought in World War II. Countless other expeditions had attempted to climb Mount Everest and failed, and so Hillary became an international hero when he became the first to succeed.
Remarkably, since 1953, over 3,000 climbers had repeated Hillary's feat.
However, Hillary, who became an avid environmentalist and humanitarian, railed against the environmental damage to Everest caused by the the steady stream of climbers, many of whom left their garbage behind.
Hillary was also shocked in 2006 when when as many as 40 climbers left a British mountaineer to die on Everest rather than attempt a rescue.
When Hillary was an active climber in the 50s and 60s, such a thing would never have happened. But now, Boomers and Gen-Xers are as unconcerned about ethics in mountain climbing as they are in finance and other fields.
"The whole attitude to Mount Everest has become rather horrifying," Hillary said in an interview. "People just want to get to the top. They don't give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress and it doesn't impress me at all that they leave someone lying under a rock to die."
The same things might be said about financial engineers who earned fat commissions by creating CDOs
and other structured financial instruments, knowing full well that
investors in them would lose everything. Like the Mount Everest
climbers, these financial engineers aren't at all concerned about the
people they left lying under a rock to die.
(11-Jan-08)
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