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For instance, last week the New York Times had a story about how banks, having been given emergency bridge loans to tide them over after the unholy mess they made of the entire financial system with their greed-driven mortgage loans, are now reluctant to lend that money back to struggling small businesses.

Loans are not being made. Why? Let Paul Merski, chief economist for the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade organization, tell you why. "There's not a lot of profit motive in a $35,000 loan stretched over six years."

Profit motive? Profit motive? The American taxpayers came in and saved your sorry asses, rewarding your bad behavior because every other option was even less good, and now certain struggling American taxpayers are asking for five-figure loans, and you guys are whining about profit motive?

Paul Merski, be thankful I don't know where your larynx is.

Listen up, banks: Now is the time to, as they say, give back. Now is the time to remember your place in the community. We're not even asking you to lose money, even though we all did - we're just asking you to accept a slim profit margin. You still get to make money, although in a just universe you'd be in jail trying to find the profit margin in arbitraging cartons of cigarettes, and you get to make the community stronger and healthier, which presumably even you understand is good for everyone.

Another member of the endangered larynx community, Bob Seiwert of the Center for Commercial Lending and Business Banking at the American Bankers Association, complained that "stringent underwriting standards" make small loans as much work as big loans, making them even less economical.

Bob, those standards are stringent because you guys apparently can't be trusted to police yourselves. You screwed the pooch. It's obscene for you to turn around and say you can't make the loans because, oh, the government wants you to keep records and check credit and things. Do you really want to be the bad guys in the American movie for the next two decades? No? Then step up to the plate, do the extra work, rescue the good businesses and start acting like citizens again.

Bad toilets: Dear Abby, whose real name is Jeanne Phillips, is embroiled in a controversy about whether to let a 7-year-old boy go to a public men's room unattended. The alternative, her questioner suggested, was taking the lad into the ladies' room with her.

Abby (we can call her Abby) suggested that the woman let the kid go to the john, stand outside the door and say in a loud voice, "I'll be waiting right here!" OK, I guess that's better than taking him into the ladies' room, although I'd hate to be the 7-year-old in question with my mom's voice trailing after me as I entered Guyland.

Oh, readers were outraged. They said that Abby was being irresponsible, that she did not understand the dangers inherent in a one-minute visit to a public restroom. Further precautions were needed. Mom should inspect the men's room first, be sure it was vacant, then bar the door to any men attempting to enter while little Jimmy was taking a whiz. If he could even take one then, what with Stress Level Red having been declared for his urinary emergency.

When did the idea get out that men's rooms were a secret hotbed of molestation? I mean, there are some men's rooms - including, apparently, one in the Minneapolis airport - where consensual homosexual activity between adults has been known to happen. But that's not at all the same thing as child molesting; that's just a form of speed dating.

Men's rooms, may I say, are boring. Ain't nothing going on in them. Molestation typically happens in other places, usually in a private home. And statistically it's no more common than it was 30 years ago. As I've said before, if you're looking for the people most likely to molest your child, look at the members of your own family, because that's how it usually happens. People don't want to admit that, so they invent phantom pedophiles in the nation's men's rooms.

Parents should just calm the hell down and let their kids live and grow in the real world. Of course every child should be told not to talk to strangers, to run away from anything that seems wrong. But after that lecture, let the boy experience a rite of passage into the adult world, and be happy.

I woke up when somebody's microwave went ding all the way across town; I woke up when somebody's cat started to sing, all the way across jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle