Tag Archives: economy

April 11, 2012 · 6:20 pm

Life As We Know It Is Over

What makes me strong?  What keeps me from breaking under the load we all call life?

I have been asking that question for a dozen years.  My husband has been hospitalized more than 30 times since 2001.  He had bladder cancer.  He just kept growing tumors and finally they had to take his bladder out and put in a conduit to the ostomy that we now call Fred.

Then he had infections – and more infections and yet again, infections.  Over the last 10 years we have spent our vacations in the most expensive resort in the country – the hospital.  A jail cell really but it’s mostly white with nice subdued drapes and wardens dressed as nurses in navy  blue.

Recently, my husband did hand to hand combat with  melanoma which made a difference in how we spend our time, our money, our personal currency.

Now, he is being laid off.  He will be 60 when the axe finally falls.  He will be too old to employ – too young for social security or medicare.  And he will still be sick, still be in the hospital 2 or 3 times a year and still be the man I love with all my heart.

I am a master’s prepared, professional who is applying for jobs as a receptionist, an administrative assistant., a dog walker, anything to get a job that will help bridge the gap between his layoff and his 65th birthday.

But I can’t get a job.  We can’t sell our house.  And we cannot stop the layoff that is rolling toward us at the speed of light.

How did this happen?  When did we become part of the fringe that cannot sustain itself in this country  – the land of the brave, the land of the free?

Welcome to America – 2012.  Welcome to our country where people work and do a good job and pay their taxes and still get screwed.  This is the land where the rich once again get richer and the rest of us pay for their privilege.

We”ll keep fighting.  We will stay together.  We will find a way, smaller, narrower but still together.  But is this what is supposed to happen to people who have lived a good life?  Worked hard?  Helped out our families?

Who knows? All I know is that this is our lot.  And this we will face together — until death do us part.

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November 1, 2011 · 10:46 am

Thoughts on Winter & Darkness & Politics

I am starting to fear silence again, filling it with sound, running from whatever my head or heart is trying to tell me.  Does this happen to you?

These are the moments when I cannot sit still.  My eyes move from place to place.  My skin itches.  I must jump up and fill the time before….before what?  What could my inner self have to say that so frightens my outer self?

In the past, these moments have led to insight.  In the past, these moments meant personal growth. But what am I supposed to learn this time?

I feel too old to learn, too sure of the knowledge that my time has passed.  I am walking slowly toward death, my own, my loved ones but death nonetheless.

Maybe it’s the coming of winter, the rare October snow we just had.  Maybe it’s the approach of daylight savings — long, dark afternoons into longer, darker nights.   Maybe it’s my feeling that I am no longer the all  powerful wizard of my early days, the one with all the answers.

Maybe it’s because I fear this lesson has much broader implications.

The future keeps crowding into the present – the outside world into my small, sweet corner of it.  Our world, the world I grew up in, the world we hippies and peaceniks changed, the world we loved, was proud of, is disappearing.

Spinning faster and faster away from me, it has moved on its axis to a place of, “I’ve got mine; the rest of you, go away.”  This world is a foreign place for me and I hold no answers on how to fix it.

How I wish I was still that wizard of my younger years and able to make the coming years as rich and warm for my daughter and grandchildren as they were for me.  How I wish the future would not loom on the ever darkening horizon of financial woes, economic downturns.  How I wish our “elected officials” would actually do more to earn their pay and less to get re-elected.

Politicians have lost their way.  Honor no longer goes with the job; passion for what’s right, not what’s personally enriching has disappeared, replaced by greed and guile.

Perhaps this is the lesson I am being forced to learn — there is no easy way out of this huge and frightening mess our country is in, no easy way to close the gap between the ridiculously rich and the grindingly poor.  Perhaps politicians should have to face only one test to run for office.

Do they have a terminal illness?

If only the dying were allowed to run for office, maybe, just maybe it might help them focus on what’s truly important instead of what’s expedient.

 

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September 10, 2011 · 6:51 am

Dismal Economic Picture Is All Our Fault

The dismal state of the economy is apparently our fault – all of us middle class, taxpaying citizens who have been laid off, fired and unable to get a job are part of the problem.

Who knew?

Gail Collins of the NYTimes, apparently.

We may be to blame for the current state of the economy but Collins offers some pretty solid advice for turning the economy around.

We should all stop looking for the bad news – like the applause from a Texas crowd when Presidential candidate Rick Perry mentioned the 234 people executed in the Lone Star state.  We really need to start looking for good news which Collins says is everywhere.

Collins belongs up on the Satirist Wall of Fame right beside Cervantes, Frank Zappa, Mark Twain, Juvenal — and all the other great chroniclers of their time whose wit and insight have helped all of us make it through yet another day in which we are cast as the reason the sky is falling in.

Wars we can’t afford, bailing out billionaire stock brokers and CEOs who don’t deserve a dime, denying climate change and speculating the cost of gasoline up to $4.00 a gallon have nothing to do with where we are now.  It’s you and me and our negative attitudes.

So toss off the shroud, read Gail Collins and go out there and find all that good news that is waiting to be shared!  Really!!  Really???

 

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February 23, 2011 · 6:52 am

Robbing The Poor To Pay The Rich

People are losing their jobs, losing their health coverage and losing their homes.  Foreclosures and food banks are still making headlines as the United States continues to march along the path to economic disaster.

That’s not really news.  Most of the middle class is living the nightmare that was created and managed by very wealthy politicians and businessmen who held out helping hands to each other, to save Wall Street billionaires, banking and financial millionaires and major insurance emperors like those who headed up AIG.

The real news is that the people we elected to straighten the economic ship out, create jobs, cut unemployment, save Social Security, offer medical care to all, not just those with an insurance card – those politicians are at it again.  And if their jawing and rhetoric continue, when the bill comes due you won’t see any of them or their rich friends and cronies reaching for their wallets.  It will be down to the poorest and the weakest to pony up and pay.

In fact, for the rich, the economic disaster story has a happy ending according to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.  At a recent budget hearing he offered some statistics that should make most of us take notice.

Let me repeat a few of thos statistics just so you can’t miss them.

The income of the top 1% of the population tripled since the 1970’s – from 8% to 23%.  Since 2007, the average annual income for the 400 wealthiest Americans doubled – from an average of $345 million a year to just under $800 million.  Under the Bush administration, this same group of people, the top 400, saw their tax burden cut in half.

Not many people offer plain talk about the current economy, how we got here and who got rich along the way.  Senator Sanders does in just over 7 minutes.  No slogans, no rhetoric, just facts make the case for balancing the American budget NOT on the backs of the vast majority but equitably.

Listen up.  Senator Sanders isn’t talking to you and me; he is talking for us.

There probably won’t be another crash, another “Great Depression” – read Robert Reich’s new book if you don’t believe me.  But unless someone in Washington D.C. “grows a set”, stops yakking about the situation and starts making choices that will right the ship, there will be the slow and deliberate unraveling that comes with an economy in decline.   And you and I and every person whose income falls below $100,000 a year will pay the price.

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