Well, Now
I hadn't realized it'd been so long since I made a blog post. It's not that I haven't had any opinions about what's been going on, it's just that I haven't really been able to clarify them apart from yer basic "this sucks" or "this is great". And of course I have been concentrating on more things in real life lately.
It also doesn't stop me from thinking about the larger picture, and about life in general in this country at this time. There was an article, for example, about a week or so back, by Bob Herbert of the NY Times talkign about how people are being priced out of baseball tickets in NY (apparently at the beginning of the year the Yankees were charging about $200,000 for a season ticket), but it made me think about how a lot of us are just being priced out of life.
If you look at the structure we have here in America, it's really very simple and very basic: you are born, it costs a certain amount to raise you, and once you reach a certain age you are expected to be productive and earn enough money to support yourself and/or a family, and earn enough during those years in order to retire comfortably. My parent's generation were able to accomplish that because back in the day there was not only an understanding that you get paid so much and that things cost so much, but anyone who seriously disagreed with that premise was shot down by tough regulations and tough enforcement of those regulations. In other words, the banks and insurance people didn't go around ripping you off, and the ones that wanted to rip you off were held in check.
It's not that way any more, and it's quite possible that it will never be that way again. Sure, there are people who can still live that dream but they are generally people who fall into a particular professional class, back in the day even a common laborer with no high school diploma could raise a family on a single salary and still afford to buy a home later in life. That's exactly what my dad did. And this also goes into part of the health care debate as well, where apparently they were debating on TV whether or not a person should live or die based upon whether they have enough money to pay for their care.
Because when you build a society where money is the only standard by which we can measure a person's value, the ultimate question becomes whether or not the poor deserve to die because they're incapable of earning enough money to keep up. Social Darwinism, some people call that. And any attempt to rectify the unfairness of this is viewed as somehow disrupting the natural order of things.
But these issues are too big for a little mind such as mine. All I can really do at this point is try to make a better life for myself so that I can keep a roof over my head. Retiring isn't even an issue, just day-to-day, week-to-week survival. And that's pretty much all I got.
It also doesn't stop me from thinking about the larger picture, and about life in general in this country at this time. There was an article, for example, about a week or so back, by Bob Herbert of the NY Times talkign about how people are being priced out of baseball tickets in NY (apparently at the beginning of the year the Yankees were charging about $200,000 for a season ticket), but it made me think about how a lot of us are just being priced out of life.
If you look at the structure we have here in America, it's really very simple and very basic: you are born, it costs a certain amount to raise you, and once you reach a certain age you are expected to be productive and earn enough money to support yourself and/or a family, and earn enough during those years in order to retire comfortably. My parent's generation were able to accomplish that because back in the day there was not only an understanding that you get paid so much and that things cost so much, but anyone who seriously disagreed with that premise was shot down by tough regulations and tough enforcement of those regulations. In other words, the banks and insurance people didn't go around ripping you off, and the ones that wanted to rip you off were held in check.
It's not that way any more, and it's quite possible that it will never be that way again. Sure, there are people who can still live that dream but they are generally people who fall into a particular professional class, back in the day even a common laborer with no high school diploma could raise a family on a single salary and still afford to buy a home later in life. That's exactly what my dad did. And this also goes into part of the health care debate as well, where apparently they were debating on TV whether or not a person should live or die based upon whether they have enough money to pay for their care.
Because when you build a society where money is the only standard by which we can measure a person's value, the ultimate question becomes whether or not the poor deserve to die because they're incapable of earning enough money to keep up. Social Darwinism, some people call that. And any attempt to rectify the unfairness of this is viewed as somehow disrupting the natural order of things.
But these issues are too big for a little mind such as mine. All I can really do at this point is try to make a better life for myself so that I can keep a roof over my head. Retiring isn't even an issue, just day-to-day, week-to-week survival. And that's pretty much all I got.
posted by CupOJoe at 10/30/2009 10:16:00 AM | 
