Dear AARP,
Concerning your July/August 2011 issue with it's 99 Great Ways To Save: Whilst I appreciate and admire people’s efforts to be frugal and save their pennies, there is patently something deeper at work here. Elizabeth Warren pointed out in a keynote speech in 2007 that Americans in the past generally could make ends meet on a single income and always had a potential second income to fall back on. Now it takes two incomes to make ends meet so the next front on saving is reusing stamps and salvaging tiny lumps of soap. They’re getting rid of cable, using their cars until they fall to pieces on the turnpike and thinking of home ownership as an American Nightmare. Not being wasteful is a good thing but I’d argue this country is wasting it’s first and greatest resource by assigning so many of it’s citizens holes so deep thanks to the burden of foreclosure and debt their imaginations atrophy and they can no longer see any way to climb out. Furthermore the Republican agenda seems bent on making things even harder for those who already have nothing and on further lining the nests of those who already have everything. I think more and more Americans see it this way. Those beyond our borders see this country as slowly going insane with it’s apparent determination to erode what is left of the safety net. Balling up little bits of soap is a waste of energy, an energy that could be better applied doing something helpful for this country. As an ardent Socialist and/or Liberal I have no concern about re-invoking the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by suggesting the introduction of some contemporary version of the WPA. With a few strokes of the pen Washington could create job programs and reintroduce hope to the millions who are losing it by the day. But both the will to act and sanity must prevail.
Russell Christian
Artist, Blogger (Art and the Bouncy Banker), reluctant pessimist and never retiree
Concerning your July/August 2011 issue with it's 99 Great Ways To Save: Whilst I appreciate and admire people’s efforts to be frugal and save their pennies, there is patently something deeper at work here. Elizabeth Warren pointed out in a keynote speech in 2007 that Americans in the past generally could make ends meet on a single income and always had a potential second income to fall back on. Now it takes two incomes to make ends meet so the next front on saving is reusing stamps and salvaging tiny lumps of soap. They’re getting rid of cable, using their cars until they fall to pieces on the turnpike and thinking of home ownership as an American Nightmare. Not being wasteful is a good thing but I’d argue this country is wasting it’s first and greatest resource by assigning so many of it’s citizens holes so deep thanks to the burden of foreclosure and debt their imaginations atrophy and they can no longer see any way to climb out. Furthermore the Republican agenda seems bent on making things even harder for those who already have nothing and on further lining the nests of those who already have everything. I think more and more Americans see it this way. Those beyond our borders see this country as slowly going insane with it’s apparent determination to erode what is left of the safety net. Balling up little bits of soap is a waste of energy, an energy that could be better applied doing something helpful for this country. As an ardent Socialist and/or Liberal I have no concern about re-invoking the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by suggesting the introduction of some contemporary version of the WPA. With a few strokes of the pen Washington could create job programs and reintroduce hope to the millions who are losing it by the day. But both the will to act and sanity must prevail.
Russell Christian
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