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Expectations
posted Tuesday, 19 May 2009
From a recent speech:It’s spring. The sun is starting to come out from behind the clouds – even in Seattle. And yet we are still emotionally and mentally in winter. Jobs, health care, real estate are all worries that eat away at us. For 8+ years, our own greed was egged on by Republican ideology. We used our homes as an ever-flowing ATM. A home is a place to live. We didn’t want to see that we were living on the surface of a bubble; we wanted to believe that it was real. Most of the clients that I warned against voodoo economics didn’t listen to me. All of our 401Ks and other stock market-based retirement sources have been devastated. Business Week says that it will take the stock market and real estate markets 8-10 years to return to their 2006 levels. An awful lot of Baby Boomers will be working full-time at back-breaking jobs into their 70s. As a nation, we allowed our infrastructure to deteriorate for decades, as we focused on individual wealth creation and spending and not on our needs as part of a community. In a speech to the United Way of Pitt County in 2004, I reminded community leaders of the quintessentially American concept of the barn-raising. Spring is a time when nature awakens from its long sleep. [In Seattle, a really loooong sleep.] In the same way, our country is awakening from a long period of unconsciousness. As our new President reminds us, we have lost the foundation of our prosperity – our ability to build and create things, our manufacturing, our engineering and our science – in our rush to make a quick buck and acquire “stuff. The future does not belong to the clever folks who can manipulate markets and finance. The future belongs to those who create tangible products and intangible hope and caring. We all need to work and sacrifice, doing whatever the situation requires, until we get it back. As a nation. Awakening to the reality of our precarious situation, the result of our long unconsciousness, requires us all to scale back our consumer expectations while expanding our expectations in other areas. Instead of sleep-walking through our lives in a haze of acquisition, we need to:
- Expect health care as a right, as a compact with each other as fellow citizens Expect to exercise more, get more sleep and eat healthy every day for preventative medicine.
- Expect that we take responsibility for our choices. Relatives of hoodlums who gun down four decent police officers say, “I’m ashamed of him.” We stop making excuses. If I end up living my retirement living in a small apartment, eating small meals: “That’s what I get for putting all my retirement funds in the stock market. End of story, amen.”
- Expect levees to hold and expect to pay taxes to keep them strong.
- Expect our children to get educated and community colleges to offer reasonably-priced retraining, and expect our fellow citizens to vote for taxes or bond issues to make it happen. We expect to spend our lives in continuous education. As our President said, every one of us must dedicate ourselves in 2009 to gaining new, non-outsourcable skills.
- Expect our elected officials to keep our jobs here and use our tax code to punish those who outsource our jobs – and make our voting decisions on this basis, not on emotional ideological bases.
- Expect to reduce, reuse, recycle. Put unused but usable items on FreeCycle or Craig’s List or the church bulletin board. Grow a vegetable garden. Check out library books, not just DVDs. Spend time walking in the park as a family. Pray and meditate more; drink less.
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