Roast Pork Rant

“Sooner or later, every man sits down to a banquet of consequences” - Robert Louis Stevenson

My mother grew up during the Depression and had to eat mustard sandwiches. As a result my sensibilities have been influenced by many of her penny-pinching habits.

I grew up eating suppers made with parts of a cow that would make my children faint if they saw them on supermarket shelves.

I have been using the same toaster for twenty years, fry pan for thirty, and have no idea how old my mattress is. I have no use for an electric can opener or a cell phone. I can debone a turkey and feed a small army a variety of leftovers for more then a month after Christmas. I’ve owned only four cars, driving them until their wheels fell off or their motors fell out. I am proud of the fact that I can step out of my house looking like a million bucks wearing $6 jeans, a $10 sports shirt, $13 leather running shoes, and $2 eyeglasses.

So what has happened to my children?

One of them in the last three years, has gone through four cell phones, four vehicles, seven televisions, three washing machines and five air conditioners. Her furnace rages all winter long. She leaves every light on in her house, and has no problem spending $200 on groceries and $100 on take-out food a week. She has umpteen I-Pods, X-Boxes, skateboards and cell phones for her preteen kids, bad credit, and thousands of dollars in medical bills.

She worries about none of these things while I sit here about to grow an ulcer the size of a football just writing about them.

She is an example of the self-indulgent frivolous generation of Americans so consumed with consumption and immediate gratification that they haven’t considered or cared about the consequences of living beyond their means by spending more than they have earned.

Credit card debt, auto debt, mortgage debt, consumer, corporate and national debt have led to a crisis with pensions and savings being wiped out as a result of stock market greed and governmental mismanagement.

I’ve spent hours trying to understand illiquid mortgage backed securities, secondary mortgage markets, credit markets, public debt, external debt, and how a number can be plucked out of thin air like one trillion dollars to buy valueless assets with a “gut feeling” so that they can be sold for profit and save our economy sometime within the next ten years.

The country is beyond broke and Washington’s answer is to sneak a special interests bill through Congress while borrowing money that doesn’t exist to enable corrupt thieves on Wall Street to continue with their crimes while I watch honest hard working small business owners close shop after shop in my community?

Why are we being forced to accept the notion that arrows, rum, race tracks and sheep have anything to do with stabilizing our economy during this financial emergency?

Am I the only one who thinks November the forth should be the date for a new Tea Party?

I’m tired of representatives playing tiddly winks with our future.

It’s time to toss these idiots overboard and introduce term limits on their stupidity.

Let them float in our contempt for their heresy for a while.

Then again, what gives me the right to complain? I won’t be a citizen until the next election cycle.