A thought for the future

To me, Garrison Keillor frequently comes off as a bit of stuckup blowhard, a limousine liberal of sorts. But he intersperses those moments with common sense thoughts. So it is with this item from his current column. He was somewhere in Massachusetts and stopped in to watch a little league game. As luck would have it, he ended up sitting up to a fellow whose 10-year old daughter was playing in the game.

It led to this observation:

"I'm 65 and have a good life and can't claim that the Current Occupant has done me much harm at all. It's when I think about 10-year-old girls I start to get hot under the collar. This clueless man has dug a deep hole for them and doesn't seem vaguely aware of it. He has spent us deep in a hole, gotten us into a disastrous war, blithely ignored the long-term best interests of the country, and when you think of the 4,000 kids who now lie in cemeteries, and for what? -- you start to grind your teeth. For the sake of the girl with the beautiful swing, I hope we get a better president than the disgusting incompetent we've wasted eight years of our national life on. Think twice about who you put your arm around, Sen. McCain."

There, in a nutshell, you have one of the big problems in this country. For every Limousine Liberal (and there are a lot of them), you can find twice as many people who are simply struggling to get along. There are a lot of us thousandairres who are making do in whatever way we can. We are scrimping when needed, running all the errands at the same time and looking for bargains at the store.

The expensive suits in the right wing crowd don't worry about this sort of thing. Recently, Norm Coleman, the senior senator from our state, tried to tell us he is not a wealthy man because he "only" has $500,000 in total investments and bank stuff. Sen. Coleman says that, when he is in Washington, DC, he lives in a basement where he pays $600 a month. And he gives you the impression he is doing it this way because he has to. That is, of course, nonsense but it does give you an idea how he got $500,000 in the bank. And it gives him the chance to give us dire warnings about an economy that he had a big hand in forming.

The senators and representatives who are telling us that everything is going to be alright are correct ... for them. They don't worry about gas because they don't drive (they have drivers) and it is all paid for. The expensive talking heads don't worry about this because they are making hundreds of thousands (if not millions) to give the opinion that everything is going to be okay. That may be true for them. But all I know is damn near every day I read about some company laying off more employees. Sooner or later, we are going to run out of potential taxpayers. At that point, we will become like France in World War I and will have a true missing generation.