As the title of this blog is “Winters Kids,” I’ve generally reserved it for family related posts. But because I’ve been lazy in pulling the pictures off my camera lately (sorry, Grandma), I’m not in any position to post about swimming lessons just yet.

Instead, I’ve had a little soap box rant percolating in my head for a few days, that is just about to bubble over. So, my “devoted readers” are my lucky recipients.

Last week, John McCain’s top economic adviser, Phil Gramm set off a firestorm by saying we’ve become a nation of whiners, and that we are only in a “mental recession.” I was still trying to form my opinion on these statements when I heard a newscaster on the radio describing how the nation’s “energy crisis” continues to leave citizens in “dire” situations. Seriously. Crisis and dire were actual words used in the newscast. Funny enough, they didn’t do any human interest stories citing anyone in a “dire” circumstance. It was just a general, blazee statement thrown out to see where it would stick.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying things aren’t tight. And I’m not saying things aren’t difficult. I’m not saying that companies aren’t shedding a few pounds, and that there aren’t real people losing jobs or having a difficult go of it. We’ve had many friends and family members who have been negatively affected by their employers scaling back in the last few years. We, in fact, experienced a lay-off in December due to lack of work and a sluggish economy. And even now, we struggle to stay with in our gas and grocery budget each week, because prices are truly high. All that I agree with.

But, “crisis”? “Dire”? As an across-the-board label? I do have to say that I continue to have to wait in long lines for gas at Costco. I still get stuck in traffic jams. People may be driving less in general, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of change in my general areas of patronage. And I see at least 4 or 5 “Now Hiring” signs every single day.

Could it be possible that Phil Gramm had a point? My generation has never really experienced a recession. We’ve never had it hard. We’ve always had more credit than we know what to do with. Heck, I’ve never even put anything on lay-away, like I remember my parents doing. Nope, it’s buy now, worry about it later. So now we’re getting called on to cinch up the belt a little tighter, pay a little more attention. Is that all together a bad thing? Perhaps, but it hardly qualifies as dire.

I keep thinking about a lesson I had on forest fires back in elementary school. Every few years, it’s actually healthy for a forest to experience a forest fire. The forest essentially cleanses itself, renews, and comes back stronger. Of course, the major catastrophic fires are different, but I see this economic slowdown more like one of those “cleansing” fires. Things have to go in cycles, that’s just the way life works. But I sure am sick of the media playing into the frenzy, and in most cases causing the problem, if not just exacerbating it. What goes up, must come down. But I sure don’t think we’ve bottomed out, and I don’t think we’re anywhere close, as some people would have you think.

Unfortunately, to top everything off, it seems everyone is calling on government to bail us out. Excuse me? Since when is it my responsbility as a tax-payer to bail out an enormous corporation like Freddie Mac, who made bad business decisions? I sure hope the government will bail me out the next time I make a bad business decision.

But actually, I don’t. If the government gets in the business of bail-outs, nobody will learn anything from this slowdown. It won’t matter what kind of business decisions or personal decisions you make in the future, because Big Brother will be there to save you! Instead of clearing out all the underbrush, this fire will merely allow it to grow thicker, creating the tender and ripe conditions for a catastrophic fire in the future.

I, for one, stand up and cheer Mr. Gramm for calling it as it is. We are a nation of whiners, and if what we’re experiencing now is such a crisis, I shudder to see what’s down the road, when our mental recession can no longer be controlled by Prozac.

What do you think? I’m open for discussion…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 1:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.