WHO WILL HELP? PRIVATE CHARITY OR GOVERNMENT?
Newsday – March 8, 2009
Unemployment’s up again.
Stock market’s down. Again.
The whole idea of a comfortable retirement is fading from hopeful fantasy to “Yeah, as if!”
Pick an indicator, any indicator. Almost without exception, the arrows will be pointing in whatever way we don’t want them to. Suddenly, “bad news” is just another redundancy.
Of course it’s bad. It’s news. Come back tomorrow – why don’t you? – for some more.
But does there come a point in such a bleak and challenging environment where the dire reports and ominous warning begin to lose their psychological oomph? A time of bleakness overload? An eye-opening moment of “Sure, it’s awful. But what do you want me to do about it?”
This much is becoming clear: There is something deeply liberating when we learn to take it all a little less personally, when people of all faiths and of none acquire something like the detachment of Buddhists.
Really, how many days of “uh-oh” can anybody stand?
So here’s a tough-times exercise, perfectly suited for now. Practice with me. It’ll come naturally, eventually.
“An economic meltdown of epic proportions,” Nassau County Comptroller Howard Weitzman warns.
OK.
A recession “longer and deeper than anyone anticipated,” Long Island economist Pearl Kamer says.
Just shrug.
Huge throngs, many from Long Island, rushing to a Times Square job fair, optimistically titled the Keep America Working Tour.
Whatever.
It won’t make you one dime richer. But don’t you feel better now?
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