I had breakfast with a cop today. He had arrested me 18 years ago, and I bought him breakfast to thank him for doing the right thing and not cutting me any slack just because we had gone to high school together.
He asked me what I thought of the economy. I gave him a long-winded answer about how we're at a tricky point in needing to encourage debt and consumption in the near term when we really need to cut it in the long term, how we don't need big SUVs and McMansions blah blah blah.
I asked him what he thought. He said he sees the marginal portions of society and it's been very alarming how they've been underserved in the last decade or so. How the closing of the mental health center in town in 2003 had left a lot of people stranded and in need of services, how private sector contractors had ridden in on a white horse and said they could take care of the "segment" and turn a profit, and then had pulled out and run for the hills when they couldn't. He said that the disparities in wealth he saw were deeply troubling and that the passage of the health care bill was clearly a step in the right direction. He worries about seething anger amongst the poor.
This is a long-time cop, a guy who sends one of his kids to Catholic school. A guy who pulled bodies from the wreckage of 9/11. Not someone you think of as classic bleeding-heart liberal, though we are, admittedly, in a liberal town (but an affluent one and one where the underclass is relatively small -- which lends more credence to his POV).
It was another one of those moments where I thought about what I was doing with my life.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Breakfast with a cop
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1 comment:
Interesting. We are a consumer-driven economy which is providing fewer and fewer individuals with enough money to consume. We subsidize large corporations although they have largely exported the manufacturing and service jobs to other countries. We complain about excess spending on healthcare and poor healthcare outcomes, yet we cannot spend enough upon education, in spite of educational outcomes far below our healthcare outcomes. Very few eligible voters actually exercise their right to vote. Perhaps a decline of the American standard of living will spur a change in the staus quo.
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