We have nothing to fear but fear itself
It seems like you can’t turn on the news or pick up any magazine without talk of the recessions or the depression or whatever we are going to call this period in time. I was coming out of the parking lot of Party City on Veterans in Metairie, where I had to go to get the balloons yesterday, and there was a car with a bumper sticker that said “Geaux McCain!” – a Louisiana stamp on a bumper sticker that is so curious. Why is that the Democrats produced a smart woman and a strikingly charismatic black man and the Republicans had a blue haired, out of touch, white man? Well, is it possible that the people who vote for Bush, McCain, for Republicans in general are the part of America that is clawing, clinging, cloying to its desperate last gasp?
Wake up America, the world is much more colorful and diverse than you might expect.
Which then brings me to this, I was reading the NYT this morning and Obama announced plans for the largest public works spending program since the creation of the interstate highway system a half-century ago. We all knew that we had to move into some WPA type program to right the country, and so his announcement did not come as any surprise.
A long time ago, when I lived in Abita Springs with my first husband, I went to work during a transition period, at a seafood restaurant called Richard’s. There was a woman who came into the restaurant every evening to eat by herself. She had a fascinating past, having followed her husband all over the United States as he laid down the same highway system that Obama refers to. There was a quiet fascination about this woman, although she had not done the work herself, she had gone all over the country because of it.
It made me think of friend’s of my first husband’s family, who one day when we were sitting around talking, the wife said that she could remember the lean times when they had had their first kid and had to eat potatoes and eggs at every meal because they were so broke. She said she often now thought about those times fondly, at how they had nothing, but they were happy.
I think about the having nothing part and as philosophical as I would like to be about money, success, and all of its trappings, I realize I buried the bohemian part of me when I left Spain in 1989 and decided instead to move back to the US and out to California. Go west, young woman! And west I went and there found a hamster brass wheel that felt like the right fit and I got on and have not taken a breath yet.
And like the chubby little hamster that paws the wheel with no end in sight, the Sisyphus of the rodent world, I keep turning the wheel but all of a sudden I am wondering if by clinging, cloying, and sticking fast to what I have for fear of losing it, that I might be missing the wide open road and more from less.