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So, are we a “nation of whiners” as former Sen. Phil Gramm so famously said late last week? George Will, on one of the Sunday morning news shows, said he was right.
Maybe we are.
About 95 percent of us are employed. Clean water is readily available. Our stores are still fully stocked with life’s necessities. We can travel where we want and say what we want. Our newspapers and magazines can publish satirical cartoons and essays without fear of government retribution. So what's to whine about?
Mr. Will says we seem to “have a low threshold for pain.”
But it’s pretty hard to reconcile the price of gas and the rising food prices with government statements that we’re not “technically” in a recession. Wages can hardly keep up when gas and food prices see such recent surges.
Or are we a nation of optimists? Times are tough? We still get up and go to work, we make plans for next week and next month. We continue to save for retirement or vacations.
It kind of depends on your perspective, no doubt.
My father once told me about the day he was ordained into the ministry. The ceremony also included the retirement of a number of ministers. One of those older gentlemen approached dad after the ceremony, shook his hand and said “Good luck, son. The church is going to pot.”
Here was a young, energetic guy. It was the mid-1950s; the church, and country, was chugging through the post-war boom. “How could someone not be optimistic about the future?” he thought.
Fast forward 40 or 50 years and he better understands that retiring pastor’s perspective. It’s in the same category that “Today’s youth are going to pot,” something that’s been documented to have been said, I believe I’ve read somewhere, for several hundred years.
Maybe we have a right to whine from time to time, but I don’t think it defines us as a nation as Gramm seemed to indicate. And I have to agree with Will that we probably have a low threshold for pain, something that comes naturally to a population that is used to abundance.
What defines us as a nation, however, are the times like Bluffton went through about five years ago — The Flood of ‘03 — and communities along the Mississippi River are experiencing now. People pitch in to sandbag, to provide shelter, food and clothing, and then to cleanup. We rebuild or we learn by putting parks in those low lands.
A bunch of whiners don’t do things like that.
by MARK MILLER
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