The New Deal, dismantled

I am a beneficiary of the New Deal, for which I will always be grateful. My father died when I was 4 in a car accident, leaving my mother widowed with three small girls, ages 5, 4 and 1, and a baby on the way, my brother. Daddy's Social Security and VA survivor's benefits allowed my family to live in dignity without a breadwinner and a single parent as head of household. We grew up in a very small, story and a half Cape Cod bungalow with four bedrooms and one and a half baths, my elder sister and I sharing what would probably have been the master bedroom upstairs. The houses in our neighborhood were built in the years immediately following WWII to house returning veterans and their young families in those early years of the Baby Boom, of which I am a product. They're nothing fancy, and as I understand it, the upstairs rooms were unfinished when they were built to allow the new owners to decide for themselves what to do with those rooms. Our house had been occupied by only one other family since its completion, and we made some necessary modifications to it in order to make it more to the needs of our young family. But for as small as it was, it was a great house to grow up in, even for its occasional lack of privacy. We also always had a lot of books in our home, as well as pets (usually a dog and two cats, but at one point, we had three goats, four flying squirrels, nearly 100 mice, the occasional rabbit, hamster or guinea pig, depending on how long they lived in addition to the cats and the dog, earning our house the nickname around the neighborhood of "the zoo"), plenty of music, either singing or instrument playing or the radio blaring either classical, folk or some form of popular music of the day and we never wanted for anything in the way of food or clothing. I think we could have considered ourselves middle class, even though my mother did not work in our earliest childhood years so that she could be both full time mom and dad to us kids. This was thanks to being able to have Daddy's survivor pensions available to allow us to maintain a decent lifestyle in dignity instead of abject poverty.

What I do not understand is why my generation seems so hell bent on dismantling all of the social safety net programs that were put into place by our parents generation to make sure that we would have something to fall back on in case of tragedy, disaster or misfortune. Perhaps some of them see folks like me as moochers off of the government. Sure, Uncle Sam paid my entire way through college, via my father's VA and Social Security survivor pensions, and there are probably some who wonder why I didn't pay my own darn way through school like so many others have before or since. Well, the fact is that at the time, despite a college education being a relative bargain compared to nowadays, I still couldn't afford it on my own. My mother had four children to get through college - do you at all think that she could have afforded to pay all four of our ways through university? Not on your life, she couldn't. The fact that the government made an investment in us and allowed us to complete our college educations debt free meant that all four of us could become useful, taxpaying citizens who were not a burden on society. None of us have outstanding college loans to pay off, either, like today's students will have for years and years to come, cutting into their abilities to earn a decent income if they can even find a good high paying job when they are done with school.

The fact is that the social safety net that the FDR administration put into place allowed a burgeoning middle class to emerge and become the most prosperous and well educated generation ever to come out of the 20th century, and in turn, gave birth to us Baby Boomers, who enjoyed prosperity and comfort that was the direct result of the sacrifices that our parents made in WWII and our grandparents made during the Depression. So what has possessed our generation to trample on those social safety nets and want them torn down and destroyed? Why the meanness of spirit toward those less fortunate than ourselves? Why deny them the same benefits that we enjoyed growing up, the knowledge that come what may, something would be there to catch us should we fall? Is it the misperception of welfare abuse and what some people regarded as "welfare queens" living high off the hog, driving Cadillacs and owning state of the art home entertainment systems, all the while doing nothing to earn those things working for a paycheck? Maybe this is what led to what I perceive as a bunch of "angry white men" who took over Congress in 1994, utterly determined to begin the complete dismantling of Roosevelt's social safety net programs. They seem to have largely succeeded, perhaps, except for Social Security, which they tried to privatize after the Bush victory in 2004. People were at least smart enough to recognize a scam when they saw it, and it went nowhere. But Hurricane Katrina once and for all blew the lid off of this administration and revealed it for what it is: incompetent, uncaring and negligent.

A new New Deal to save the ravaged Gulf Coast and put people back to work again rebuilding that part of the country is just what is needed right now. A new New Deal to rebuild our country's crumbling infrastructure would also be a great way to spur the economy back to solvency is also something that the next administration ought to look into doing. Sending us all checks for a few hundred dollars and urging us to go to the mall and spend it is the wrong answer to jump start our sagging economy. There need to be more long range answers to our fiscal woes than to tell people to go to the mall and buy more junk they don't need. Many of us are going to use our tax rebate to pay off bills, not buy junk. That's my plan for my little windfall. I have medical bills left over from last year that need to be paid down, and now, so that's where my money's going. And I'm sure that I am not alone, either, in wanting to use the money for just that. So don't look for any big bump in the economy this year from our little tax windfall. Put people to work, don't just give them a few hundred token bucks and tell them to go shopping with it. Utter stupidity, but then again, what do you expect from such an incompetent, uncaring and dumb bunch of idiots who run the country right now?