Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Suffering, Yes, but Also Complaining

Phil Gramm is right. We are whiners. I was whining about Phil Gramm just yesterday.

But the whole country does it. We whine about taxes. We whine about gas prices. We whine about terrorists. We whine about the schools and our knowledge of math, science and geography. We whine about access to affordable health care. We whine about dead soldiers. We whine about the fact that tax payers have to keep bailing out the financial industry, allowing the gamblers who bring down the industry to start new bubbles and scams, starting the cycle all over again ... and yet we whine about regulation. We whine about inflation. We whine about jobs moving out of the country. We whine about automation making workers redundant in our manufacturing economy. We whine because all of those great jobs of the future are still in the future, but we're stuck here in the present and, in some cases, the past. We whine about liberals. We whine about conservatives. We whine about McCain. We whine about Obama. Grouse, grouse, grouse. Whine, whine, whine. Why doesn't everybody just get a grip and get on with it. Isn't that what we are supposed to be about? Getting on with it, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, becoming the next Bill Gates or Sam Walton? Did those guys let bureaucrats, taxes, government ineptitude and an undereducated workforce stop them?

And do not get me started on the whining that goes on elsewhere in the world. Israel whines about Iranian nukes. The UN whines about organized rape in the Congo and east Africa. Aid groups whine about Darfur. China whines about its PR problems. They sound like a bunch of babies over there.

It reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon I saw a few months ago.
A spiritual teacher and his acolytes sit on the floor; a woman addresses the teacher with a question: "You say that life is suffering, but isn't there also complaining?"

No comments: