Posterity's Just Around the Corner

from the SF Marina Times, April 2008

There may be more prescience than I had first thought in Governor Schwarzenegger's decision to lay off one-third of California's schoolteachers next month. There may be no jobs for these kids anyway when they get older. Posterity's just around the corner. It's really astonishing how the state's priorities are as upside-down as a mortgage. I just learned what an "upside-down mortgage" means. That's when the mortgage payments on your house exceed the value of the property. Now, that's depressing. It makes one grateful just to pay the rent. These are the joys of non-ownership.
I've always been afraid, I must tell you, to own anything. I know what it's like to have them taken all away. Don't get me wrong, I'm not as lamentable as it sounds. Someone said to me the other day that it is the American Dream to own a home. That's not the way I learned it. I thought the American Dream was to leave a world for that's better for your children. Perhaps that involves things other than property. Now, I run the risk of sounding like a pundit so I'll leave it at that, and return to my usual facile sarcasm.
"Prosperity is just around the corner," President Herbert Hoover famously said as the county careened deeper into the Great Depression. His prediction haunted him to the end of his days. President Bush evoked Hoover's impotence the other day when the Bear Stearns story broke. Speaking of upside-down, it's seems that we have to lend money to banks. Of course we do. As many called for action, Mr. Bush said he and his administration were "on top of things." So was Eliot Spitzer and looked what happened to him. The president went on to dismiss the country's flailing economy as simply "a rough patch." President Bush's deep-seated indifference to suffering is breathtaking. But he's consistent.
It was St. Patrick's Day in the Green Zone. Vice-President Cheney took his family to Baghdad. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, Senator McCain dropped in on the Iraqi ambassador and McCain expressed his support for the war -- everyone one of them. Does anyone wonder who's going to pay for this extended war in Iraq? Of course, posterity's just around the corner. It's up to the kids and their kids now. The same kids who are being cheated by the California public school system because there isn't enough money in 2008 to pay their teachers.
That's punditry and I am sorry about that.
Let me push it. Let's get off Governor Schwarzenegger's back. Let him go make an action movie, collect a ton of money, and give the dough to the teachers so we won't have this idiocy about shutting down classrooms haunt us until the end of our days. Posterity's just around the corner. I think we better be afraid what we'll we'll find there.

Bruce Bellingham is an author, and a columnist for the Marina Times and SF Northside. He's more comfortable with puns than punditry.


####