Don't leave your future up to others

"Advice to retirees: Embrace the future," columnist Tad Bartimus counseled in the Post-Intelligencer Nov. 29. She described her layoff from a 25-year career and her choice of agreeing to the layoff or losing all health care and pension benefits.

Suddenly, she had to find ways to survive with less than half her promised pension. Her situation, she said, echoes the predicament of more and more Americans, like those who took middle-class futures for granted at companies such as General Motors, Delta Airlines and Ford, but who now scramble to get by at jobs paying a fraction of the wages they were used to. She talked of America's social contract being ripped apart but backs off to counsel individual adaptation and seeing life as "a banquet," where we need to savor even unexpected courses.

I recently spoke in Kokomo, Ind., where a major Delphi plant is likely to be closed. My brother-in-law, now eking out a living as a substitute teacher, has been out of full-time work for almost a decade, in part because of a heart condition that would saddle any but the largest employers with prohibitively unaffordable insurance costs. Everywhere I go, I encounter people with once-comfortable lives who are borrowing on their houses, running up their credit cards, losing their health insurance and generally running faster and faster to avoid the economic abyss.

Bartimus highlights a real and urgent problem. The promises on which many have based entire economic lives are no longer being honored. We're increasingly a winner-take-all society, where those at the top gorge on luxury consumption while those at the bottom scramble for crumbs. But the solutions Bartimus counsels are exclusively individual. "The trick," she writes, "is to figure out what comes next," and to focus "on possibilities, not regrets." Maybe, she writes, she'll forge a new future in woodworking.

I hope Bartimus keeps landing on her feet, and I bet she will. People should be optimistic and muster all their resourcefulness, creativity and tenacity while dealing with the hands they're dealt. But we should also work together to help ensure a future where everyone gets dealt a decent hand.

The problems Bartimus describes can't be solved by quietly accepting the global corporate mantra: "It's here. It's the future. Get used to it." It's not our individual decisions that are gutting our pensions, raising medical costs sky high and making our lives on this rich and fruitful Earth increasingly precarious. The economic squeeze faced by everyone except a handful of individuals comes from 30 years of deliberate political choices -- union-busting, regressive tax and trade policies, an eroding minimum wage and a collapse of moral and political restraints on destructive greed. These pressures have been accelerated vastly since President Bush took office.

I worry that by framing the solution totally in terms of individual adaptation, Bartimus steers her readers from the major lesson of the stories she tells: that ordinary citizens must join together and speak out on the larger roots of these problems, on the choices we're allowing to be made in our common name. If we simply accept our fate, some of us will find ways to adapt and survive but many more will fall through the cracks. In a time when we're taking "The Apprentice" as a national model, we need less silent adaptation, not more. Life should indeed be a banquet -- for all of us. Whether we make it so is contingent on our actions.

Paul Rogat Loeb of Seattle is the author of "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear." See www.paulloeb.org

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