THRIFTY OR SKINT?

Almost six months in Austin and I’m learning more and more about the US everyday. Austin is unique in some respects being rather liberal, casual and very much into accepting people and ideas, no matter how strange, hence the official city motto Keep Austin Weird. I am beginning to think, though, that Austin may well be as good a microcosm of what is happening in America, as anywhere else. Because my evening job requires me to telephone one person after another and I have, no doubt, spoken with thousands of people in the last months, I have discovered that unemployment and underemployment are rife. I suspect that may be why so many people, like myself, shop at the proliferation of thrift and charity shops around town. Are we being thrifty, or are we unable to afford anything new? In these shops one can buy anything from clothing to furniture, well actually one can fit out an entire life with the gear you can find at relatively amazingly low prices. One step above these shops are the stores selling new merchandise at usually decent prices, like Target and Wal-Mart (I love this, the spell check just automatically corrected the way I spelled Wal-Mart, just another indication of how big business has invaded our lives), although in many cases their prices are too high for the likes of me who is only working two jobs. Homelessness is pandemic, no one seems to have medical insurance and yet there are people driving around in their huge SUVs spending $130 each time they fill their tank with petrol. When I left America to move to Ireland, in the eighties, I felt then that the divide between the haves and have nots was increasing daily. The current administration, I will not write that evil name, has taken this divide to new and extreme heights by sucking up to big business in a way never before embraced in this country. One only has to look at the way the government handled and continues to handle the Katrina debacle (billion dollar no bid contracts handed out to political cronies whilst people made homeless by the hurricane are being told the government will no longer pay to house them or help them repair their homes) to understand that commercialism, not democracy, is the basis for its policies. A recent article in the newspaper cited the number of low income people being investigated by the IRS for underpayment and/or fraud (N.B. turned out almost none of them were fraudulent and many had over paid) whilst big business gets more and more tax relief and a pass on any scrutiny by the IRS.

Damn, I really did not want to make this a political diatribe but I used to believe in this country and the freedoms on which it was founded. I learned, as one can possibly only do best from a distance, that many of my beliefs were erroneous but still felt that there was a sound foundation on which the US, if it woke up, could provide a quality of life that was reasonable and affordable. Now…. well I spend my free time scouring the thrift shops for a spoon for 25 cents so I can eat my soup, which is about all I can afford.