weather report

It always amazes me when I read something (in Czech or Slovak as it happens) and, without footnotes or references or quotation marks, the writer repeats the words of someone else.

As in the editorial writer yesterday in a Czech newspaper who said (words to the effect that)

What the Greek problem shows us is that we have all been living beyond our means.

Which is consistent with the omnipresent endorsement of austerity which I seem to find again and again in Czech newspapers.....

And I think of my mother struggling to care for my father, and not having enough help.
I think of me working in Central Europe because had I stayed in the USA, I would not have had either a full-time job or health insurance.

Indeed, my education was possible because my parents helped me.  Were they living beyond their means when they provided their children a college education? "Provided" because university education is not free in the USA.

The other night I mentioned the idea of full employment to a friend.  And by "full employment" I mean decent work, and not drudgery.  To which my friend replied that East Germany had full employment 

But that was precisely not the sort of work I have in mind.  Not work that makes people stupider.
Not work that leaves people feeling they have been cheated or abused.

I tried to explain to her:  I don't want to go backwards.  I don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past.  But I see no reason why full employment with decent work, interesting work, should be impossible.

I don't want to go backwards; but what I see today is that we are going backwards.  And our decline is being hastened by the wise men who dare to say that we've all been "living beyond our means".