Working On A Dream (Bruce Springsteen)

Thursday, March 19, 2009-11:00 A.M.

Good morning, readers from blogger.com, Facebook, MySpace, and ComedySoapbox. I'm delighted that you chose to take a few minutes to read me and see what's on my mind.

In the past few years that I've been putting fingers to keyboard, I've attempted to chronicle my journey in the world of standup comedy and professional entertainment. At key points in my life, I've deviated from that path to share personal musings, recognize departed family and friends, and discuss current events of interest.

I've always attempted to keep a balance; to provide as much information as possible to give a real look at what my life on the road is like, but not so much that it becomes a boring exercise. Sometimes I manage the task quite handily, and sometimes you read about my roast beef sandwich that I made in my hotel room after a show.

My life has always seemed to have been chopped up into four-year increments; I do something for four years, and then move on. I spent four years in college, four years managing the Comix Cafe, and now toured the country for eight years in the comedy clubs. I guess I enjoyed this part of the ride so much, I did two tours. And now I'm starting what I have to assume is another four-year stint hosting the college game show "Dash For Dollars."

I'm absolutely loving it, and each college that I visit brings a new challenge. Some schools are bigger than others, some are situated in densely populated urban settings, others out in the country among the cornfields. Some colleges provide huge performance venues, others have access to more intimate spaces. I welcome the challenge that each school provides, and work according to the specifications.

The thing that they all have in common is the trust they put in me to provide a great show, and I work very hard to make sure that I deliver on that promise. The students are the stars of the show, not me, and I try not to forget that. I deliver the show with the promise of fair play, sportsmanship, and the idea that a positive attitude will be rewarded, and not just greed. And some audiences are better at accepting that than others. I roll with the punches, do my job and let the chips fall where they may. A roller coaster has to creek slowly up a hill to provide the rush of the plunge down the other side.

The great advantage that this new opportunity has afforded me is that I'm working constantly, doing colleges mostly during the week, and leaving weekends open for club work, which I still enjoy. The disadvantage is that the time I've been allowed to spend at home to reconnect with my family and decompress has shrunk, and made those moments more precious. But a curious side effect has also taken hold, and that is that I'm absorbing even more news now than I used to. There's a great deal of down time on the road, and I've got all the tools at my disposal to absorb a ridiculous amount of information. In the vehicle, I have satellite radio, and now that XM and Sirius have merged, there's about 250 channels to surf through. Every hotel has some sort of cable package, and my laptop provides constant connection to the internet, which I access for what seems like every waking moment. Today, they pushed a USA Today under my door. I literally can't stop the information from flowing.

With all that being said, I come to my point; I finally understand why our economy collapsed. From what I understand, the problem stemmed from the housing market. Banks were writing mortgages at sub-prime rates, which allowed people to purchase homes they couldn't afford. At the same time, housing prices were going through the roof because everyone could basically get the financing they needed to purchase the homes. As demand went up and the supply stayed constant, the price went up; simple economics. Then the banks, knowing that many of these mortgages were going to wind up in foreclosure, went to companies like AIG to insure the loans, which was smart. The problem was that AIG was insuring the loans at a much greater ratio than their actual asset ability to provide. They would then bundle these debts as securities and made them available to investors, and of course, they weren't worth the paper they were printed on because they were unsustainable debts backed by money that just wasn't there.

So when regular working folks who had these mortgages for homes they couldn't possibly afford started defaulting, the banks started collecting on the insurance of these bad mortgages, and the whole house of cards fell down. AIG failed, which meant that the banks holding all of these bad mortgages failed, and the investors who plowed money into AIG lost their investments, which in many cases represented their retirement funds.

There are other factors in play, and I don't have a background in economics so I can't really comment, but it seems that the whole mess is predicated on a few simple factors; first, that Americans couldn't pass up the idea that they could live in a house beyond their means to maintain, and second, that the banks couldn't pass up the profit that they would make writing mortgages far and above the business that they would normally do, and not see it as a risk because they were able to get the loans insured. And there was no regulation going on at any point of the cycle.

People who know me know that I would have no problem laying the blame for this squarely at the feet of the Republican President of the last eight years, but there is essentially no one person who can shoulder the blame. President Calvin Coolidge famously said, "The business of America is business." Capitalism should exist for the purpose of individuals making money, providing a comfortable lifestyle, allowing ones self to raise a family, and to secure a retirement free of worry. The social contract, though, is that money should be earned, and be based on something; usually the sweat of one's brow or the product of a factory or field. That's all there is on the playing field, folks....goods and services. Products and labor. And when we start shifting around air, we blow up a balloon that has no choice but to pop.

But who can blame the financial sector for contriving such a scheme? We don't have goods and services anymore. We allow China to make all of our consumer goods, and we ship our jobs to Mexico and India and anywhere else we can, favoring the 60 cents a day worker over our American minimum wage which stifles a corporation's profitability. So there's nothing left to do but trade in money, and bundled debt disguised as securities. And watch the stock market drop like a rock that moments ago was skipping along the surface of the lake.

We need a way out. The Republicans cry "tax cuts!" but how much of a tax cut could you provide for someone to keep them in their home? To rebuild their shattered nest egg? To allow a company to start hiring workers again and provide them an income with which to start anew? I personally don't think it's possible.

I think the answer is that we have to start making things again. We need to open factories, hire workers here in the United States, and start elevating the middle class...because the middle class is the class that actually consumes the goods.

I don't know the ins-and-outs of farm subsidies, but I do know that there's less food in the world than there are people who need to be fed. Why are we not producing as much food as possible? Instead of sending cash overseas in the form of foreign aid (which I believe we should be doing, absolutely) why are we not sending boatloads of grain? There are probably factors I'm not considering like spoilage, cost of distribution, etc, but again, I don't claim to be an expert. I'm just a man crying out in the wilderness looking for answers.

Can we start working again? Can we reclaim our American dream?

How about this....health care seems to be on a lot of people's minds, and rightfully so. The state of health care in this country is unsatisfactory by anyone's standards except for perhaps the pharmaceutical manufacturers and insurance agencies. Every doctor I've spoken to (not enough for a sample, but enough to make me say this without hesitancy) is in favor of a single-payer health care system. Preventative medicine seems to be the area in which we particularly lag in this country. And that means that illnesses, ailments and conditions don't get treated until they are in the drastic stages, and they become more difficult to cure. How much do we waste by allowing people to get that sick? And how much does overall production suffer due to lost time on the job by workers who are out sick? Has anyone calculated that cost?

And of course, all of this speculation falls on the shoulders of one man; President Obama. I trust President Obama, and I think a lot of Americans do, too. Currently, his popularity is riding around 60%, but even that number is moving downward as impatient Americans look for answers and results. He understands that in order for us to dig our way out of the hole, we need shovels. And right now, the government is in the best position to provide those shovels.

Obama's plan at this point seems to be a carbon copy of Franklin Roosevelt's plan, to start building infrastructure (which to be fair, we do need) and creating jobs. We almost need a Marshall plan to rebuild America much as Japan was rebuilt after World War II. There are critics of Obama's plan, to be sure, and the rhetoric seems to center around the idea that "You can't spend your way out of a recession." The criticism shrivels a bit when you change the word "spend" into the word "invest." Building safe bridges, levies, dams, roads and highways is an expenditure, to be sure, but it is an investment. Just as having up-to-date schools to educate and train the next generation of Americans is also an expenditure, it is no less an investment.

My father lived through the Great Depression, and now it looks as though I'll get the opportunity to do the same. And I've decided that perhaps this is something that America needs right now. In times of trouble, we pull together and help each other, we share what we have and we lift each other up. We speak more softly and we listen a little more carefully, because we're all in this together. And we embody the great American spirit that all things are possible if we stick together, join hands, contribute our talents to the pool and push in the same direction.

We need hope, not despair. We need to roll up our sleeves and start working again. And we need each other.

There is an old English proverb that goes like this; "Fear knocked at the door and Faith answered, and lo, no one was there."

Have faith in God, each other, and yourself. We can do this. And if you know someone who needs encouragement, please send this along as a text or a link.

Let's get to work.

Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY