Hard work is not enough these days
I was born in the early ’50s. My father was a fireman and my mother worked in several places, ultimately retiring from the phone company. My father usually had a second job. They worked too much, but while we lived an unglamorous life in a “three-decker,” there was always plenty of food, gas in the car to go to the beach, and new clothes at the start of the school year.
Things were pretty good. Neither of my parents had an education, but it seemed that there was paying work aplenty, and if you hustled you could live well, far beyond precarity.
If you were to have transported our family forward in time to the present, things would have been very different. Each of the three jobs my parents held between them would have paid less in real terms, and the work is less plentiful now too, so they would have brought in much less. They would have worked themselves mercilessly just to have enough to buy food and clothes and then still they would have struggled.
My hardworking parents might very well in today’s world have wound up in that category of “takers” — denigrated and detested by icons of politics, business, and finance.
DEAN POIRIER, DULUTH
Money biggest influence at Olympics
I look at professional golf and tennis — two sports that arguably should never have been included in the Olympic Games, and can’t help noticing the difference in attitude to the Rio Olympics. The top four male golf pros in the world are not going, citing concerns about the Zika virus. The top four male tennis players are going to Rio, citing support of their sport and the Games. Ironically, the top women golfers (who possibly are more at risk from the virus) are all competing in Rio.
Could it be that money, and not the remote threat of the Zika virus, has influenced the male golfers’ decisions?
IAN SHAW, CUMMING
