LA Progressive

People are being murdered in Ukraine to fulfill the pathological needs of a dictator. We watch as children lie dead beside the road, as apartment buildings are bombed, as old women stumble over rubble trying to escape the shelling with their little dogs.

“How terrible!” we say.

“How awful!”

“Someone should do something!”

And then our gas prices start to rise as we cut Russia off from one of its major funding sources.

We care, we insist, but not enough to put up with that.

It’s easy to criticize those complaining as shallow and selfish, and some of them undoubtedly are, but most of us are drowning in blood and oil as it is because our own government is led largely by egocentric oligarchs, too.

Financial advisers often ask, “Are you putting enough away to retire comfortably?”

One of my employers confided his personal worries to me once during his lunch break. “Do you think I can retire on a million dollars?”

I put a whopping $25 aside every two weeks. I’m not going to say how much I have in savings, but it’s considerably less than a million dollars.

And I retire in two years, the moment I turn sixty-two.

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