Tag: Social Security

Breezin’ Along

 

Editor’s note: This post was scheduled to appear yesterday, April 15, but a severe weather outbreak in the eastern part of the country knocked out internet service in our vicinity, delaying it’s appearance until today.

 

Sales of recreational vehicles have been setting records in the past several years as the economy continues to rebound from the Great Recession of 2008, and as Baby Boomers retire and adopt the RV lifestyle either full or part time. It is considered a lifestyle by the people who live it, people who read magazines and websites devoted to their concerns, and who share information with each other concerning their rigs and travels, both in person when they meet at campsites and on internet forums. Really it has developed beyond a lifestyle to a subculture, ever since Wally Byam introduced the Airstream trailer in the 1930s, and especially so since after World War II.


The subculture of RVers should not be confused with people who dwell in mobile homes, the majority of which are mobile in name only. Recreational vehicles as a category include teardrop trailers, pop-up campers, and self-contained vehicles with all the amenities of a complete home except a permanent yard. They range in price from $10,000 to $1 million. Most of all, unlike their cousins the mobile homes, recreational vehicles stay on the move. RVers tour the country and stop for visits that are only temporary, even if they may stretch to months.

DROPLET - beautiful
A modern teardrop camper trailer. Photo by PPILLON.

One rather surprising statistic about the recent boom in RV sales is how many of the vehicles are being bought by Millennials, the generation now in its teens, twenties, and thirties. RV ownership has typically been associated with retirees with a desire to travel, and it’s therefore not surprising that RV sales have increased as Baby Boomers, the largest generational share of the population, have reached retirement age since about 2010. There appears to be a different dynamic driving RV sales among Millennials, perhaps relating to the new fluidity in the service and internet economy, where jobs either are low paying and do not generate loyalty one way or the other, or the jobs are better paying in the technology sector and the workers can work from home, wherever that may be, whether near or far from corporate offices. In either case, for young people starting out and without a lot of funds, an inexpensive RV is adaptive to the modern economy while allowing them to travel and explore before settling down, if indeed they ever find the need to do so in the traditional sense of a house with a mortgage.

A montage of highlights from the 1953 film The Long, Long Trailer, directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, with music for the montage provided by Perry Como singing “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze”.

There are RVers, young and old, who pick up extra income by traveling to seasonal work such as at Amazon.com warehouses, and that kind of thing will probably increase as more people take to the lifestyle and require some funds beyond Social Security, pensions, or other temporary service sector work. The employers like the arrangement, particularly as applications outnumber positions, allowing them to keep wages low, and because they are typically hiring responsible individuals with a good work ethic, even if they are in many cases unprepared for extended physical labor. Once the work is ended, both parties cut loose from each other without any further commitments, and in this case that is probably salutary for all concerned. One last thing the curious may wonder about the RV lifestyle, and that is about the relative safety of being in a RV during a lightning storm, and the answer is that a recreational vehicle constructed largely of metal top to bottom will most likely conduct a lightning strike safely to ground, though it is perhaps not wise to invite disaster by parking on the highest, loneliest spot in the countryside, or near a tree that qualifies.
— Ed.

“Gypsy”, a 1982 song by Fleetwood Mac, written and sung by Stevie Nicks, may represent different things to Baby Boomers as they age. It certainly represented several things to Ms. Nicks over the years as she progressed from initial idea to performance.

 

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The Check Is in the Mail

 

At the end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, which can be dated to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, there was much talk in the West of a “peace dividend” on account of the anticipated reduction in military spending. The dividend never amounted to anything as far as average Americans were concerned, particularly since the Gulf War came along a year later, and then through the 1990s the US involved itself in flash points around the globe in its self-appointed role as world police force. In the new century, the so-called War on Terror has preoccupied this country and dragged it into middle eastern quagmires ever since 2001. That peace dividend looks like it’s never going to show up.

Counting minor skirmishes and interventions, America has been in conflict with enemies foreign and domestic for most of its history. Always in the past after a major conflict, the military would draw down its personnel and weaponry and return to a reduced level that was considered the peacetime military norm, even if small conflicts were bound to flare up. Again after World War II, it appeared the armed forces would follow the pattern and draw down, and indeed they did for several years in the late 1940s. But then the Berlin Airlift happened, heightening tensions with the Soviet Union, and more or less beginning the Cold War. Shortly after that came the Korean War. The country has pretty well been on a war footing ever since, a condition President Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 farewell address when he spoke of the military-industrial complex.

The Ladies' home journal (1948) (14763515784)
From The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1948, an article in the magazine described the trials of a young family making ends meet. Here the father balances the family books while the mother irons clothes. No doubt they juggled income and expenses in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, not billions or trillions.
In a 2012 speech at the Democratic National Convention, President Obama anticipated a peace dividend from reductions in American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, a dividend he said he would use to pay down the national debt and put Americans back to work repairing and improving infrastructure at home. Like the Cold War peace dividend, the dividend that was supposed to follow from over a decade of middle eastern wars also proved illusory. For one thing, our enormous military spending, larger than the military budgets of the next eight biggest spenders combined, has been done with borrowed money. Claiming a reduction in military spending would yield a dividend from the balance is like a homeowner taking $20 out of the household budget meant for repayment of various debts and calling it a windfall. Not only will the homeowner have to repay the $20 next month, but he or she will have to come up with an additional $20 to make up for the shortfall.

 

The other thing about this country’s huge military is that some interested parties in the military and in the defense industry like to keep it sky high. That is what Eisenhower was warning us about in 1961. These are people who, while they may not like war exactly – when it comes to actual military service, for instance, a good many of them seem to have other priorities – nonetheless have acquired a taste for the profits and power of the military-industrial complex. They are the friends of Halliburton and Blackwater, and they are in high places. They are the people who will see to it a peace dividend never gets beyond their own sticky fingers into the wallets of the American people who have paid for all their boondoggles.

From Mel Brooks’s 1974 film Blazing Saddles, with Harvey Korman and Robyn Hilton, and Mel Brooks himself as the Governor, this scene could just as well be depicting activities in the modern day Oval Office as in a fictional governor’s office in 1874. Warning: foul language.

There will not be enough money in the federal budget for fixing the nation’s infrastructure, moreover bringing it up to 21st century standards, until the obscene amounts spent on the military-industrial complex are drastically reduced. There will not be enough money for health care, for public education, for Social Security, for fighting climate change by ditching the fossil fuel industry in favor of renewable energy, for doing all the things we want to do to improve our society as a whole, and not merely improve the fortunes of the oligarchy, if we do not come to our senses regarding our budget for interfering around the world and in some unintended ways making it a more dangerous place. Throwing all that borrowed money into the war machine for the past 70 years has bought us a grand house, with a grand mortgage to match, and meanwhile the termites have been busy at the foundations.
― Vita

 

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