Marty: I’m feeling typically American again

For decades I had thought of myself as typically American, but I
recently discovered that I’m was being left out of many typical
American things
– things that just do not apply to me. 
For decades I had thought of myself as typically American, but I recently discovered that I’m was being left out of many typical American things – things that just do not apply to me. 

For instance, I certainly can understand that people can grow apart, but when I was typically American is was important for parents to try to stay together, peaceably, until the kids were grown up. Not anymore, now it’s more important for everyone do their own thing as soon as they feel the need. Naturally, the kids from broken homes have more problems and need more help and that costs a lot of money. Then they make broken homes of their own and so on, forever.

Serious drug and alcohol abuse is more typically American now, 180,000 DUI arrests a year in California alone, teenagers binge drinking (I’m not talking about a beer or two on Saturday night, I’m talking about getting totally blasted often and drinking every day), junkies filling up the shelters, hospitals and clinics and worse, the morgue. Of course, all this leads to more domestic violence, more disease and more wasted lives. I never was a teetotaler or a prude; I just never got into it that deep. Naturally, this has a great cost to society, treatment is expensive as is public assistance so these dysfunctional folks can get the support they need.

Many Americans, corporations and government entities can no longer manage their finances. Individuals buy homes they cannot afford because they think they “deserve it,” they never save, they run up huge credit card bills and buy on impulse – they want the good life and they want it right now. Corporations and the government make risky investments and never think about the downside. Some teens have cell phone bills that could feed a family of four for a month. Prom expenses costs more than a semester of college.

I thought typical Americans always put something away for a rainy day and lived within their means even if it meant giving things up. Now individuals, corporations and governments need bailouts on everything – houses, cars, personal debt and public obligations. 

At any one time, more than three-percent of adult Americans are either in prison or on parole. They commit crimes with little thought of the consequences and then they leave it to society to clean up their mess. This is one of our most expensive problems; it costs a fortune to run the prison system, but if we turn these criminals loose, who will fix the damage their criminality will do? Somehow, like so many typical Americans of the previous generation, I just never got around to going to prison.

You get the gist of it; we are told that typical Americans are in trouble up to their eyebrows.

The litany of woes that applies to typical Americans goes on and on and since almost none of them apply to me, I started feeling very untypical and that’s where Congress and the administration came to my rescue.

Crack government researchers noticed there was a small, but significant, number of Americans like me who were feeling left out because they just did not have enough problems. So they looked for, and found, a way to bring us back into the major group – they decided to designate us as the ones who will be required to pay to clean this all up. It worked; I’m feeling like a typical American again – taxed to the max.

Marty Richman is a Hollister resident. His column runs Tuesdays. Reach him at

cw*****@ya***.com











.