cost of life

in my city salad days (more my bacobits days), i paid a third of our $125 a month rent, drank 35 cent pickwick ales, enjoyed 99 cent lunches, and drove cab at night. my college tuition had been $200 a semester. work all summer; save enough for a university year. bob dole was running for vice president.

students, let us compare and contrast.

now: average equivalent urban rent - $1,750.
beer: five bucks a pop.
state school: $8,000 per semester.

the iraq war will easily cost 1.25 trillion dollars. that's billions of months of rent at my 1976 rate.

the gray lady reports last week that the average manhattan hedge fund manager's take last year topped $350 million.

the average.

a subway ride away, the bronx remains the poorest urban county in america. throughout gotham 1.5 million live below the poverty level. a poverty level that is set insultingly low. hundreds upon hundreds of thousands receive food stamps. hundreds of thousands more need them.

this fiscal straight jacket tightens with crushing inevitability, a python. day after day, dime by dime, hunger to hunger, the empire of money crushes human futures.

over a single generation we've slid from pride to penury.

what's a life worth?

andrew bacevich found out. bacevich is from a military family, fought in vietnam. he is a professor at boston university. his twenty seven year old son, also named andrew, volunteered to fight in iraq. professor bacevich has consistently written against the iraq war.

last week professor bacevich received the news no parent should receive. his son had been killed.

professor bacevich writes, "memorial day orators will say that a g.i.'s life is priceless. don't believe it. i know what value the u.s. government assigns to a soldier's life: i've been handed the check. it's roughly what the yankees will pay roger clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month."