Griping About $8 A Month – Sheesh!

Getting a haircut last week, I heard a lady two chairs over and old enough to know better, grousing about the increase in local property taxes in Durham. She said it at the volume people use when they expect everyone to agree.

Guess what, most of us are just too embarrassed to refute something so ignorant.

I didn’t hear her quip about the cost of haircuts which had also increased as most things do through any given year. But she grumped about a measly $8 a month increase property taxes ($200,000 house) which haven’t been raised in years.

Government as one of our most revered presidents said is the “instrument of our united purpose.” It is the vehicle through which we do things for the common good and by common we mean everyone including ourselves.

We all want our home values to increase, right? And that requires clean water, waste removal and disposal, education and training, inspections to ensure public health and that the neglect of others won’t pull our values down, police and fire protection, good roads, convenient transit, healthy neighborhoods, a thriving economy, preservation of quality of life etc.

And the $8 is spread over all of those services….Oh my, what torture.

But a good portion of us appear so spoiled and/or ignorant as to believe they can have all of those things without paying for them. Or that the cost of those services should somehow never increase, although we want our benefit, our services and our quality of life to do nothing but go up.

Some of us are so arrogant as to believe we’ve earned everything we have by sole virtue of our rugged independence which infers that someone who doesn’t have them didn’t earn them.

“But for the grace of God” is a saying designed for these fools.

You get what you pay for. Period. And we pay for safety nets just in case…nothing is free, even freedom.

So buck up and pay the freight for the things that we can’t do individually or on which we cannot rely on non-profits or private enterprise alone.

If you need to gripe in public, gripe about all those folks dodging their taxes or not paying their fair share. That should be something we can all agree is wrong.