Spare Change

They're out there, in uniform, in the middle of busy intersections — ten- and twelve-year-old kids — scrambling between cars with their coffee tins, asking for donations. There's an adult or two around, and the tin cans say [SomeTown] Softball, or Cheerleading, or Track.

I'm sorry if these are your kids, or kids you know, but get real. Charity and good will is one thing, but when did we, as a society, have become such fat, lazy slobs as to think that we're each entitled to payment simply for being alive? And what the hell kind of adult oversees these "fund-raising" efforts? Why teach kids to spare for change, to beg — to be satisfied with living on the dole rather than working? If these adults don't have enough moxie to organize a simple car wash or bake sale, should they really be supervising kids at all?

Hey, here's a free idea. Maybe we could encourage those kids to become the writers and thinkers of the future by starting an empowerment project in which they write a newspaper, publish it, and sell it to us. Oh yeah, that's right . . . much smarter (and far more needy) people are already doing that successfully.

I grew up in a town a lot like the one in which I now live. Some folks were well-off, and some were not. But no one begged for money. They worked for it. Youth soccer teams made money the same way Smith Barney claimed to: they "EARNed it." There were car washes and bake sales and raffles. Donors got something for their trouble — and, more importantly, we kids learned the lessons of hard work. If we didn't sell enough raffle tickets or brownies, or wash enough cars, or find a sponsor, well then, we didn't get new uniforms.

A while back, AKL and I took a long bike ride on a hot, sunny day. On our way out of town, and again on our way back an hour or two later, we stopped and bought 25 cent cups of lemonade from a 7-year-old girl. She was new to the world of business, and had a little help from her mom, but that girl learned a few things that Saturday. She learned the necessity of simple math in the real world (two cups of lemonade times 25 cents, out of one dollar). Maybe her mom taught her what "overhead" is, maybe not. I know for certain she learned about the value of return customers, and what "tips" are. And she sold a lot of lemonade that day.

Seems simple enough. You want cash? You work for it.

We have become irresponsible with our money. We buy lottery tickets instead of groceries (because, surely we're all owed a big payday). And every day we open our mail boxes to more offers for another credit card we can't afford. Maybe we even get the new card to pay off the debt on an old one. And if we are fortunate enough to own a home, what do we do? We take out a home equity loan (because certainly, we deserve "free" money) to pay off our credit card debt.

But to what end? Credit is based on — often foolish — optimism: that life will be better tomorrow, belief in "the American dream," and the steadfast notion that we will one day soon have more money than we have now. Don't get me wrong, I have lived paycheck to paycheck, and I'm very fortunate to not live that way now. Yet too many of us live far beyond our means (and, of course, we're encouraged to at every turn).

It's time to rein it in. And our kids too. (There's simply no way I'm ever dressing up daughters RK and E-O in some goddamn uniform and asking them to go hassle shoppers heading into the grocery store.) Thank god our fearless leaders in Washington — like the supervisory team parents noted above — have our education and well-being in mind, and aren't leading us down a road paved in debt.

Yeah, thank god for that.