Whose Dime?

Crowded Parking

There’s an old saying about parking on someone else’s dime. It refers to coming to a meter that someone had pulled away from before time had expired. Considered lucky.

For those of you who may have never faced a parking meter in which you inserted a coin, that was reason enough to actually carry coins around in your pocket, rather than dumping them into a dish on the counter as I now do.

The larger meaning of the saying is about benefitting from what someone before you has done.

When I was born, 1940, the world was in a horrendous economic depression. Franklin Roosevelt, to the manor born, was an unlikely candidate for addressing the woes of people who were unemployed and suffering.

But he did. The New Deal, which the Biden years tried to resurrect in some ways, and which the current administration is trying to dismantle, built a massive government structure intended to put people back to work, while rebuilding the physical structure that undergirds a nation.

I pass old intersections in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where we now live, that have brass plaques in the sidewalk, saying “Built by the WPA.” The Works Progress Administration.

The Social Security Administration was the brilliant idea of Frances Perkins, the first woman Secretary of Labor.

I walk on sidewalks, drive on highways built during Eisenhower’s tenure, and receive a monthly check from Social Security, all because of what those who have gone before me, have done.

I am parking on someone else’s dime. And I fear that one reason there hasn’t been a bigger outcry, so far, against the cruelty of this administration, is because, in the past 40 years, the efforts to support those whose livelihoods have been lost to jobs moved to cheaper markets, have languished.

And people like me, because we were already provided for, hadn’t noticed.

It’s time we did. Time to raise up our old bones, march against inhumanity, and raise our weary voices in protest against tyranny.

It’s time to feed those meters for those who come after us.