Our Creed

• We didn’t create this mess.
• But we’ll find our way through it.
• Along the way, we’ll complain if we want to.

Why We Whine

Once, long ago, “whining” was something our parents warned us against. As our dictionary describes it, whining is “complaining in a childish, undignified manner” or, even worse, “uttering a low, protracted, peevish, somewhat nasal sound.” Peevish? Undignified? There was no way we ever would have done anything as nasty or nasal as whining.

All that changed for us in early July, when Phil Gramm, onetime Republican Senator, told The Washington Times, “You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession. We have sort of become a nation of whiners.” Our ears (maybe we mean our eyes) perked up, especially when Gramm went on to add, “You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline. We’ve never been more dominant.”

A few days later, on ABC’s “This Week,” commentator George Will agreed with Gramm. “We are a nation of whiners: We are the crybabies of the Western world,” is the way he put it. “In fact, we have an extraordinarily low pain threshold.”

And that’s how The Whiner was born.

It’s fair to say that Phil and George helped us to find our calling. After all, we do have a very low threshold of pain, and we crossed that threshold quite a while ago, when people all around us started losing their jobs (oh hell, we’ve lost a few in our time as well). Shopping for gas and groceries practically became a death-in-life experience. Our retirement savings started disappearing before our eyes. Our profession (journalism) began to look more and more like an endangered species – a development that wasn’t exactly unique in companies and communities across America.

Of course we were whining! What were we supposed to do? Say “thank you” to Wall Street, Washington, and all those fat cats hiding out in their corner offices?

A recent Google search for “whiners” yielded about 2,380,000 million entries, a number that we expect (and hope) will continue to rise. Gramm himself won’t let go: He told a September meeting of The Financial Services Roundtable that “if you’re sitting here today, you’re not economically illiterate and you’re not a whiner….”

Sorry, Phil. We wouldn’t be caught dead at a meeting of The Financial Services Roundtable. We may be “economically illiterate”. We may be “crybabies.” But we didn’t exactly need a global financial meltdown to convince us that things have been screwed up for some time now.

Whiners of the world, it’s time for us to take charge of our personal finances, our jobs, the quality of our lives, the well-being of our communities, and the future of our economy. And along the way, we’ll complain just as much as we want to.