Tom Curtis re: America the Traumatized and STRS management

From Tom Curtis, January 2, 2010
Subject: 010210 Curtis To Neff & Staff, America The Traumatized

Hello Mr. Nehf,

I trust you and all of the employees of the STRS had a wonderful holiday season. Heck, why wouldn't you?

Each of you has a job where everything is simply wonderful, isn't it? The STRS facility is beyond grand, includes free parking and so many other benefits that we the stakeholders never even dreamed of having during our employment. You live in Columbus, Ohio, but feel you should be paid according to Wall Street in New York. You spend our funds to hire accounting and consulting firms to validate that you are underpaid according to some scale these firms brew up. I could go on, but what is the sense of it, you all obviously feel entitled to such for the wonderful job you do for your stakeholders. Right!

You might take the time to read the following article, because it clearly identifies why so many of your stakeholders are so angry with the STRS management. We have PTSD! This was brought on by the greedy and uncaring likes of the STRS management during the past decade.

Thomas Curtis
STRS Stakeholder & Retiree

America the Traumatized: How 13 Events of the Decade Made Us the PTSD Nation

By Adele M. Stan
Posted on December 30, 2009

It's been one helluva decade, even though we've reached the end without knowing what to call it. Some have tried "the aughts," others the "double-Os." I'm content to simply call it over. To mark its location in the great march of history, I've taken to calling it the millennial decade, after the great numerological transition it heralded. Yet for describing its character, nothing comes closer than the Decade of Trauma -- American trauma, that is.

Here in the home of the brave, we've endured a decade that shattered nearly every notion of what it meant to be an American, whether you live on the left or the right. And so we shout. Or hide. Or startle too easily.

In America today, it seems we all have a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder, as evidenced by our increasingly vitriolic political environment, where reality is denied and histrionics run riot. Anger, we're told, is the natural reaction to trauma; in people with PTSD, the anger is out of control. By that measure, the millennial decade has brought us 10 years of PTSD politics -- with no end in sight.

(Click here to view the rest of the article)