Thanks For Being An Adult

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Nov. 30, 2008.

Go ahead. Go ahead and be thankful for the bounty that has been laid on your table. Go ahead and be thankful for your family, friends and good neighbors. Go ahead and be thankful for your good health and the fact that that the sun still shines brightly and the grass is still green and the flowers at Longwood Gardens are still vibrant and colorful.

It is certainly all right with me if you want to give thanks for all those things. You have my absolute permission. I would not deny you your Pilgrim-given right to be thankful for those things, because they are fine things and worthy of gratitude.

But me, I am thankful for none of those things. I’m taking a pass on the bounty-family-friends-sun-grass-Longwood route. Me, I am thankful for Lawrence H. “Larry” Summers.

Yes, that Lawrence H. “Larry” Summers, the former secretary of the treasury, the former president of Harvard University, and, until recently, employed as the Charles W. Eliot Professor of Economics at the Kennedy School of Government. Mr. Summers made the papers this month when he was appointed chairman of the U.S. government’s National Economic Council by President-elect Barack Obama, and became a charter member of Obama’s team that will be given the task of pulling this great nation up by its bootstraps, financially speaking.

I am thankful for Mr. Summers and his appointment because of anything he believes in when it comes to economics. I have no sense of gratitude for whatever his past track record is, or whether he’s a supply-sider or flat-taxer or free market-supporter or trickle-up theorist. I am thankful for Mr. Summers because, frankly, he’s older than I am.

It was enough that I had to accept the fact that the man who’s going to be leading the free world in a couple of weeks just turned 47 in August. It was enough that I had to face the fact that the most powerful person on the planet not named Buffet (Warren or Jimmy) was going to be not only younger than me, but younger than my younger sister. It’s a little disconcerting to wake up to a world in which the guy they will be dedicating, “Hail to the Chief” to for the next four years is young enough that when he was in fourth grade I would have been perfectly willing, able, and justified in taking his lunch money.

But putting a guy in the Oval Office who’s younger than me by four years is the will of the people, and I stay out of arguments with the people, in the main, because there are so many more of them than me. But there I was looking at the bunch that was picked by Mr. 47-Years-Old to rescue my 401(k), and they were all post Baby Boomers. And that doesn't feel right.

If you are me, you don’t want a 47-year-old treasury secretary, like this Timothy Geither fellow. You don’t want a 49-year-old chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors, like this Christina Romer person. You want someone who’s more grown up than you are, someone you can be certain knows how to balance a checkbook, someone like your Uncle Adrian who smokes a pipe and remembers rotary telephones. You want, frankly, an adult.

And that means they have to be older than you, or me, because you are well aware that you are not an adult. You are fairly sure that you are practically just out of college, for crying out loud, even though you recognize that most recent college graduates do not have gray hair or recent colonoscopies. You are certain that only adults know how to get countries out of economic meltdowns, and people who are younger than you are, sorry to say, not adults.

So I am thankful that Mr. Summers is there in Washington to let the kids know what they can and can’t do, and how best to save the country from utter bankruptcy.

And if you want to be thankful with me, go ahead and wish him a happy birthday. Because today Lawrence Summers turns 54.