by Rick Albertson

Teresa Heinz Kerry posted a special Mother's Day message this morning as a Daily Kos diary that included this YouTube video. The DKos diary comments thread that follows is rich and evocative, and she encourages all of us to participate and contribute our ideas, as noted in this transcript of her video message there:


Hello, I am Teresa Heinz, I’m married to John Kerry, and I want to wish you a very happy Mothers Day.

I want to share with you a concern and a hope which I share with my husband John Kerry, which is the economic wellbeing of women and their retirement. It’s not a sexy issue, when you think of it, but it is a very basic issue.

Now, there are a lot of statistics about women in quote the Golden Years. Having two-thirds of the face of poverty, be a poverty of women in the Golden Years. They’re not so Golden!

Women, because they are caregivers, have babies, take care of sick parents, etc., have a cumulative loss of about $650,000 in their lifetimes. Young people have an awful lot of expenses. And no one ever talks to them or emphasizes the value of savings.

Now we’re focusing a lot also on young women, and young men for that matter, anybody, this works for anybody, to make them understand the value of savings, and that if you save $10 a month, or $20 a month, or whatever it is you can save, it really matters. Compound interest does work.

And savings aren’t there, so you have all these people living just on Social Security, it’s not enough, $11,000, $12,000, that’s crazy. And then you hear about people eating catfood.

So the campaign really showed me that what we were dealing with was life in America as it is today for the reasons that it is. And so what you and I have to do, is to figure out, send me at teresa@heinzoffice.org., send me any ideas or any questions that you have that you think might be valuable to share with others, to put in our e-book.

And I’d love to invite you to look at our e-book at womensretirement.org.

I invite you to think of your contribution to Mothers Day as truly thoughtful, beyond the pretty, which unfortunately like everything else, gets very commercialized. But think about this, share maybe the little booklet or the e-book with your mother or with your sisters, with your co-workers, with your women workers, with your daughters.

Being thoughtful.

Preparing.

I mean that’s what women do best so I think we have to help them do that well.

Now we have Mothers Day coming up on Sunday. I might see my husband for part of the day because he’s got to campaign, he’s up for re-election in Massachusetts. What is it that I would like to be able to have and to have other women have which is, calmness, a feeling of security, that they’re not going to have to eat catfood, that they’re going to be able to take preventative medicine for heart disease.

Just normal life quality, humanity, that’s all we want.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this chat, and I’ll be back to talk about other issues that affect women primarily.

Happy Mothers Day.