Tune My Heart

Penny had a conversation with her friend Monica this morning. I can hardly expect to plumb the depths of female-to-female conversation, but I do know that this conversation wound up with Penny inviting Monica to come over.

“But don’t try to drive up our hill,” Penny warned Monica.

“Is it really that bad?” Monica asked. Keep in mind that Monica drives a full-size van. In other words, she has a big box full of nothing sitting over her drive wheels. Our hill seems to be just about ready to vanquish freshly re-tired front-wheel-drives. Monica’s van on its baldies truly had no chance. She made it half way up the hill and then apparently drove sideways, miring herself on the left side of the driveway at some bizarre angle, pretty effectively blocking the road.

We tried dumping kitty litter and ice melt all over the place. We tried pushing with as many as four stout lads. We pushed up and down the hill. Nothing helped. Finally, we managed to back down the hill a bit, enough to get the van parallel to the driveway, clearing the way.

I tried hooking up Moby Dick, my great white whale of a pickup to the van and towing ever so carefully down the hill. We couldn’t get the beast to move out into the driveway and ran the risk of dumping it into a fairly scary ditch. We stopped. Eventually, I decided to let Monica’s husband destroy his own vehicle.

Part of me wanted to be angry with Monica for finding that funny parking spot. Because of her refusal to listen to Penny’s warning, I had to park my car way down the hill and spend over an hour trying vainly to get her out of the pits. Yeah, I wanted to be angry, but I couldn’t really do it.

You see, as stupid as her attempt to drive that big box of nothing up the hill was, I know I’m fairly likely to attempt something even stupider next week. Far too much of our lives are dedicated to ascribing blame for all sorts of stupid things that happen. Wouldn’t it be nice if we managed to instead commit ourselves to get all the stupid things sorted out. I can help you sort out your stupidity and you help me sort out mine.

What a great possibility. Rather than pointing fingers, we join hands and help stamp out stupidity. I think the idea has merit.

Yesterday, during the Super Bowl, I watched the incredibly controversial, potentially civil-liberties-shaking Tim Tebow ad for Focus on the Family. This thirty-second spot, which had caused so much hand-wringing by the chattering classes on the left, committed the horrible sin of suggesting that people might visit the Focus on the Family website. Nobody complained that GoDaddy.com urged us to go to their website for a continuation of their sexist and tacky strip-show/bad-acting festival, but the very idea that people might take the message that Tim Tebow’s mom loves him and then peruse some message from FOTF has those critics shaking in their boots.

Just before the game, Penny and I hit the local grocery store. There, I saw the current cover of People magazine, where more hand-wringing is going on. As it turns out, the most fecund of Americans, the Duggers, are experiencing health problems with their nineteenth child. “How many children is too many?” the magazine asks.

Both of these stories put the lie to the falsehood of “choice.” The educated elite trumpet their notion of choice, yet they don’t extend that privilege to others. What they really mean is that we should all have the choice to hear the messages that they find appropriate. What they really mean is that women should have the right kill their children but not to choose to have an unlimited number of children.

I wish these types would be honest. Their message of choice is really one that says they know better. They know what Focus on the Family is really thinking and trying to accomplish. They know who should be allowed to procreate. They just know.

The President proposed his new budget yesterday, suggesting that the United States spend $3.8 trillion while taking in roughly $2.2 trillion for a proposed deficit of $1.56 trillion. That’s $5,200 in borrowing for every human being in the country and over $12,000 in spending for each of us. Simply put, that’s a chunk of change.

Whenever the subject of the budget deficit comes up, you can’t listen to the various slivers of the chattering class for long before you catch some esteemed economist, political thinker, or other person with a nice briefcase pontificating on how the budget deficit really isn’t nearly as significant as we like to be believe it is. Typically, these types will argue in historic context, comparing borrowing today with borrowing during World War II, or they’ll remind us to view the deficit as a percentage of GDP, or they’ll simply cluck knowingly and suggest that the unwashed masses don’t understand the finer points of economic theory.

Let me tell you what I understand. The United States is borrowing vast, incomprehensible, sums of money and we’re borrowing it, increasingly, from off shore, from a source that cannot be assumed to have this nation’s best future in mind. Let’s just imagine an analogy.

Let’s imagine that I am running a deficit on my hog operation at Shamayim Hill. We’ll say that I’m spending $1,200 while bringing in $1,000, financing the missing $200 by borrowing from the First Commercial Bank of Bates City. I do this in order to expand my operation. Next year, I have revenues of $2,000 while spending $2,400, expanding again. This isn’t a terrible business model. So long as I can continue to keep revenues growing fast enough, this sort of borrowing makes business sense. And in a hog operation, when the market turns downward, I can always send more hogs to slaughter in order to pay the bills.

But what happens if I’m borrowing not to expand my domain but just to keep my head above water. Even if my revenue stream promises to continue to support my debt habit–a fool’s promise that the housing bubble should have given the lie to–I simply cannot keep this up. Why?

What happens when the First Commercial Bank decides to stop loaning me money? Bad things. I either have to sell hogs, find a new cash cow, or play chicken with bankruptcy. In any case, life is severely disrupted.

China, between August 2008 and August 2009, bought over $200 billion in U.S. debt. I’m sure Mr. Bernanke, Geithner, and company are expecting Beijing to step up to the buffet for a similarly huge helping of U.S. paper this year. So what happens if the Chinese approach the auction and say, “No thank you”? Do we sell hogs? Can we find a new cash cow? Or do we play chicken?

Simple economic theory tells us that when demand diminishes, price falls. In this case, we have to pay more to borrow the same amount of money.   Could the U.S. find buyers for that much more of our fattened hogs? What happens if the cost of borrowing rises by a point or two?

The next time, you hear some economist claiming that the deficit doesn’t matter, rest assured they somehow have their snout in the trough of government over-spending. And when your snout’s in the trough, you’re easy pickings for predators.

Tuesday is my day to work from home. My highly intellectual and academic activities on this Tuesday included . . . Okay, aside from doing a bit of email response, I didn’t do anything academic. Instead, Penny and I went to Independence, to the home of Jenny, a friend who has moved in with her son and daughter-in-law. Actually, it was Jenny who sold us Shamayim Hill. Today, we drove the truck to town and ransacked her property for things we could use. Having cleared out everything she wanted to keep, she gave us the green light to help ourselves.

We started by loading up the truck with a dozen privacy-fence panels, six foot by eight foot, and a bunch of 4×4s. We hauled that load over to Emily’s house and then headed back. A couple of dog runs were our main quarry. We spent well over an hour dismantling the things, fighting with thick grass that had grown among the chain link fencing, struggling to remove screws, and cutting through dozens of plastic ties. Eventually, we loaded the dismantled runs along with cabinets, shelves, and a number of other things. We managed to get them home without any casualties and unloaded.

From there, I headed out with the chainsaw and started cutting wood. I culminated the day’s work by splitting several wheelbarrow’s worth of wood. When I returned to the house, Penny diplomatically sent me to the shower. Fair enough.

Why am I boring you with the details of the day? Basically, I’m slung out here on the couch, zoning in front of the TV, and I’m tired. My hands and arms are reliving the movements, the strains, and the lifting of the day.

It’s good to be tired at the end of the day. My friends who work in construction and other physical pursuits might laugh at this comment or even strongly disagree, but I hold to the idea. When you feel the effects of the day’s work in your muscles, you remember that work. You appreciate it. When you sit in a desk chair all day, doing most of your heavy lifting on a computer screen, it’s easy enough to let that slip from your consciousness. Work and non-work can blur pretty easily when they look and feel so much alike. And really, how different is a Facebook update from a business email.

God has been good to me, giving me a profession that allows me to use my mind, that grants me the flexibility to cut firewood on Tuesdays. But God has also been good in allowing me to exert myself and to feel the effects of my day in stiff fingers and sore thighs.

Olivia and I went for a walk today. In the course of our ramble, we made our way past the scant remains of several long-ago buildings. From the best digging I can do, our property has been farmed since about 1840, when Colonel James Watson assembled a large chunk of land and farmed it with slaves until the end of the Civil War. It was twenty years ago, according to the forester I talked with, that these acres ceased to be grazed. Two decades ago, cattle munched on every bit of green that wasn’t thorny–hence the many mature hedge and honey locusts on these hills–and that wasn’t too big to wrap cow lips around–hence the scattered century-old oaks along the ridge. I can imagine that those wandering bovines managed to keep the place fairly well cropped. And today?

Today, the woods have made a good effort at recovering. No, the hills haven’t completely filled with oaks but the canopy is largely restored. The cedars and smooth sumac will, in time, give way to more desirable species. Meanwhile, the foundations of the old barn and silo look ready to last another century. The old root cellar, probably dating back to Col. Walton’s day, remains open open for business.

Still, these human-built artifacts don’t make all that much of a mark on the land. We could haul out a truck-full of rusting metal and have the place look pretty presentable. I think then of the impact that commercial development leaves. When you pave a few acres and drive pilings down fifty feet, those scars don’t fade away in a couple of decades. This isn’t intended as an anti-development rant. The problem I have, though, is when people clear ground, re-route drainage, pave areas, and erect buildings without a great deal of thought. In Southeast Kanasas City, a large shopping area, almost completely abandoned now, sits like a sort of American Forum along its acres of useless parking. The shopping mall that used to anchor that area has now been demolished at a colossol cost, but a ring of big-box stores remains. The area is less than thirty years old. Who decided that this sort of development would be wise and worthwhile? How long would it take the forests and meadows of Missouri to reclaim that parcel? It won’t be in my lifetime.