Posts Tagged → bank account
America as a garden or a bank account
With “Gardening Month” June behind us, our backyard gardens are starting to go into overdrive, and really produce the produce. The most popular garden items are zucchini and tomatoes, followed by cucumbers, green beans, other species of squash, lettuce, and herbs. Our own garden is well watered and well fertilized. Last year we put in over 800 pounds of horse manure and 160 pounds of lime, as well as a lot of home-made compost. This spring we put in about 100 pounds of our own back yard compost and another 160 pounds of lime, well-tilled deeply into the loam.
Every year we rotate the locations where the garden plants are placed. Repeated planting in the same spot results in both insect pests and fungi becoming settled there, and a constant problem. Well do I remember visiting Kokomo, Indiana, in the mid 1990s. I was there as a representative of the US EPA. We held a public hearing on the use of an anti-anthracnose/fungicide that posed some health risks, but also was saving the butts of the local and regional farmers. Kokomo County is where a huge portion of America’s summertime cantaloupes had been grown for a very long time, and the diseases attacking cantaloupes had become hard-baked into the soil.
I learned then and there not to keep planting the same plants in the same exact locations every growing season. Rather, rotate them around to different parts of the garden every season.
With daily watering, routine plant maintenance (e.g. zucchini plants should have the old bottom leaves removed every couple days, and checked daily for vine borer eggs) like lightly spraying soapy water onto garden plants and weeds around the garden edge, and regular harvesting, like a lot of other American back yard gardens, ours should be able to produce a lot of organic food for our family to eat all year long.
There is also a refreshing symmetry to the garden of having put in a lot of work on it, and then reaping a lot of benefits from it. Someone should write a book about gardening, traditional human values, and personal development. One thing I do see is a garden as a symbol of America, or as a bank account.
As currently run by corrupt career politicians in both political parties, America is not being well tended or maintained as a garden must be kept.
Said another way, if America is a bank account, it has not had any deposits made into it for a long time, and it is way over-drawn.
And no, I am not (yet) advocating for the garden to be watered by the blood of tyrants and patriots alike. But a garden must be watered, and its weeds must be pulled, if its plants are to grow and bear fruit. A bank account must have deposits if it is to have anything to withdraw from it when one requires money to buy food or clothing. There are a thousand individual public policy corolaries to the nation-as-garden theme.
Why is it that America is not being cared for and dutifully tended as a garden, or even as a basic child’s bank account, by the people who run it? Why is America being treated as a place where people, any people, can just take take take and keep on taking, as if there is no end to the garden produce or the money?
Yes, I think one political party is more at fault for this failure, but there is no ignoring that most of the Republicans have committed almost all of the same failures as their opponents, only just less so, because the Republicans are not as competent at purposeful mismanagement. Believe me, if they could do what the Democrats do, the Republicans surely would.
So why are American voters not demanding that their elected representatives follow really basic values and practices for maintaining America? Why is legislation that guarantees that only American citizens can vote being torpedoed? Why would elected representatives or American citizens want voter fraud? Voter fraud means that the garden will die! There will be no democracy or freedom to enjoy! There will be no money in the bank when we need it most!
Squash vine borer eggs on a zucchini leaf. Just tear or snip off the part of the leaf these are on. Check for them daily. These could be called illegal border jumping aliens, unjustifiably siphoning off our hard work.
Help! My bank account self-identifies as a billionaire
Although I had put only twelve hundred bucks in it, my bank account recently decided to start self-identifying as a billionaire.
It is true that there were not billions of dollars in the account, but that didn’t stop it from saying that there should be, and, even more important, it didn’t stop it from SPENDING like it had a billion dollars.
We had a talk, the bank account and I.
We spoke about responsibility, restraint, honesty, objectivity, working for what we want, embracing life as it is and not as we wish it would be, and so on.
I mean, come on, Bank Account, I am not a billionaire and I cannot place a billion dollars in you to cover your personal feelings and desires and all the costs associated with satiating them.
Unfortunately, the bank account then went on a wild spending spree, which I ended up being on the hook for, and which I had no money to pay for.
Our next talk turned to angry accusations.
What can I say, I was frustrated. I expected better behavior from the bank account, and I expected reasoning with simple math and logic to work. Dollars and cents. What money goes out must be covered by money coming in.
What the bank account said in response made no sense to me, but I had to accept it.
The bank account called me a bigot, and mean, and hurtful, and disrespectful of its most personal wishes.
This shocked me, and made me question myself. Was I really such a bad person for insisting on the most rudimentary good behavior?
I wasn’t sure where to go with the relationship as the bills were stacking up, and the bank told me that ultimately I was responsible for the behavior of my own bank account, so I would have to pay the bills in the end.
Believe it or not, things got worse.
When I opened the bank account, it was just me spending the money that was in it. After the bank account self-identified as a billionaire it had developed a taste for luxury items.
And then, because of feelings once again, my bank account decided it was against the simple safeguards meant to keep others from spending the money in the account.
Even worse, the bank account developed a taste for financial largess to others that bore no resemblance to the twelve hundred bucks I had originally deposited, much less the billion dollars it pretended to! Before I knew it the bank account was partying hard with all kinds of new friends, and letting them withdraw money that they wanted to spend on themselves.
That kind of generosity with my money made the bank account feel awfully good about itself, and it made others like it more than boring, crabby old me, always whining about balancing expenses with income.
When I went to the bank to complain, I was told that the bank account was in my name, and although it had obviously gone off the deep end, I was going to have to pay all the bills in the end.
So I decided to self-identify as a hermit, and I abandoned the bank account. I just withdrew from the relationship altogether. I couldn’t afford it.
Last I heard, the bank account still self-identified as a billionaire and was still living large, with all kinds of hangers-on and new-new friends, all with expensive tastes, living it up every day and night. The bills are piling up, and I have no idea who is going to pay them.
Tinker Toys & Lincoln Logs
Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs are kids’ toys, used to teach elementary building concepts to little kids. The laws of physics are a core component of those lessons.
Apparently these basic rules have been forgotten by a huge portion of Americans when they are applied to building a nation.
America provides more liberty, freedom, and opportunity to more individuals from more walks of life than any other nation. The way it does that is through a carefully constructed and delicately balanced arrangement of written laws and social norms.
No house of cards, America is nonetheless like any human society. It’s relatively fragile, easily upset, prone to mistakes.
So what is up with the Black Lives Matter anarchists and their many enablers carefully positioned around the racist movement’s periphery. Don’t these people recognize that if you make war on all police officers, whose job it is to keep our society from literally falling apart, the basic underpinnings can come out?
Students of history wonder aloud about Nazi Germany, how such a refined and materially successful culture fell so quickly, to be replaced by the lowest savagery. Well, societal failure can happen anywhere. It can happen here in America, too, if serious citizens do not work hard to teach to newcomers and next generations the basics of what it takes to make this place run so well.
Instead, one political party is dedicated to a culture of anarchy, false grievance, and Santa Claus – like gifting of everything from cell phones to houses, gratis the over-taxed American taxpayer. BLM has had the backing of Obama and most of the members of his party.
This means one of two major American parties is dedicated to America failing. Perhaps this is the “transformation” Obama spoke of, but let’s face it: This is a recipe for wall to wall catastrophe.
America is like a bank account. You only get to take from it what you put into it. A culture of taking, taking, taking and demanding and foot-stomping is a giant withdrawal from the bank account. To the point where the account is becoming overdrawn.
Put another way, America is like a carefully arranged assortment of Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys. Once the bottom most foundational principles are removed, the whole thing will crash down.
Please don’t take America for granted. She can only sustain so many overdrafts and big withdrawals from her account before she fails. Lend a hand and keep the underpinnings held together. Vote for the only presidential candidate who can and will do that, Donald Trump.
And yes, I think it is sad that he is the smartest, most capable kid in the playroom. But that is the fact. Trump is not arguing against the laws of physics