The well is dry
Published 12:45 pm Friday, August 24, 2012
Summer in these United States has been very interesting. We have seen tragic scenes like the massacre in Colorado unfold. The news has been dominated by something the media calls an election campaign. We have watched politicians trample the personal constitutionally protected freedoms of American citizens, but, thankfully, we have had the weather to talk about. It has been real, even if the descriptions of our weather as offered by the media have bordered on science fiction.
You should not be surprised that there are parallels to be drawn because the same circus ringmasters that control political news are controlling the information we receive about our weather. The very hot, dry weather that has tortured the earth in the midwest has been described in a manner that many believe we are in the end times. I don’t want to make light of the harm caused by the drought, but there is absolutely nothing to be gained by using extreme terms or statements to make the impact of the drought appear worse.
I grew up on a farm in Kentucky, and we saw our share of crop affecting weather extremes. The countywide water systems that are depended on today did not exist. We had cisterns that captured rainwater that ran off the roofs of the buildings on our farm. Many of the local farmers depended on wells. The concept of a well running dry during a drought became more than just a concept. Occasionally it became a life affecting reality. I don’t want you to think that life was threatened by a dry well. Life required us to live with a water shortage.
Resistance was futile, the dry well always won. You went elsewhere to get your water. The notion of the Saturday night bath often became a water shortage enforced reality. People usually chose to ignore the dry well problem they could not solve. Until the rains came and the water flowed in the well, water shortage was a problem that became a reality of life. You learned to live with it.
We have a problem today that is not unlike a dry well. It is financial. I can’t remember any time in my life that we have seen so many local governments choose to file bankruptcy. When a city finds that the revenues it collects no longer rain down in the volume required to fund a budget inflated by the debt, the financial drought wins and the bankruptcy becomes a reality.
A major component in the reality of a city or county bankruptcy is the thought that the money from Washington, like the water in the well, will always flow. The massive debt we have incurred over the past three years is the financial equivalent of pumping every well in the country dry. What we as a country have chosen to do, in response to an economy that has encountered a dry spell, is to vacuum clean our financial wells. We have chosen to extend the impact of an economic drought for years to come. Our economy is not going to be able to afford a Saturday night bath for a long time. Our economy is going to stink. Obama may get the credit for the problem but the blame truly belongs to a nation that has insisted on letting the financial shower run after the well went dry. Our economy can recover but we can’t, continue to drain the economic well during a financial draught. The well is dry.
