Aspidistra

The only significance of my 79th Birthday last week
was that it reminded me that I was two to ten years
old during the deepest part of the Great Depression.
And so, as a remaining witness, I've got a couple of
opinions that may upset you......particularly if you're a
passionate advocate of our president's Stimulus
Package which is supposedly spreading money throughout
the countryside like Johnny Appleseed making fruit trees.
Don't misunderstand.....I'm a huge Obama guy.....and
Stimulus is just what we need. God knows I remember
the New Deal....the great ceramic transformers and dams
that were built just outside my hometown of Charleston,
Illinois....and the hundreds and hundreds of guys who
came from all over to work in the CCC camp to build all
that stuff. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. That was the drill......Hoover
Dam, TVA, WPA...."back to work" was the song.... And the
whole thing was also a burst of humanism and decency.....
I vividly remember the CCC guys in their blue overalls
piling into their trucks to save the Catholic Church from a
Ku Klux Klan burning.

Why not this time? Is their nothing left to build? Or save?

The Stimlus money seems to evaporate into the
tax-based bureaucracies of our cities and states.
Don't misunderstand,
I did close to thirty years as a civil servant and I have nothing
but respect for that profession which keeps the cities running
and the projects warm in winter. But no matter how much
we pour into the existing "infrastructure"....the jobless
numbers continue upwards, scratching ten percent this weekend.
The stimulus is like the aspidistra plant, the plant that is borne
close to the ground....and doesn't fly.

Here's my plan.

From now on, every dime we spend of Stimulus money must
result in specific, indentifiable new work....real work....real new jobs.
We got to stop balancing budgets and build, build, build.
Highways for a start...(I've got a couple of candidates),
wind farms, new dams, cleaning up poisonous industrial sites,
bridges to fix and bridges to build and on and on. And it should
be a visible program....with signs everywhere....a proud new
moment in American history where we grabbed our bootstraps
and owned up to our problems.

Now...I'm not kidding.....I mean a LAW.....a law that says you
must get the aspidistra flying.....make it wave.....like that flag
that so often flies upside down.