Author: Robert Bettmann

My mind is in several places right now. I’m building my own business, which involves diverse work. I’m working on Arts Advocacy day stuff, including research and planning in preparation for the day: March 31. I’m working on a dance show – All Good Men – which I’ve blogged about before. And at the same time I’m trying to get my head back into what was my masters thesis (which will be out soon as a book) cause I need to get a few articles together so I can, eventually, make money off of the publication.

The basic idea I’m working on is an environmental idea. It’s about how we understand the natural world. Do you ever think that western medicine is kind of messed up, the way it treats the body as a machine? Lots of people think that way — it’s why holistic medicine has gotten so big. Lots of people also think the way we relate to nature is whack.

The way we relate to nature, and the way we relate to the body are one and the same.

Does this matter? It’s an idea. Not a unique idea. But an idea. How we relate to the body is representative of how we relate to the rest of the world.

I remember in Macro class as an undergrad discussing savings rates. We were looking at (even back then) rising deficit, and trade deficit, and how individual savings patterns are mirrored in government spending. My teacher was saying that while hypothetically we don’t want lots of debt, the last thing we want is for people to ever start spending less. While there is an ‘ideal’ savings rate, and a ‘safe’ savings rate, if people ever start saving more they are spending less – which is bad for the economy.

You can have a clear idea. You can know how it works, but then you can also see and decide what you should do. Not exactly sure where I’m going with this…. I wrote in an earlier post that looking at graphs of rising deficits is like looking at graphs of rising green house gasses. It’s really easy to feel like they don’t matter. Cause they don’t right now. Social security, greenhouse gasses, nuclear war…

One of the arguments against Kyoto, and raising cafe (fuel) standards is that ‘we can’t afford it’. Or, ‘they can’t afford it’. At some point, if all these theories are right, we will pay for it. Probably more all at once than we would like. It’s a bit like shoving a whole bunch of tunafish in a pillow. Sooner or later, you’re gonna have a really stinky mess.

It’s amazing to me that they are saying maybe this latest stimulus won’t be enough. Enough for what? Enough for whom? We live in a world that is constantly achieving new balance points. It never stops. Like our bodies, moving with our breath, and our hearts, moving our blood every moment we’re alive, the world moves.

We know we can’t afford to spend the way we are. We know we can’t use energy the way we are. There is very simple economic data that tells us this. The market evolves, and when the internal combustion engine develops, the people who make carriages are screwed. Here, and now, we can choose to let the economy crash, soundly, and with some grace, or we can….

Sooner or later we pay for stupid decisions. “Tomorrow is for tonight’s forgiveness” I wrote in a bad poem a few years ago. Clear ideas are guideposts that can help us know how it all works. But even if we do know how it works, there is still the matter of how it is actually gonna work. I appreciated Warren Buffet’s statement a few months ago that, “when others are scared be bold. when others are bold, be scared.” But I think maybe he was just working for the fed when he wrote it.