Togetherness

Karen and I sat on the back porch of our cabin yesterday, listening to Opossum Run. We thought about people elsewhere who walk miles each day to collect a little water to meet their needs. The time to pan for gold, if that time ever existed, has passed. Water has become golden.

As I mentioned in this year's Thanksgiving Day blog posting (immediately preceding this one, entitled "Thank You"), we're fortunate to be able to "make" Thanksgiving dinner. This is a result of a choice we made 17 years ago, after asking ourselves, "Is this really what we want to do until we retire?" We didn't realize then where we were heading, and I suspect that 17 years from now we'll look back at today and say we didn't realize in 2011 where we were headed.

Traveling always does this to me. Stepping outside our box forces me to look at our choices from a different perspective. As we walked around Manhattan, we didn't see many gardens or wellheads. We visited a small community garden in the Upper West End. Each participant had a few square feet, where growing potatoes or raising turkeys would be very hard. The only way they could "grow" a significant amount of food was to pay someone else to grow it for them. Enter, grocery stores and farmers' markets.

That's okay, I suppose, assuming the buying doesn't accompany an attitude that looks down on the labor and the places that make their food possible. Something is out of whack if we call farmers and other laborers names like "rednecks," sort of like the names given the slaves brought here to do the work white people thought was beneath them. These are the people who feed us.

We spent an afternoon art gallery-hopping in Chelsea. At first, I didn't know quite what to think of an exhibit of works by Robert Kinmont at Alexander and Bonin. A wooden box sat on the floor next to what presumably had been its contents, a small pile of soil, entitled "A Cubic Foot of California." Another work, entitled "Evidence," consisted of 127 willow forks, that is, forked willow tree branches. Near the entrance stood half of a hollowed-out log, clean and smooth. These and other pieces seemed like a tractor driving down Wall Street. Then I thought, yes, that's exactly what we need to see. We cannot, must not, live such specialized, compartmentalized lives.

"So are you going to drive a tractor down Wall Street?" asks Virginia.

I hope I don't have to.

More LocalMore

I understand the giant banks have nixed their plans to impose $5 monthly fees on debit cards.

"Why?" says Virginia. "Because so many customers complained?"

Maybe, but I don't think it was just the talk. More likely, it was because so many customers put their money where their mouths were, and moved their accounts to smaller, more local banks. See my blog posting for October 5, "Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is -- LocalMore" at whoisvirginia.blogspot.com/2011/10/put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is.html. I wish I could say that my posting made a difference, but I can't. Hardly anyone reads this blog.

Now what? LocalMore. My brother-in-law, the former editor of a small town newspaper and now the creator of a successful on-line small town newspaper (The Bluffton Icon), many years ago made a point of encouraging readers to buy local. This was long before the "Buy Local" food movement. He thought it made sense for people to support their own townsfolk, especially the ones who offered products and services in downtown stores, rather than tripping off to Lima or Findlay or even farther to Toledo or Columbus. (And it probably helped sell ads for the newspaper.)

That's what I mean by LocalMore. It makes sense to buy things made near us, by people we know. Among other things, those items then don't need to be shipped hundreds or thousands of miles, back and forth, to fill our orders.

"But we don't know what's made nearby," says Virginia.

That's probably true, in large part. So we should find out. It's taken a lot of work for folks to coordinate the sale of food grown nearby (LocalVore). After all, it's often inefficient to drive here for a gallon of milk, there for a cabbage, and yon for a basket of strawberries. So someone has to accept the challenge of setting up a farmers' market or local food store. The same cooperation is necessary to pull together other products made locally.

"So are you going to do it?" says Virginia.

Well, um, I'm so busy as it is.

"Yea, right," she says. "That's what they all say. So the banks get bigger and bigger until they're too big to fail."

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is -- LocalMore

Are you upset about big financial institutions and their failure to show any remorse for the way they've been behaving, after taking us to the brink of financial disaster, getting the country to bail them out, then resuming giant salaries and bonuses, messing up mortgage servicing, ignoring the Servicemembers' Civil Relief Act, while watching the unemployment rate rise?

And now, Bank of America, again perched on a cliff -- with what some analysts say includes $200 billion of bad mortgage loans it may need to write off -- announces a $5 monthly fee for debit cards, blaming the "need" to impose the fee on the financial reform bill (Dodd-Frank), the very same bill whose unimplemented provisions were supposed to come down hard on too-big-to-fail institutions.

If you're out there complaining about the big banks, get with the program. Bring your money home, to local financial institutions. Go LocalMore! First, Localvore, now LocalMore! They're FDIC-insured, too, and they're not too-big-to-fail. Retire your Bank of America debit and credit cards. You've got plenty of other options. Bring CEO Moynihan to his knees, like NetFlix chairman Hastings after 1,000,000 customers quit, who had the good sense to admit: "I slid into arrogance based upon past success."

For more, check out my February 10, 2010 blog posting: "Keep $$ Local." You can find it easily by clicking on "Banking" among the list of topics on the right side of this blog.

"Enough, enough," gasps Virginia, still struggling. Her attention span is very short these days.