And now, the Poetry Corner for today…

posted by Bill Arnett @ 12:50 PM Permalink

…features Joyce Kilmer:

I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Followed by today's paraphrasing:

I THINK that I shall never see
An economy as mighty as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against sweet earth to feed the poor with all the rest;

A tree that looks out for the Poor all day,
While lifting her arms to Shade and pray;

A tree that may in summer care,
To spread it's bounty everywhere.

Upon whose bosom snow has lain,
While heating the poor, relieving their pain,

Poems are paraphrased by fools like me,
But only men can build a good economy.

Which I guess is my way of saying it is beyond insane to attempt to build a good economy from the top down. Trees do not begin life through leaves floating around above ground that somehow manages to extend roots to the ground. No such tree could or would survive.

Without roots, any tree would quickly die from the lack of earth's nutrients required to sustain the growth of the tree as a whole, failure of the organism would logically follow.

By putting down roots first and then, through the miracle of osmosis in combination with the wonder of chloryphyll, the nutrients drawn from the soil are converted to the sugars and other elements necessary for the tree to grow, and construct an every larger ecosystem.

But this is obviously a "bottom-going up scheme" of nature that man has seemingly either forgotten, or believes in his arrogance that this system, having survived for millions upon millions upon millions of years, can be avoided by, in effect, constructing a tree from the top down, ignoring the fact that a tree must put down a root system to provide nutrients that is at least as large as the tree's canopy, and that wicks the nutrients up from the ground for conversion to growth by this combination of nutrients and the conversion of those nutrients through the miracle of chemical reaction with chlorophyll.

Without the support and provision of nutrients and water from the root system below, the expansion of that root system in tandem with the canopy growth, and that canopy reaching every upward for the sunshine to react with the chlorophyl, the tree will wilt, rot, and die.

This is exactly what is wrong with our economy. Under bush and cronies the only part of the "financial tree" tended to was the canopy, the very top of the tree.

Forgotten was the root system that must flourish, the people, if you will, that must be provided with the good-paying jobs to provide a solid structure of growth. The root system providing the valuable nutrients crucial for growth.

Forgotten was the remembrance that without that infrastructure being reinforced by those roots the strongest of tree trunks would eventually, perforce, collapse of its own weight. Lost sight of was the fact that without these nutrients from a strong economic base, the "root system", that there would never be sufficient nutrients going up the trunk of the economy to provide for conversion to the needs of society from the canopy, which should cover all of us, that the canopy itself, deprived of the work, efforts, and lacking movement of ground-based nutrients up the trunk of the economy to the top was doomed to fail for the very same reasons that a tree cannot be grown from the sky downward.

Why don't all these hot-shot financial experts see the obvious: if the government were giving $8 trillion to the poor, underworked, and unemployed that all the best things would happen, just like after WWII. By providing money for college to all veterans America built the world's strongest (formerly) economy with education, union jobs where a perosn's family could work for generations, and with the strongest industrial base the world has ever seen.

And what did the people do with their new found wealth? SPENT IT, spent it right on up the line, buying food so food producers had to increase their orders and efficiencies, the shipping companies getting those goods to market were forced to grow to handle the workload gain, they in turn ordered ever larger and more efficient methods of getting product moved, which led to innovations and efficiencies such as never before seen, and at the very tip-top of the canopy, with the sunshine of a progressive nations growing with the workforce down below in the root system, led to the healthiest and strongest economic "tree" ever seen by man of nature.

But then the canopy was a benevolent thing, converting nutrients that benefitted all and distributing them up and down the trunk and back to the root system by making available the capital (nutrients) to the soil and root structure, in a symbiotic relation which supported the trunk, which in turn enabled the canopy to benefit the entire economic tree as a whole.

We now believe, or at least our "leaders" believe, they are capable of ignoring or somehow overcoming the history and natural order of nature, that we can defy and ignore reality, and that by keeping the canopy alone afloat it will somehow act in opposition of the ways of nature and lead to prosperity for all.

I call BS on this.

But that's just my opinion, and I could be wrong.

This is the end of today's Poetry Corner. Thank you for reading it (if you did), and may the forces of nature save us all (I am an atheist so I ask for no prayers, benedictions, sermons, blessings, or appeals to a nonexistent "Higher power." Nature and the natural world have provided all our bounty and it is to those forces we owe our thanks.)

Labels: economic disparity, economics, Economy, Poetry