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A couple of weeks ago the Santa Cruz Garden Company, a very fine nursery on Mission Street, donated three hundred dollars worth of seeds to the WAWC Early Education Center's gardening program. Everybody pause and think about how nice that was. That act of generosity is not the subject of this post.
This is.
Today, I finally got around to getting the preschool teaqchers in on the bounty. That is, I said "We totally have this huge box of seeds, right here." I had not kept it a secret before, I just forgot to show them exactly where it was, and they forgot about it altogether until I did that. Immediately they thought of a gazillion projects involving the seeds and their beautiful packets.
Here comes the insight. I passed one of the preschool teachers in the hall, and she was carrying a stack of packets and the color copies she had made of their covers, and she told me about the complicated and beautiful project she was undertaking for the next day.
I had a horrible, horrible reflex which I stomped on real hard -- I wanted to hoard that stuff. I didn't want anybody to "use it up," especially somebody who was not me. What an embarrassing thing to have caught myself thinking!
I was thinking, afterwards, that this was in fact a reflex: you have a pile of good stuff, you want to save the pile and make it bigger, not "waste" it (as in, use it). It's a good impulse when you moderate it and keep some grain for planting, and a udeful impulse when you keep investing money instead of spending it on frivolities, but it's toxic when it prevents you from churning wealth through the world, stimulating production and innovation and providing essential services and protections.
So that's it. Rich people are exposed to an excessive number and volume of piles of stuff, and it triggers the reflex to pile stuff up more and accumulate it in more concentrated and taller piles, rather than to give the stuff away, or use it, or whatever. And that's why we can't have nice things like fully-funded fire departments, fire inspectors, modern(ized) school buildings, books, and materials, accessible medical care and effective public health, public transportation, parks, a sound climate policy, effective pollution controls and water management, a sensible energy system . . . because all those things demand that stuff is spread rather than piled.
This is.
Today, I finally got around to getting the preschool teaqchers in on the bounty. That is, I said "We totally have this huge box of seeds, right here." I had not kept it a secret before, I just forgot to show them exactly where it was, and they forgot about it altogether until I did that. Immediately they thought of a gazillion projects involving the seeds and their beautiful packets.
Here comes the insight. I passed one of the preschool teachers in the hall, and she was carrying a stack of packets and the color copies she had made of their covers, and she told me about the complicated and beautiful project she was undertaking for the next day.
I had a horrible, horrible reflex which I stomped on real hard -- I wanted to hoard that stuff. I didn't want anybody to "use it up," especially somebody who was not me. What an embarrassing thing to have caught myself thinking!
I was thinking, afterwards, that this was in fact a reflex: you have a pile of good stuff, you want to save the pile and make it bigger, not "waste" it (as in, use it). It's a good impulse when you moderate it and keep some grain for planting, and a udeful impulse when you keep investing money instead of spending it on frivolities, but it's toxic when it prevents you from churning wealth through the world, stimulating production and innovation and providing essential services and protections.
So that's it. Rich people are exposed to an excessive number and volume of piles of stuff, and it triggers the reflex to pile stuff up more and accumulate it in more concentrated and taller piles, rather than to give the stuff away, or use it, or whatever. And that's why we can't have nice things like fully-funded fire departments, fire inspectors, modern(ized) school buildings, books, and materials, accessible medical care and effective public health, public transportation, parks, a sound climate policy, effective pollution controls and water management, a sensible energy system . . . because all those things demand that stuff is spread rather than piled.
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