Spiritual Economics

What price a sane life?

You can be sure the current massive debt burden taken on by students seeking degrees is not justified in most cases. The price is excessive and the education is a joke. Most degrees these days don’t even signify so much as simple literacy. Precious few will get you a job worth having. The debt burden, which few ever manage to service, much less repay, justifies federal SWAT raids, now. It’s not worth it.

Of course, if we were to find an institution offering a real education, it would be different. Some things in life are worth the financial debt and threats. An education that opens your mind to genuine skepticism, intelligent cynicism and equips you in questioning assumptions is an education, indeed. A set of experiences which expose you to a world you could not find on your own is actually worth quite a bit. In those terms, some degrees are actually valuable, if not economically useful.

There is an apple tree behind our mobile home. We take care of it, but not with any great diligence. Once the flowers appear, I try to see it gets water when the rain doesn’t come. When fruit becomes visible I water it daily. I can’t tell you what variety the apples are, only that they are yellow when ripe, rather soft and pithy and no fun to eat. They aren’t too bad if you catch them just before they turn, but they tend to be small.

I pick the apples and cut away the ruined parts from insect and bird grazing, places where a limb rubbed it hard. Then I peel them, dice them and we later turn them into apple sauce. It’s time consuming, but I do only a few at a time when they seem ready to pick. We may get a half-bushel of them, and it makes a quart or three of apple sauce. If I were spending the same time working at manual labor, I could easily afford several cases of commercially produced apple sauce.

But then, the labor would aggravate my arthritis, and I frankly wouldn’t be able to offer good reliable work. Chances are I’d end up doing work I really didn’t like much, perhaps bumping into moral challenges, and having to face being a victim of the tax system. In other words, I’d be less myself and more of someone I didn’t want to be. I’m not lazy; I work a lot, but don’t get paid much for it. I take free-will donations, and frequently nothing at all, to fix computers for other people. I like that work, and can’t imagine charging fees for it. But there are plenty of days when no one calls.

What can replace for me the very rich blessing of those moments with a paring knife, peeling and cutting those apples I picked myself? Granted, what we make here at home is much better tasting than the store brands, notwithstanding the poor quality of the apples, but that’s only part of it. The act of doing for myself and my family, along with tending a garden, means far more than a lot other work I’ve done in life, never mind my college education. I poured many hard hours into tilling the soil, hauling mulch some distance, pulling weeds and grass, watering carefully and fertilizing. Because I work for myself, there is no economic accounting for that labor. The labor itself is a good I derive from the situation.

I’m free. I make my own schedule, negotiated with nature. I do what I can to salvage a product over which I really don’t have much control, but far more than if I bought the latest Monsanto GMO monstrosity at the grocery store, which isn’t allowed to tell me which items are GMO. Did you know the Bt protein in GMO food crops is found intact in the bloodstream of humans who eat those crops? We haven’t had time to see what pathology arises from that, but we will, and it won’t be good. Better by far is the thing I planted myself or which nature freely offered. The blackberries are good this year. The sand plums were rather thin and now are all but gone, but they were worth chasing. They were worth bathing in insect repellent and keeping an eye out for snakes, thrashing myself with the underbrush and plum tree thorns. Those threats simply don’t compare with what man cooks up in seeking to dehumanize others.

As a military policeman, when I was working the DARE Program in Europe, at places like the US Embassy school in Bonn, I knew the program itself did the kids not a bit of good. It was based on a badly broken school of psychology. I knew, for better or worse, the success of that opportunity rested entirely with me as person. Whatever good was done for those kids was limited to what I could create interacting directly with them. I gave them myself, and got back a whole lot more than I put into it. Indeed, the expensive trip to Los Angeles to take the DARE training did more for me as an opportunity to experience Hollywood at the street level than the classes could ever do.

I eventually went on to get my teacher’s certification based on my days in the DARE Program. The last time I worked in public education was as a substitute teacher. The subject that day was Flowers for Algernon. As part of the discussion, I told the kids education might happen at school, but it was really up to them, not the system. The system was actually slanted away from genuine education, and entirely devoted to herd management. Classes where kids might really be engaged were cut short by the bells, while dreary classes of material mastered in minutes required they sit bored. They learned in detail things no one ever uses and skipped lightly across stuff that could change their lives. It was all politics. The worst teachers ran the union and the most talented were run off. Talented or not, I was not called back after that day.

I noticed the kids weren’t in a hurry to leave when the bell rang.

Whatever they learned, I know for sure I learned something that day. I’d never go back for even the most extravagant pay. Money didn’t mean much then, and it means less now. Engaging something which pays spiritual dividends is worth starving and dying prematurely.