Finding balance

You can see our culture's fascination with the ancient Greeks in our universities. While in college you may be a participant in athletics, but are unlikely to do anything of more meaningful expenditure of physical effort. You might join a fraternity or sorority and take part in celebrations of inebriation while wearing togas.

Socrates and other Greeks have glorified the human body as long as it was applied in games, and not in real work. That would be considered demeaning and inappropriate for a citizen.

I woke up with a bit less soreness in my shoulders and elbow than I expected. After hauling limbs, chainsawing and removing downed trees, we next went to the library and moved thousands of books and large book cases away from the walls so the interior of our original Carnegie Library can be painted in preparation for its centennial year. Today, with fresh paint on the walls, we will move books back. And then do the same thing over again next weekend so the second half of the library can be made new.

As human beings we need balance between the physical exertions of our bodies and the expansive pursuits of our intellects. The stupidity of our industrial age was that we placed men and women in jobs that were either physical or mental, but not both, missing Jean Jacques Rousseau's point that "each refreshes the other". But human beings are both mental and physical. That is why craftsmanship should be taught in schools, and why children should be given the opportunity to do real work in yards and fields under the watchful eyes of loving teachers and parents, to discover their physicality not just in games, but in service to community.

In the meantime, many financial experts are predicting failure of the Obama stimulus package. It will make it through Congress, but not have the necessary effect. The American love affair with senseless consumerism seems to be grinding to a halt, and will lead to a shrinking of the economy regardless of how much money we print and distribute to banks. The Chinese are beginning to suffer their own economic decline and will be unlikely to shore up the American economy at their previous level through the purchase of Treasury Bonds. We can all hope once again that experts are wrong. But the important thing at this point is to invest in our communities through hard work and our saved resources. In the recent past, communities have been those places we displayed our blatant consumerism, but they can become the places in which we display our generosity of spirit, putting the wisdom of our hands into the efforts of restoration.