The economic news is bleak...

In Time Magazine this week, there was an article about micro loans being used in New York and now Omaha, Nebraska to create small scale entrepreneurs. This is a technique that has been used successfully in third world countries, and perhaps with the mortgage and bankruptcy crises, we are now becoming one. Certainly, the way the Bush administration treated New Orleans after Katrina, and Detroit leading up to the collapse of the auto industry, would make us wonder where we rank in the scheme of things. Wall Street and the big banks are now a recession success story. Due to huge amounts of capital thrown into the system by American taxpayers, they are thriving... but only at the long term expense of the nation as a whole which will be faced with paying the bill. Too bad there aren't many lobbyists working for the average person on the street.

So far, very little has been done by either the banks or by the federal government to restore the economic health of the average American tax payer. The mortgage crisis is getting decidedly worse. Food stamps are sustaining our nation's children. Trickle down has become less than a drip, but then it never actually worked in the first place. The very idea... that people would take their earnings from investments and put them to work in the employment of people making things and serving the public was an absurdity. People no longer know what it means to invest in the lives of each other. That idea seemed to have evaporated long before Ron Reagan chiseled the trickle down theory in stone for our conservative brethren.

When you ask someone to make something, you do more than simply set hands in motion toward the delivery of a product. You launch someone on a path of growth, leading to greater skill, economic capacity and citizenship. But we don't seem to understand that. We send our best and brightest off to ivory towers where they are educated in such things as banking and hedge fund management, and are kept isolated from the practices of tangible human creativity.

In the meantime, the media is wondering where Tiger Woods is hiding. I would suggest that that may not be all that important. Who cares? There are things of greater significance, hands down. Again, I will suggest that the nation's major universities consider an affirmative action program for the hands. Those who are to become our highly educated elite should not be kept out of touch. It is a disastrous notion that the hands and brain can be educated apart from each other. Look back over the last 20 years as we have eliminated wood shop from our nation's schools, and the current effect... economic collapse, the decline of manufacturing, the shipping of our brightest enterprises to other shores. These things describe a nation out of touch with basic human developmental principles.

It can all be fixed, but take a deep breath and don't hold back. It won't be fixed easily or soon. Talk about it with your friends. Introduce your friends to this blog and the ideas we share. And tonight, cook. Tomorrow make something and invest your own resources in the creative powers within your community. Call it a micro-loan. Something we invest in each other. The payback will be enormous.