THOUGHT 1: Blogging is light, and I’m not even apologetic this time. I’ve rediscovered working in — as opposed to simply owning — a coffeeshop, and while I miss my time at home with Shelley and the kiddos, I’m doing my best to enjoy a few things I’ve missed:

• Wonderfully made coffee within arm’s reach at all times
• Random conversations with people I don’t know
• Listening to “Hot Rail” by Calexico
• Time to blog, if only for a few minutes
• Standing for hours at a time

Most curses are also blessings, I think, and so I’ve no reason to lament my increasingly busy lifestyle… in the midst of all this busyness, I may actually relearn how to relax.

THOUGHT 2: I’ve long said “I agree with conservatives in principle,” and then voted for liberals… Hell, I may still do that. But for everything I liked and still like about Obama — his eloquence, his thoughtfulness, his (seeming) candor — I’m convinced that this “stimulus” idea simply isn’t going to work. My friends who also voted for Obama will here object: “Give the man a chance!” And I am, and shall, and don’t walk around dwelling on the state of things or looking anew for the next great white hope. But it simply doesn’t make sense.

As I mentioned in a pretty recent post, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at people so they can get their network TV shows and Viagra ads doesn’t seem like a good way to spend tax money (I’ll have a lot to say in coming weeks about tax money). Neither, thinks I, does just spending money on something, anything, make for sound economic policy. Debt got us into this mess — why do we think further debt will get us out? As C.S. Lewis said, it’s telling that we’ve essentially crafted our society around lending w/ interest — the one and only economic policy that God specifically forbade the Israelites from taking part in.

THOUGHT 3 (is related to Thought 2): Larison is always a good read, especially in these Dem-majority times. But he’s outdone himself, tossing out what he may think is a throwaway line that (if only more people read him) should make it into Bartlett’s:

(O)ptimism permits the perpetual deferral of hard choices.

This is the wisest single sentence I’ve read in a long time, and particularly convicting in an age of “hope.” As a spiritual person, I generally aim for optimism. And there’s nothing wrong with optimism, I suppose, when one is speaking in a spiritual sense and of something that’s both realistic and relatively certain. But this refrain of “Americans have come back before, we’ll do it again!” takes all the oomph out of this economic punch to the gut. “Don’t worry, it’ll all be better” is a great message for a 2-year-old who fell and hit his head; it’s at once  condescending and stupid when used on grown men and women who should know better.

THOUGHT 4: My friend Greg has started blogging one idea per day, as well as one haiku per day. I found this one particularly apt (though be warned, it takes a few readings to grasp the meaning):

This sleep that thought thieves
in the new morning will seem
pricey. The thoughts, cheap.

Beautiful.

Tags: barista, haiku, optimism, stimulus plan

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 9.17 pm and is filed under coffee, commentary, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.