Musings from the Back 40

Humans and Humus

Human: adj.  ME 3. Prone to frailties associated with man as an imperfect being. Made from dust (humus), destined for dust. 

 

To be human is to know we are dust. Yet we know the gift of life remains, despite death and decay. In the Creator's plan, dying is not in vain; it leads to life as surely as humus, the moldering rot of previous life, becomes the nutrient source of new life.

 

Humus: n. An organic substance consisting of decaying vegetable matter that provides nutrients to living plants and increases ability of the soil to retain water for plant roots.

 

Spring 1961.

I wielded the shovel aggressively, but Dad said, "Careful now," and placed a restraining hand on my shovel.  He marked a larger perimeter in the soil around a healthy young sapling growing from dark, moldering soil.  That's where I was to dig a narrow, two-blade-depth trench.  I dug.

 

He stopped me again and held up a lump of soil packed with many root hairs. 

 

"Here," he said, "is humus.  It's what makes trees grow.  If the root hairs are broken and the humus separates from the roots, no point trying to fix it."

 

He sent me for the gunny sacks in the pickup.  I helped him rip them into wide bands and bind them tightly around the root ball with baling wire.  Only when the delicate soil-root system was secure did he allow me to do what I intended earlier: I pierced the taproot with the blade of my spade. Then I pried up the root ball, and the gunny sack bands secured the fragile network of root hairs and humus around the tree roots.

 

We took several dozen oak, maple, and elm saplings that day for him to plant along newly paved streets in our hometown.  The following spring, when I came home from college, he proudly pointed out the flourishing trees transplanted from our farm.

  

Spring 2010

Our nation's broken health care system is being dug up and transplanted.  The past three years of political wrangling leading up to the new health care reform law have badly damaged the older American values of compassion and trust. These were the values that guided health care until the mid-70's. Profit then was a corollary, not the priority.  Since profit-maximizing business was not dominant among providers, health care functioned responsibly. The insurance companies generally trusted doctors, recognizing the bottom line was not maximum profit.

 

Now two major competing values of our health care system have been at war for decades, and health care is in crisis.  On the one hand is the right of any citizen to health care.  On the other hand is the right of health businesses to maximize profit.

 

No one, Democrat or Republican, in Washington seems to have the guts to stop healthcare profiteers from gorging at the tax-payer trough.  Republicans claimed the expense of the Obama plan would bankrupt the country. Yet Obama refused the obvious: to let the proven taxpayer-paid and -run health care systems of Medicare, Congresses' health care, and veterans' health care become the model for total reform, drastically reducing profit-maximizing business to pre-70's levels.  That's what would also lower the costs that now burden each citizen. And it would provide the fiscal foundation for health care for all.  Almost everyone in Washington, including the President, is bought off to refuse this proven solution.

 

The media have not reported on this mistaken bi-partisan consensus.  Instead they favor the contrived controversies funded with billions$$ by the health industry to skew American citizens away from this best solution. Washington easily refuses an honest debate on this racket, enjoying instead the noisy Republican vs Democrat gridlock over minute intricacies barely questioning the power of profit priorities in the health care system (see on line a relevant Frontline report. Search words: Obama's Deal Frontline, or use this ULR:  www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/obamasdeal/).

 

Our roots need nourishment from the humus of these older values: compassion and respect.  They used to bring people together networking around human need, and can still provide support for our nation's health care in the changes ahead. It depends on how the heavyweights view the old values that built American health care into the world's best system in the 70's.  We need those values again, like never before.

 

That's the way I see it from the back 40.

 

"No one can serve two masters. . . you cannot serve both God and money."

            –Jesus of Nazareth, AD 32.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034
graberdb@gmail.com
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org