Good To Have A Back-Up Plan

July 4th Weekend has arrived and with it, early summer doldrums.

We speak not only of the lack of an evening breeze while we sip a drink on the porch, but of the apparent stillness all around us, as if we have collectively been holding our breaths, waiting for the next ....what exactly? Cataclysmic event? Dow at 8,000 ? Yet another dippy CEO? Clean pelicans?

Are we waiting for a Congressional hearing on all of this....Waiting?

All around us people are saying, "Don't worry, nobody can ever find a job in the summer." Or, "Don't worry, nobody buys houses in the summer." Really? Apparently it's true: our culture and healing economy are so advanced that we can afford to just take the entire summer off: shut down until mid-September.

At least that's what we used to do. Then, in the fall, we would resume hiring, buying and selling until the end of November, when, naturally, we would shut down until mid-January. But, these days it seems as though we have gotten permanently tentative about doing business with one another.

If you have been looking for a job or selling a house, you may have wondered lately, "Is this any way to run an economy?" You may have also wondered, "Do the Chinese simply shut down for weeks and months at a time?"

"Not exactly," as our occasional Thirdgarage colleague "8-Ball" might say.

This summer feels different so far, doesn't it? There really does seem to be an eerie stillness around us. Where we live and write, only the local coyote population seems to have gotten off-message, and we didn't even know there was a local coyote population. Dear Wile E & Friends, Warning! You have severely ticked off the local real estate agent community, which was already pretty severely upset.

Advice: get hired elsewhere or move to a new neighborhood pronto, like in Idaho.

But, where were we? Oh yes, being tentative. It's okay to be wary of corporations, when they've given people good reason to do so. It's okay to be somewhat wary of government, particularly of the whacky accounting used by state government. But, when we lose Trust in each other, that's trouble. We proudly celebrate Independence Day, but the truth is that our hard-won political independence implies the we are dependent on each other for a certain amount of trust. Otherwise, the "system" Talking Heads with over-heated employment contracts love/hate really does bog down.

Here's a modest July 4th proposal; we might think of it as our Dependence Day suggestion: Our culture has a saying and we put it right smack on our money; "In God We Trust." We can argue the constitutionality of that, but who cares? Our problems stem from a lack of Trust in....Us.

Let's change our currency to read: "In God And One Another We Trust"

Good to have a back-up plan.