Buying Eggs

I needed eggs the other morning and so I jumped in the car and started driving for a local farm where they sell eggs off the back porch for a buck seventy five. I had scratched up the money from my pants pockets (times being what they are) and set off on my Sunday morning drive back into the rural America. The far west suburb of Chicago I live in is ground zero for where the boom died. On my drive toward the farmer I saw old stone entrance posts and gates of STONEHAVEN  or CREST FARMS with bright red flags advertising luxury homes. On the other side was only corn fields.

And I drove feeling more anxious. Hadn't these morons learned yet? That Americans could no longer afford luxury homes and that the market nay the culture for these type of homes had passed. In these high weeded lots sat several desultory McMansions that someone had taken a flyer on and like the pioneers of old found themselves isolated in a country they knew not. Like a wave retreating these fields will return to the Prairie grass. 

But I felt anxious. Something seemed terribly wrong. America seemed to have bet on all the wrong things. The thought that a million dollar home could make you feel better about yourself seems so delusional now after four years of super recession. And yet the red flags are new and the sign is freshly painted. COME PICK OUT YOUR DREAM HOME. I slowed down to look and then I stopped and just stared at the lonely landscape of American capitalism gone bad. I saw no American dreams here.

And so I finally reached the old farm house with the swinging sign EGGS and pulled up to the back porch. I crunched across the drive and swung open the door to the nineteenth century home. The cooler whirred and the box for money sat there open. I threw in my dollar seventy five and fished out a dozen eggs. No one was up in the house and I shut the door quietly and walked back to my car. Then I drove back toward home with my eggs and I felt strangely peaceful.

Funny that just a simple task like buying eggs off a farmers back porch should give me such serenity. But maybe I had just touched a time when all the choices were simple. A man produced eggs and sold them to his neighbors and expected the money to be left behind. Simply amazing.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Does Capitalism Work for the Many?

Should one human have a billion dollars at their disposal? It would seem an indictment of capitalism that such things can occur. But they do and now we have lots of billionaires. That kind of concentration of wealth into the hands of the few is unsustainable. Should an Oprah have billions and billions of dollars?Should a Bill Gates? Some would say the good provided is worth the payout,but in our wired world of five billion people and three and a half billion jobs, it just doesn't make sense.

Behind the OWS movement is a basic proposition: capitalism favors the few at the expense of the many. The few are people who game the system and make the billions. And why shouldn't they? They are smart enough to do that. But we are all on the same planet and just because one person can have the intelligence or luck to make a billion dollars should society permit that kind of inequity?

The problem is people don't share. Even if the President proposed a tax on billionaires it would never pass the congress because the billionaires can buy the congressmen. Even this rarefied world of billionaires could cry class warfare and say people are taking from them unjustly. We would like think that a sort of mega philanthropy would kick in for people at this leve,l but money has a nasty habit of staying in the same circles.

Capitalism allows anyone to become a billionaire in theory. But becoming a billionaire is largely a fluke in a system that allows one individual to prosper at the expense of the many. It would seem the many are starting to wake up.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Spring Break for An Exhausted People

You fall out on the beach after a brutal winter that feels like something out of a Russian novel. You are amazed that somewhere there are people who sit on beaches and soak up this incredible sunshine and you immediately wonder what they know that you don't. Because it is not only the winte,r but an exhaustion from stress and work and stress and work. Chicago seems like something out of a Siberian winter and the people you remember from the trains and coffee houses going through their days seem more like coal miners than a thriving middle class. And then you realize you are a coal miner.

Why else would you spend your time in an area of the country that is frozen for eight months? Why would you live near industrial centers spewing toxins and God knows what else? Why else would you live in an area that is just for people to work and work and work. Because down here in the boot of the country in Naples Florida this is where people come to get some relief and it makes you wonder as you stare at the Gulf and hear the surf like someone who has just come back from a war because you have come back from a war for survival--if there is a different way to live.

And you hear all sorts of other languages: French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and you  have to wonder if the whole world has been sold a bill of goods. That you are supposed to spend the majority of your life working in areas you take vacations from to see how life should be and then  go back. And of course the world doesn't wait or care. Your small hell will be waiting for you when your week ends. So you just stare at the water and feel the sun and hear the surf and then you just sit down in the sand and face that glorious sun and drink up your missing Vitamin D, muttering...I made it. 

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man is scheduled to blast off April 26th