The other day, two folks I know showed up at the ranch. I was working in my vegetable garden shoveling soil into new beds, new beds designed to make my garden more water efficient and less labor intensive. Funny how that works – when one is young, conservation and labor efficiency weigh little on the mind, but I digress …
Anyway, these friends of mine showed up bearing a gift, a thank you for my contribution to the design and implementation of their backyard garden. Their gift to me was quite extravagant, to say the least. They gave me an inversion table because my back has been stiff and sore since I returned to my physical ranch chores after my hand injury last October. Anyway, I politely refused, but they would have none of that. They told me that if I had charged them for my time and expertise (in still another life, I was a landscape designer), the cost would have been much greater than the cost of the inversion table.
You see, part of my life philosophy is that giving to others is both liberating and helpful to my personal growth. The only way this can work for me is that when I give anything, I expect nothing in return. If I expected something in return, this would be a trade …
Funny how this works – when we trade, we want a positive return on that investment. This is the dichotomous nature of life. No matter how idealistically we live one part of our life, we cannot escape the basic tenet of another part of our life – earning money. Thus, when we are earning money, we must, to a degree, leave the ideal aspect out and focus strictly on the objective target, making money.
Now many, over time, have taken this notion to an extreme. Many have simply disregarded any part of the nurturing ideal in favor of earning money, no matter who it affects, or who it hurts, or what it does to the fundamentals of society. We all bore witness to this is the financial collapse of 2008, and we are bearing witness to it today in the Massey mining disaster in W. Virginia.
Mining coal in dark and dusty underground caverns is a far cry from trading in the comfort of one’s home. These mining folks do the dirty work of scratching out the coal so we can turn up our lights, watch our televisions, and fire up our computers to trade. If you think about, we should be thanking them for their labor, for what they do. We should be protecting them, and we are not. Yes, mining is a hazardous profession, but when management ignores safety violation after safety violation because its “bean counters” advise that paying the fines is cheaper than adhering to the regulations, the profession becomes even more hazardous. We are now seeing the results of this greedy mindset, a mindset that has abandoned any sense of giving in order to maximize money making.
When I contemplate the owner of the mine making scores of millions for his personal gain while the miners in W. Virginia work and die in conditions deemed unsafe by the U.S. government, it makes more then my back hurt. I won’t say I don’t understand this mindset, because I do. It is greed pure and simple. It is not about giving; it is about taking, taking at any cost.
Trade in the day; invest in your life …
