We don’t live in a metropolis. Our town lies in a rural area which only recently achieved public bus service for one of its outlying communities. Before that, some of the area’s students had to hitchhike to get home from high school. Near the center of our tiny town, there is a library maintained on a volunteer basis. Though I’m sure the volunteers do what they can, whenever I pass by, it isn’t open. Now the library in the nearest town to the south may suffer a similar fate.

We talk a lot about civil society but not so often about what goes into to making and maintaining one. Like public education, a library is essential. It’s a meeting place where ideas are important, a setting where where elders can tutor struggling students, where kids can research their term papers, and where the unemployed can use the Internet connection to apply for jobs. (And that last is especially important: At Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2010, local residents hoping for charity turkeys at the mission on the main highway had to stand in a long line to get one. It’s not likely they’ll have the spare fuel to drive long distances or excess funds to spend at online bookstores.)

I hope the library board considers the following: A short while back, we were all snickering about Texas, where extremist officials voted to take evolution out of the school textbooks. Those Texans must be eyeing us here in Santa Cruz County with astonished wonder, now. For without a library, right-wing ideologues won’t have to make the effort to ban an idea or censor a book to keep it out of circulation: Why bother to ban a book, when the library has already been closed down?

© Shelley Buck, 2011. Used with permission.

In the past, I have honored relatives at Christmas by making gifts of tree seedlings, rabbits, and a even a flock of chicks. I ordered these donations online through a charity that does on-the-ground work, helping village people around the world leverage the fecundity of the animals or trees provided to them into gifts for others and greater prosperity for their communities. It’s a wonderful program.

There are lots of animals to choose from…sheep, goats, camels. I’m tempted to get a camel this year, but at $850, the camel is way too much of a stretch. Geese are more affordable. Although I can get a share in something else for $10, that flock of geese I have my eye on starts at $20.

This year, as I noted, things are a little tight. I still intend to give, but I have decided to employ a Wall Street strategy. I will donate for one flock of geese, then carve it up (only on paper, of course).

Then I plan to honor each of my farflung relatives with a derivative of this gift.

Wait a minute! How are the unsuspecting recipients supposed to know I have really made the donation of the underlying geese? Will they examine the paperwork, or what? Will they want to know which end of which goose their fractional shares are from?

A goose is a pretty non-toxic asset, but I guess they’ll just have to trust me on that.
© Shelley Buck, 2010. Used with permission. Shelley Buck is the author of Floating Point: Endlessly Rocking off Silicon Valley, available at Smashwords, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and (via Apple’s iBook app) on the iPad.

The cookie is delicious, as I expected, but that is not the point. I hesitated. I could have skipped it entirely. Once more, in my willingness to be agreeable, I have nibbled away at my own resolve to protect my health.

We read a lot about corporate efforts to exploit our hungers with nutrition-poor fast foods. We read a lot about diets and self-discipline. But less is written about the conflicted nexus of holiday tradition and eating. My hostess does not see herself as tempting or controlling me; her hospitality is on the line. She works hard to provide an ambiance of comfort in which food ranks paramount. If I reject the food, I reject her culture, her labor, and her striving for a perfect Christmas in spite of bad times. Acknowledging these efforts, accepting the spirit of nurturing and comfort, accepting her wish to see me eat, I give in. Later, I wish I hadn’t.

Although she never urged food on me, my mother might have urged me to be gracious. That is, she might have done so back before her own cholesterol count shot up and her resolve toughened. Before the stroke devoured chunks of her vocabulary like chocolate chips, leaving her to signal her word retrieval failures with a finger motion across
her throat.

No longer young myself, I think of my mother as I stand facing the Christmas platter. I squirm. I wish the economy were better. I wish my friend had found a grander arena for showcasing her culinary excellence–as chef in a fine restaurant, perhaps. But few cooks are launching restaurants these days.

“Delicious,” I tell her honestly. “Perfect texture”–all the while wishing that the wagons of tradition had not circled, in these hard times, around a cookie platter. Wondering if I am dying to be sociable, I take another bite.

For her part, buckdata is wondering why money isn’t getting to the people most hard hit by this depression, such as those on the verge of losing their homes, those who have already lost them, and those for whom a tarp is not a government program but a literal roofing strategy in tent cities around the country.

To aid the President—on this issue at least– the following modest solution is hereby submitted:

Let’s all be bankers! Maybe it’s time for the poor and dispossessed and the rest of us to found some banks. Buckdata has a few in mind: First Foreclosure Bank in Stockton, Credit Default Swappers Bank in the New Orleans Ninth Ward, Toxic Assets Bank in Flint, Bonus Plus Bank with a nice Manhattan address, the Bank of Kaput in New Shock, Pennsylvania, and, of course, the online Bank of Buckdata.

Consider the possibilities: Laid off attorneys can volunteer time to help with the charters and incorporations. Laid off Wall Street employees can help us set up the books. Laid off web designers can devote their graphics talents to creating suitable online presence and branding. Impoverished retirees can exhume their mothballed suits and ties to lend us all gravitas at the headquarters front office.

Once the banks are set up, perhaps the homeless, the foreclosed, the evicted, and the about-to-be dispossessed will be able to approach Washington politely, hats (if we still have them) in hand, in search of generous bailouts. After all, a democracy, too, involves a contractual obligation, doesn’t it?

The proposal has a further benefit: If the sheriff’s deputies should arrive to evict us before the bucks start rolling in, we can always live in the vault. –buckdata

Note to readers: This is a satire. The above banks do not now exist. There is no Bank of Kaput in New Shock, Pennsylvania. There is no New Shock, Pennsylvania. No intention to single out particular existing institutions should be inferred from this blog post. This caution is necessary because of an unusual initiative reported in the New York Times on April 8. The article by Graham Bowley and Michael J. de la Merced details a scenario in which ordinary citizens may  be cajoled to invest in private mutual funds which are to be set up with government support to purchase other private institutions’ soured assets. The writers suggest such citizen investments may be envisioned as similar to the patriotic purchases of “Liberty Bonds” during the World War I. In such an audacious climate, formal disclaimers truly become necessary. Without such disclaimers, even well-informed readers may find themselves unable to distinguish pastiche from reality.

Twitter is software which allows a registered member to send out very brief messages to others, either from twitter.com’s website or from a cell phone. Recipients can get the messages either on the web or on their cell phones or other mobile devices.  Members can “follow” others’ messages or allow others to follow their own. One can thus send messages like, “I’m doing the dishes,” or “I’m saving the economy” to friends, family, colleagues, and nearly total strangers who have signed up to receive them.

The service is free, except for the instant messaging charges the cell phone carriers may impose.

It’s a neat idea and its time may have come in a way many media watchers not have foreseen. Here’s why: With mounting middle class layoffs, lots more people will have the leisure to try out new technologies, particularly low cost and free ones. Using their new and copious spare time, they will learn how to – as the users of this new communication system put it – “tweet.”

This week, a buckdata.com writer received a solicitation to follow her to date rather scanty Twitter postings. Checking out the profile of the would-be follower, she discovered a discreet link which connected to the sender’s resume.

It is not likely to be the last such.

Readers, brace yourselves for the sight of the new-new media being used the old-fashioned way. The great Twitter job hunt is on!