Priorities: People and Numbers

No written record exists of the exact time when human beings began to demonstrate the abstract ability to think of things in terms of numbers. Carbon dating has revealed that prehistoric humans were able to count things some 37 thousand years ago when scientists recently used it to determine the age of what is believed to be the oldest evidence of counting—an African baboon bone with 29 distinct and deliberately cut notches.

Now, our very modern experience is flooded with numbers. Don’t get me wrong. Our unique fascination with numbers has more often than not has made life much less arduous in many more ways than we can readily imagine. What's more, one could consider that that previous sentence the understatement of all time.

However, many politicians and a complicit media collaboratively working for corporate interests seem to have manipulated our seemingly instinctive attraction to numbers in the recent ‘debate’ over the federal deficit. Somehow, many people are convinced that it’s more important for our government to balance its books with abstract numbers than it is to serve the unemployment, health care and infrastructure needs of tangible and real PEOPLE.

Folks, this debt deal ranks as one of the harshest pieces of legislation Congress has passed in my lifetime. (I’m 54.) It does nothing to address the country's immediate problem that has a direct impact on the quality of life for PEOPLE—joblessness. Shouldn’t the plight of PEOPLE be the government’s first priority? Abstract numbers reflecting a massive debt, while important,could have waited a year of two.