Sunny Days

You know I worry about using up the stuff on the earth.

Count up the things we use and compare that to the new things made every day. Not the stuff people make—they just take half-baked things and finish them off. It’s sunshine that starts off most everything. We cook, weave, mold, refine, extrude, burn, or bake the half-done sun-stuff like wheat dough, plastic, fiber, and oil. Remember that. We just do the last step. All things that bend easy or squish a little or smell a lot probably started off with sunshine.

Lots of the half-baked stuff is underground--that’s oil and coal. But a lot is on top. Some even ready to use--like chickens, trees, horses, and potatoes. But we finish off most of this stuff for tires, tofu, bandaids, plastic Barbies, bug spray, wigs, deck chairs, and even polyester jumpsuits. We just love making stuff.

That’s not bad. I make lot of stuff. You do too, I bet. We just never checked our sunshine account before. Now the bad news—There’s a sunshine deficit! Just like the dollar.

Before, we had a surplus. The sun is really big and it takes a lot of people to use it up. Well now there are lots of people and poof—the extra is gone.

We don’t want to use up everything and fight over the crumbs. We need a way to keep track track of what comes in and what goes out. Sunshine accounts. Everybody gets an one. Everybody gets a debit card, too. Every month there is a deposit, just like Social Security for old folks. The sun puts it in and you take it out.

You’ll know when you overspend. You get the bill at the end of the month. Even worse, they turn you down in the store. Overdrawn again. Too many things, not enough sun.

Some tricky questions come up right away. How much sunshine goes into your account. I say divide up the country: everyone gets a couple hundred acres and we measure the sunshine on it. That’s what you get. I feel sorry for the Swedes and some other folks who don’t have much sun, but we can give away some from Arizona to them.

And those poor countries on the Equator, boy, do they have sunshine. Their accounts will overflow. They can sell off their sunshine for non-sun stuff like cement and steel. I see big skyscrapers on the Amazon.

I hope this works. It’s a whole lot better than being hungry in a big, cold house full of plastic toys. A lot better.