Life After The Stimulus

So the stimulus package has passed and the idealogues are weighing in. In the past, I used to find interest in this back and forth banter. Now, I seek a more engaging conversation or perhaps question. I find myself asking what my role in the recovery is? As I post this very message, I feel like the farmer who knows that the rainy season is coming. There are five questions in my mind that are helping to prepare my family's "economic farmland" for the upcoming planting season:

1. What is my land best positioned to consistently harvest?
2. What tools and resources should I be buying?
3. Is my farm positioned to make it until the rainy season arrives?
4. What are the lessons from harvests pasts that must be deployed to give us the best shot at winning?
5. Is there balance in my system that is capable of supporting long term growth, sustainability, and renewal?

These questions all provide introspective homework that will help me get after my role in the economic recovery...and yet, yet, yet as soon as I type those words I am reminded that my purpose in this effort is not to recover what was lost. Instead, my role and interest in this endeavour is to establish a greater rate of economic efficiency and a wider sense of economic justice throughout the world. As I build my economic farm to generate the next "economic harvest," I am using improved economic efficiency and expanded economic justice as new criteria for judging the effictiveness of my family's farming efforts.