Howdy friends and neighbors. First, I want to apologize for my last few articles. Although I wrote my opinion, I was just making fun of the same old junk that you can get from any of the mainstream media. I guess my frustration with the so-called leadership of this nation has worn me down and it showed in what I was writing. When I started this writing this weekly column, my goal was to inform and promote the business of agriculture and the rural way of life through an entertaining article. Well, lately I have sunk to a level that I am not sure I am proud of. However, I am proud of saying that my Mom could have handled the VP job but I’m glad she just taught teenagers some basic life skills instead.
I read a book recently that pointed out the importance of having a mission statement. Thus, I have come up with a mission statement to help keep me on track with my thoughts as I type this mess out each week. Here is what I came up with: “My mission is to provide my audience with an entertaining view of the world of agriculture, rural life, and cowboy logic as I see it from Sunny Point, Oklahoma.” Only under “cowboy logic” can I wonder what cows and politicians are really thinking. I will still continue to be an astute spokesman for armadillos and old feed trucks. Nowhere in this mission statement is partisan politics, thus I will strive to keep that nonsense out of my future writings.
I want to thank you for lending me your time to read this mess and I truly hope each week will be more entertaining than the last. We have been talking and studying pride at Sunday school and church. It’s time for me to eat a big scoop shovel full and thank the Lord above for the privilege to be able to write, learn, and live in the greatest country on earth. I’m so blessed to have all that I have. I truly thank the ones who have fought for our freedom and pray for the ones currently standing guard. We can so easily get caught up in the media mess and lose sight of all we do have. If it weren’t for the veterans of this nation, we wouldn’t even have a Wall Street. Let alone a crisis.
It’s time to change gears. I wonder if we might just have a media crisis! Here comes some cowboy logic and “rith-ma-tik.” Wasn’t it about a week ago that if the administration and congress didn’t pass a “bail-out” the markets were going to crash and we would have the grapes of wrath all over again? Well, I’m writing this Sunday evening and a week has gone by. It seems to be left-of-center, but we haven’t had a wreck yet. I saw an e-mail that talked about the money in the bailout and I think the numbers were off a knot or two. Man, there’re lots of knots to count and carry in this bailout. The last figure I saw was about $850 BILLION dollars ($850,000,000,000.00). Just how much money is that? Well one billion is 1000 million. So, if the US Treasury made a million dollar bill (I guess it would have Bugs Bunny on it), $850 billion would be 850,000 one million dollar bills! Okay, you’re a wheat farmer. If each kernel of wheat was worth a single dollar (this would mean hard red winter wheat would be about $15,000.00 a pound or, are you ready, $900,000.00 a bushel!!! Talk about limit up!) it would take 944,444 bushels to equal $850 Billion!!! That’s almost a million bushels of wheat if each kernel was worth a dollar. Okay cowboys, let’s say you have 160 acres of land. If you lay one-dollar bills flat over 160 acres like a blanket (in other words, had a perfect stand) you would have to stack them 54.6 feet thick to equal $850 billion dollars. (A one-dollar bill has about 15 square inches and is .0043 inches thick. One acre is 43560 square feet.) That’s pretty lush green on a good quarter of land. I still think some darn hunter would give $900 billion for it at auction! Football fans, if you lay one dollar bills like the above on a football field including the end-zones, you would have to stack the one dollar bills a mile and a quarter (1.25) high! I’m talking about dollar bills laying flat over a football field 6600 feet tall!!! Folks, it’s a lot of money. It’s basically $3000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States.
I’m Monte Tucker, and I hope to have better things to come from under my hat.
