When I was eight, my family visited an uncle, aunt, and two cousins who worked a farm in southwestern Minnesota, a place like Little House on the Prairie but with cars instead of buckboards. My suburban California background left me unprepared for life as it was lived in rural America where your nearest neighbor’s house could be seen only by the mind’s eye, not by the eyes in one’s head – even with the aid of binoculars. To an unsophisticated lad from a neighborhood where paved streets, concrete curbs and sidewalks, and hedges, picket fences, and cinder block walls were the norm, life on 140 acres of amber waves of grain gave fodder for memories that have lived in me for seven decades.

The chickens running wild in the barnyard, the pigs snorting in an adjoining muddy pen, and the cows scattered in a pasture without apparent boundaries greeted me even before the relatives I had never met before came into view. There were catfish in the cows’ watering trough to keep things clean there, I was told. Later I watched slack-jawed as my uncle and cousin clamped rings into pig snouts. When I joined an errand to town in an old Chevy and we found our way into a wild, lightning-peppered thunderstorm (at home we had sprinklers on lawns, rare winter showers but never thunder and lightning). The next morning a dead owl, victim of a lightning strike, fallen from a driveway utility pole, cemented my wide-eyed observance of the storm’s potential danger. Gathering raw materials for meals from the barnyard and vegetable garden instead of the grocery store expanded my fourth-grade horizons. The hand pump for water in the kitchen was like the ones I saw on cowboy shows set in the wild west, but seeing it up close brought amazement as did the stuffed-figure Neanderthal in the museum I met on a class trip. It marked the absence of indoor plumbing, including hot water heaters and toilets. I found a weird joy in seeing the outhouse supplied with an old Sears & Roebuck catalogue as backup for an empty t.p. roll.

The kitchen pump intrigued me until I discovered that bathing took place in the kitchen as one stood in a large wash tub while a mother tended the water from pump and stove for a comfortable temperature and soaped and rinsed the tub-stander until toweling was done. Thankfully, I was spared this embarrassment but its prospect dampened my verve for subsequent Minnesota farm visits. On the other hand, the farm bathtub helped me understand the old proverb about “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

I try to avoid muddying this column with political tripe. Usually there is enough going on inside each of us individually that we need not add the passel of complicating topics created by joint human ventures. But the present White House raid on excesses in government spending is all too rash not to be characterized as “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” The needs of the poor, sick, handicapped, marginalized, and otherwise vulnerable of the world are being burnt on the altar of selfishness. Religions worth their salt are one in making the needs of the needy a high priority. A Higher Power supreme over the universe recognizes the weak as well as the strong. The person with maturity of spirit knows that he/she is derived and accountable for all others who are derived also. It appears that the laudable effort of staunching wastefulness is being waged without regard to those with little or no voice to plead their case.

I move that those with free, mature spirits raise their voices together and call out to Washington D.C.: “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Is there a second?