Saving the Country, One Quarter at a Time

Our family recently returned from a trip to Washington DC. While we were visiting, many of the radio stations were discussing the mounting debt crisis and possible solutions. I might just be a small-town girl from Indiana, but it was clear to me there were many ways to solve the country’s financial crisis right there in DC. So let me offer some suggestions.



1) The Obama children are off school for summer vacation. Why not turn to the trusted way of generations of kids for earning a few bucks in the hot days of July? The Obama girls could set up a lemonade stand on the White house lawn. Tourists could buy a cup of lemonade for the reasonable price of $200 or be brought to the ground by the Secret Service. Your choice.

2) Speaking of untapped White House resources, I saw Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden. I’ve seen bigger veggie patches in window gardens in New York City. If she really wants to help the country out, she should consider a bigger spread and start selling tomatoes to reduce the national debt. At $500 a veggie, we could put a dent in that debt number in no time.




Do you see the vegetable garden that every news organization talked about when it was planted this Spring? Yeah, neither do I.  It's a tiny blob on the side.



3) As we were visiting DC, we saw many monuments and museums. Which brings me to several ways we could reap financial savings. First of all, many of the memorials had pools with big signs forbidding the throwing of coins. They said such an act would defile the monument. They say “defile,” I say cha ching…free money!”



Big fountain = big potential for quarters.


4) And speaking of monuments, there are some sort of sculpture memorial to every ethnic group we’ve ever wronged. Let me take care of this so we can stop the madness.



Really, really sorry

 We’re all really, really sorry already. 


There, I said it with sad puppy dog eyes and kitten faces. So let's move on and stop building "guilt" monuments and paying workers thousands of dollars to scrub off the daily influx of pigeon poop.

Not sure how we wronged the Easter bunny, but from the size of the monument, it must have been pretty bad!

5) Now let’s talk museums. We visited the Hirshhorn which is this huge round building next to the Mall in Washington. Let me give you an idea of where your tax dollars are going.

There was one room that had nothing except yarn hanging from the ceiling. I looked closely expecting this yarn to be made of something special like locks from Hercules’ head. Uh, no. Plain yarn like you’d buy at WalMart.

How about we stop hanging the stuff from the ceiling and crochet something useful out of it? I’m sure people (and by people, I mean the weirdo artsy types who sit around pontificating on the deeper meaning of yarn hanging from ceilings) would pay big bucks for a beanie created from artsy yarn. Even if it didn’t contain the DNA from Greek gods.

6) The Hirshhorn also has one large room dedicated to darkness. The exhibit is called “Black Box” and essentially it’s a room you walk into that has the lights turned off so you see nothing but darkness. Some artsy type with a yarn beanie was talking about how it was "life changing." I bet she’d love my basement, maybe even enough to make a large donation to the national debt.

7) Guarding all of these national “treasures” were dozens of watchful guards who made sure you didn’t get close enough to actually touch the yarn, cause that stuff’s irreplaceable. $2 a skein at WalMart. I’m just saying.

There were also lines on the floor to keep you a respectable distance from the sculptures. Cause it would be a crying shame to lose a national treasure like this:

By the way, the national treasure is the sculpture, not my son. Though he's a treasure in a different way.

Or this:

Notice all the pictures I took are outside. No cameras were allowed in the actual building.  Not sure why.  I'm thinking it was to prevent uneducated non-artsy bloggers from making fun of the yarn.  (Did I mention, $2 a skein at Walmart?). 

Or maybe the flash photography would ruin the life changing experience of being shoved into a dark room and told it was art.

At any rate, there were plenty of museum guards to tell us to keep our cameras in our bags and our grubby fingers to ourselves.

If we really have a money problem in this country, we could send those guides to more lucrative sites. Like the White House lemonade and veggie stand.