Years ago, when I was thinking about keeping chickens, I went to an all-day workshop organized by the UC Cooperative Extension people on raising pastured poultry. The egg farmer who gave the workshop had kept hens for years, and had developed various systems for keeping his birds fit and happy. By all accounts, his flocks were healthy, consistently productive, and largely free of the kinds of social problems that can affect poultry communities, such as pecking on each other to the point of misery, or eating their own eggs.
This guy whitewashed the interior of the hen houses every year (apparently whitewash has some antimicrobial properties); mucked out the houses frequently; and designed coops and outside pastures for his chickens that far exceeded minimum requirements for space. His chickens were let out of the coops when the sun came up every day (so that time changed over the course of the year), and went in around sunset. So their schedule was regular and reliable. The chicken whisperer had gone to great lengths to safeguard his birds from predators, sinking hardware cloth into the ground around their houses to deter digging predators, and providing lots of trees for camouflage and protection from flying predators.
In short, and this guy said this literally over and over again, he had designed lives for his chickens that were as stress-free as he could manage. Chickens, like all living things, are affected negatively by many stressors, and their ability to lay eggs reliably and well diminishes when they feel stressed or unsafe.
I see the same phenomenon with the plants I work with. The water main at the facility where I work has broken twice (!) this summer, and that has meant that the water gets turned off, which means the plants don't get watered on those days. Since they are drenched thoroughly only a couple of times a week, missing a watering session in the summer is a problem.
That lack of water has stressed a lot of the plants. Many leaves on the butterfly bushes are yellowing; some are curling and dropping. The angelica plant, which really appreciates consistent water, has dropped its biggest leaves. Some sunflowers have thin stems and few leaves as a result of these challenges.
The annual plants, such as the sunflowers, that have experienced the stress of inconsistent watering will never realize their full potential; they won't overcome these setbacks, and they'll just be scrawnier, shorter, and much less robust than they otherwise would have been. The perennials, like the butterfly bushes, should be more resilient, and will most likely look fine next year (assuming the water issues get sorted out). But this year, they will simply not look as good as they would have if they had been reliably and sufficiently watered.
So if chickens and sunflowers really benefit from consistent, reliable care; good nutrition and proper hydration; and an awareness that, for optimal performance, stressors should be minimized or eliminated—what then might this sort of attention mean for humans? Especially with respect to the idea of limiting stressors? Many humans have a ton of pressures built into their everyday lives—long commutes; humiliating work settings; financial stressors—without the kind of consistent, healthy care and nurturing environments than can offset the effects of some of those stressors.
One of my sons took a summer writing class, and for his last assignment, he wrote a paper exploring the feasibility of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). This idea was a central plank in the platform of former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who called his UBI plan the Freedom Dividend. With a UBI, individuals regularly—for example, every month--receive a guaranteed, minimum income. Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated for the UBI in the last book he wrote, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?
My son and I talked about the UBI a lot before he wrote the paper. We both liked the idea, and were able to list a lot of potential benefits. Among them, a reliable influx of money:
*Could potentially lift a lot of American families out of poverty
*Might mean that some individuals would have the margins to make decisions that would allow them to become more clearly captains of their own lives; for example, the guaranteed income might mean that a person could reassess the necessity of working for an overbearing, demeaning boss
*Might relieve a lot of stress for people who struggle to make ends meet
*That lessened stress might, in turn, mean better physical and mental health for individuals and for the society at large, and thus might relieve some of the stress on our beleaguered health system
Would some people who received the UBI spend it on drugs or alcohol or back issues of MAD magazine? Undoubtedly. But we're talking greater good here.
So my son liked the idea of the UBI, but he wasn't convinced that such a project could be appropriately funded. In his paper, he wrote about various potential funding sources, such as a consumption or value-added tax (VAT); luxury taxes on very expensive consumer items; a reduction in the cost of certain social service programs, such as welfare and unemployment compensation, which might become obsolete or at least shrinkable in light of a guaranteed minimum income. But he didn't believe that any of these options—or even all of these options together--could result in the necessary $$.
Enter My Idea. What if every individual in the United States (and apparently we have more millionaires and more billionaires than any other country in the world) who made more than $10 million in a given year was required to turn over that excess to fund a UBI program? Don't worry, millionaires and billionaires, you can keep everything you've accumulated so far. We're not going to raid your treasure chests.
But with $10 million—even one time, one year—there's no reason why any person and that person's children and grandchildren would ever want for anything. I know there are oodles of ways that the ultra-rich loop around and behind any kind of limitation like this. But maybe we could appeal to their humanity?
Does this sound unfair to you? That whatever someone earns, he or she should get to keep? Does it sound unAmerican?
Or does it sound like a way to share the bounty a bit? To make people feel a little bit cared for, like the chickens mentioned above?