When we put things into order, we can plan more effectively

Matt Pearl

Back a couple of weeks agod, I cleaned off my desk in the office; my wife could hardly believe her eyes.

Clutter has been part of my life for nearly 37 years, and I doubt I see the end of stacks, piles and trays to sort anytime soon — but they say the first steup to getting wel is admiting I have a problem.

I have to admit that it is more pleasant to face a day’s work when the work of the day isn’t being crowded off the desk by the work of the month or that of the year. Organization has never been my strong suit, but I could get used to knowing where all my stuff is.

When we put things into order, we can plan for tomorrow much more effectively. It’s a lesson I think our nation would benefit by learning.

On the afternoon that I began sorting, pitching, filing and moving things to acomplish my directive of a manageably clean desk, there were some things I just couldn’t fix: I discovered items that should have been acted upon weeks and months ago; I found pictures and files and all sorts of things that had gone neglected in that time period. But the act of sorting forced me to deal with any mistakes and to move forward with the tasks that remained do-able.

We have, as a country, bogged ourselves down in laws, in programs, in economic norms that have left us looking at a seemingly insurmountable pile of policy and debt. It might be time to sort through things one-by-one.

I can tell you for certain that if I had not cleaned off this desk of mine, the papers and tasks would have continued to mount, adding to the headache associated with sorting through the mess later.

But by acting when I did, I discovered something that most of you have known for a long time: It’s a lot easier to keep a CLEN desk organized than it is to ORGANIZE an already messy one.

Well, it looks to me like we have a mess. Our state has a foundation formula that sorts areas of the greatest state burden in terms of expenditures, but from that formula nothing seems to get fully funded most years. And why? Legislators, the governor and others will tell you that the economy is bad, and that leaves the state budget short. But if we dig do you suppose we would see something more?

Would we see a Missouri “desk” covered in more policy than we have dollars to enact? Would we see one-time money being used to fund long-term projects? I think we just might. It’s a neat trick we learned from Washington DC, where spend now and let the next generation of legislators pay is the general policy.

Folks, the desk isn’t getting any cleaner by adding to the piles. At some point, the trash can becomes the most effective cleaning and sorting tool in the office. We can’t keep everything.

Our state and our nation are going to have to do what you and I do every month in our household budgets: we look at what we have, we decide what things we need the most, pay for those things, then fund the rest of our existence from what remains. We have learned that we can’t have everything all the time. We’re not all independently wealthy, are we? We’re used to not getting what we want all the time.

So why is it that we keep electing multi-millionaires to high office, then expect them to budget our money the way middle-class folks do? The desk is piling up, folks. Time to start cleaning.