Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the importance of government spending on essential services that may not be visible but become invaluable in times of need.
Nancy Gibbs emphasizes that while taxpayers may question government expenditures, many of these investments fund crucial safety measures that protect society. These 'invisible' services often go unnoticed until they are critically needed, illustrating the idea that the value of such spending is often recognized only in times of crisis.
In practice
During a town hall meeting discussing budget allocations.
Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.
Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.
The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.
Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.
All our efforts to guard and guide our children may just get in the way of the one thing they need most from us: to be deeply loved yet left alone so they can try a new skill, new slang, new style, new flip-flops. So they can trip a few times, make mistakes, cross them out, try again, with no one keeping score.
Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It's the nature of the process.
Learn young about hard work and manners - and you'll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.
Consideration is the soil in which wisdom may be expected to grow, and strength be given to every up-springing plant of duty.
The noblest mind the best contentment has
If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.
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