blue trane's Journal: Balancing Budgets

I think balancing budgets becomes a fussy compulsion, almost a fetish: you want things to look neat. You want the figures to come out even, regardless of the consequences for individuals you don't know, far off at a distance somewhere. When the people who experience the repurcussions of your budget-balancing have no communication with you, and you only hear about their plight mediated through many third parties, it becomes easy to tell yourself a story about why they are suffering, and ignore or discount their real situation; because your own story, that you want your ledger book to "look nice", is so much more compelling and immediate.