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Raven Rock. A House Divided · I Believe

• 0:29
  unknown: Act one.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: The mountain.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: Danny Kowalski's alarm went off at 4:15.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: He dressed in the dark so he wouldn't wake the baby.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: Jeans, thermal, boots, his wife, Sarah, still asleep on her side, one arm over her belly where the second one was growing.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_03: He pulled the door shut, stood in the cold on the landing of their apartment in Chambersburg, and waited for the truck.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_03: Rick pulled up at 4:30 with the headlights off until Danny waved.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_03: Kyle was already in the back seat.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_03: Danny climbed in, took the thermos of gas station coffee Kyle handed him.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: They drove south on 11 and picked up 16East toward the mountain.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody talked much.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: The radio was on low.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: A voice was saying something about the billionaire tax started by a senator from Vermont.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: Rick reached for the dial and turned it up a little.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_03: The bill had passed.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: 5% a year on anybody worth more than a billion dollars.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_03: $3,000 for every American making under$150.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_03: The president had signed it that morning.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: The numbers floated through the cab the way numbers do at 4 30 in the morning when you haven't finished your coffee.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: Kyle said something from the back seat that might have been, we'll see, or might have been nothing.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: Rick turned it back down.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_03: They were three men on a six-month contract doing electrical work for the federal government inside a top secret facility most Americans had never heard of and weren't supposed to think about.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: Danny had his journeyman's card, 18 months.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: This was the best job he'd had since he got it.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_03: Prevailing wage, 35 an hour.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_03: More than his father ever made, more than most of the guys he graduated with would ever see.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: He knew that.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody told him that.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: Doing the math again on the back of an envelope.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: And coming up short the same way you came up short last month.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't buy expensive stuff.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: They even stopped eating beef.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_03: He had a new baby coming.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: His father had made less and owned a house by 30.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: The road climbed, houses thinned, farms gave way to timber, timber to the Blue Ridge, dark against a sky that wasn't black anymore, mist hung in the hollows.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: This was the gap where Stewart's cavalry had come through after Gettysburg, though Danny didn't know that.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: The land knew it, the road knew it.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: The mountains on either side were old enough to have seen it all and said nothing.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: They turned off 16 at the access road and stopped at the first gate.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Rick handed over the badges.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Pentagon police had seen them every day for almost six months, but it didn't matter.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: The guard checked them against a list and looked in the truck bed and waved them through.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: They parked in the lot and walked to the portal.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: The portal was the size of a stadium entrance cut into the side of the mountain.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't look like it belonged there.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: It looked like something a country would build, only if it really believed the world might end and that it was worth spending whatever it cost to make sure the government survived.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: The tram was down.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Walking today, the site foreman said.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: He was a retired master sergeant named Colvin, who had been working at the complex for eleven years.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: He referred to it only as the rock.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: He said it the way a man talks about a church he's attended all his life.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Respect.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: No explanation.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: They started into the tunnel.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Danny had been on the job three weeks, but he still wasn't used to the walk.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: The tunnel was wide enough for trucks.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: The walls were rough cut and dark and wet under the fluorescent strips that ran along the ceiling in an unbroken line that curved away ahead of them until the curve swallowed it.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: The first time he'd made this walk, Colvin had stopped the crew about 200 yards in and put his hand flat on the wall.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone thinks this is granite, he'd said.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, it's greenstone, metabasalt, granite fractures.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: This doesn't.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: It absorbs the force and holds together.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's why they picked this mountain.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Danny didn't know what metabasalt was.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: He'd nodded the way you nod when someone tells you something you know you're supposed to care about.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: But the word had stuck with him.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Greenstone.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: A rock so hard they'd tunneled deep and blasted half a million cubic yards out of this mountain in ten months and built a city inside the hole.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: They walked, heavy packs.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: The daylight behind them faded and then disappeared around the curve.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: The air changed.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was cool and constant, a temperature that had nothing to do with the season.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: The hum of the ventilation was everywhere, sourceless, the way silence is in a place that has never been silent.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Kyle made a joke about something and his voice sounded different in the tunnel.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Smaller.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't make another one.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Danny counted his steps sometimes, not because he wanted to know the distance, because counting was something to do while the mountain pressed down on him from every direction.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: He knew the rock above him was hundreds of feet thick.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: The tunnel curved to deflect a blast wave.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Behind the doors at the end of this walk were five three-story buildings that weren't attached to the walls.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: They were mounted on springs, so they'd ride out the shock wave of a nuclear detonation the way a boat rides a swell.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: He knew all this because Colvin had told them, and because Colvin loved telling them, and because the telling was part of how Colvin made the place make sense to himself.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: They walked for 30 minutes, maybe more.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Danny's boots were loud on the concrete and the sound bounced off the greenstone and came back to him changed.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: They just kept going, deeper into the mountain.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_03: Then the blast doors.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_03: They were enormous.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_03: Not in the way a building is enormous where you stand back and take it in.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_03: To seal a mountain shut while the surface of the earth burned.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: Lately Danny walked through them every morning.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_03: He showed his badge again on the other side, and picked up his tools and went to work, pulled wire, ran conduit, terminated panels in rooms where generals would sit if the worst day in human history ever came.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_03: He did it well.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: He was good with his hands, and he was careful.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: And he took pride in the work, the same way his father had taken pride in his work at the shop, and his grandfather before that.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: At lunch, he sat on a chair near some old antenna and at the sandwich Sarah had made him.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't have his phone.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: Even if he had, there was no signal inside the mountain.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: He'd check it when he got back to the truck.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: He thought about Sarah still in bed when he left.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_03: The baby, Lily, fourteen months old.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: Who had started walking three months ago and kept pulling herself up on the coffee table and falling and pulling herself up again.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_03: He thought about the one coming.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: April, they said.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: A boy.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_03: He hadn't told the crew yet.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't know why.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe because saying it out loud would make the math louder too.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_03: Another mouth.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: Another body in an apartment where four would be tight.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: Another reason Sarah couldn't work.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_03: Even if they could find daycare that didn't cost more than she'd make at the pharmacy where she'd been before Lily came.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: He finished the sandwich and walked down the corridor to fill his water bottle.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_03: On the way back, he passed the bunk rooms.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: He'd seen them before, but today he stopped.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: The racks were six high, maybe eight, bolted to the wall, bare mattresses on metal frames stacked so close together, a man would have to roll sideways to get in.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_03: Colvin had said they were hot bunks.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_03: One shift climbed out.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: The next shift climbed in.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_03: Mattress still warm from somebody else's body.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_03: Sailors and soldiers sleeping in shifts in the belly of a mountain.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: Everything accounted for.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody had planned this.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody had thought about how many people would need to sleep and for how long.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: And how to keep them rested enough to function through the end of the world.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_03: Danny looked at the racks for a minute and then went back to work.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: That evening, they walked back out, up and up and up.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: The tunnel was the same in both directions.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: The mountain didn't care which way you were going.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: When they came out of the portal, the sky was gray and the air smelled like rain on leaves.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: And Danny stood there for a second and breathed it in.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Three weeks on the job, and this was the part he looked forward to.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not the paycheck, not the drive home.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: The moment he walked out of the mountain and the sky was still there, Rick drove them back through the gap.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Danny sat in the backseat and watched the blue ridge go dark against the last light and thought about the copay for Sarah's appointment on Thursday.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: About paying for the delivery.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: They would have the money.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: That wasn't the problem.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: The problem was that they always had it the way you always have it when you're choosing which thing to pay for and which thing to push back.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't drowning.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: They were treading water in a current that never stopped, and the shore was always the same distance away.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: He got home at 6:30.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Lily was in the high chair to keep her in one place.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sarah had made pasta.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: She looked tired and he knew he couldn't fix it.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: She'd finished her degree before Lily came.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't talk about it much anymore.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: He kissed her, picked up Lily.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: She grabbed his ear and he sat down at the table.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Good day, Sarah said.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he said.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: The tram was down, so we walked in.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Long walk.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: How long?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Half an hour, maybe 45 minutes.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Through the tunnel, all the way to the blast doors.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: She shook her head.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: All that.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: For what?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't answer.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't know what she meant.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: She might have meant the walk.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: She might have meant all of it.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: The mountain, the bunker, the billions of dollars the government had spent to build a city underground so that in the event of nuclear war, the right people would survive.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: She might have meant something simpler about a 26-year-old electrician who did everything right and who walked through a mountain every morning and came home every night to an apartment where the math never worked, no matter how many times he did it.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't know what she meant, but he heard it.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: He ate his pasta, and they gave Lily a bath and put her down, and then they sat on the couch, and Sarah fell asleep with her head on his shoulder, and he sat there in the quiet with the television on low, and the dishes in the sink, and the bills on the counter, and the baby asleep, and the next baby coming, and the greenstone mountain somewhere out there in the dark, full of springs and blast doors and reservoirs and generators, built to survive the end of the world.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: He thought about nothing in particular, and he thought about everything.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Act two.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: Three weeks later, Sarah called while he was in the truck on the way home.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_03: Rick's phone rang.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_03: Sarah had his number for emergencies.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's Sarah, Rick said and handed the phone back.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: It came, she said.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_03: What came?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: That check.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: The three thousand.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's in the account.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_03: Danny didn't say anything for a second.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_03: He looked out the window at the blue ridge going dark the way it did every evening.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_03: The ridgeline holding the last light like it was deciding whether to let it go.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_03: All of it?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: He said.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_03: All of it.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_03: $3,000.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: Kyle heard it from the front seat and turned around.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody's getting it.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody making under$150, Danny said.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_03: Kyle shook his head.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_03: Took it from some guy in California and put it in your checking account.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: That's America.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody said anything after that.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: Rick drove.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_03: The mountains went dark.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_03: That night, after they put Lily down, Danny sat at the kitchen table with Sarah, and they looked at the bank balance on her phone.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: It was the most money they'd had in the account since the wedding.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_03: Not because$3,000 was a fortune.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_03: Because they'd never had a month where something wasn't already owed against everything that came in.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_03: The money sat there in the account like a clearing in the woods after a large tree falls.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: Open space where there had never been open space before.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: She wrote them down on the back of an envelope.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: The same envelope Danny used for the math that never worked.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: This time it worked.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: There was money left over.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: We can go to Bistro, Danny said.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like we used to.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: They used to go on dates there, but they hadn't been since Lily was born.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sarah looked at him.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: I know we don't have to.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: She looked at the list and then at him, and then she said, Yeah.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's go to Bistro.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: They got a sitter.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sarah's mother came over and held Lily on her hip and told them to take their time, and they drove to Bistro 71 and sat in a booth by the window.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Water to drink.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: She loved wine, but couldn't have it with a baby on the way.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Then her favorite, the Brusquetta.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: They split a steak, a special treat, because they had stopped eating beef to save money for the baby.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Then a creme brulee.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: She laughed and talked, and Danny could see the woman he'd met before the apartment and the baby and the bills and the math, the woman who'd been halfway through her degree when they started dating, who used to argue with him about things he'd never thought about and win every time.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: He never knew what she saw in him, but he was glad she saw it.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: I forgot what this was like, she said.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sitting somewhere that wasn't the apartment, eating something that wasn't pasta, being two people at a table instead of two people managing a household that was always one invoice away from coming apart.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't talk about money.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: They didn't talk about the delivery or the car seat or the truck.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_03: Danny told her about Colvin and the Greenstone, and how the buildings inside the mountain were on springs.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_03: Sarah laughed and said that sounded like something out of a movie.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_03: He told her about the blast doors, and she shook her head the same way she'd shaken it when she said, All that.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: For what?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: But this time, she was smiling.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_03: He thought about telling her about the bunk rooms, but didn't.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't want to bring the mountain to the table.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: Not tonight.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: Danny paid the bill.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_03: A little more than a hundred dollars with tip.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't do the math against the balance.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: He just paid it.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_03: It felt like the beginning of something.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_03: Like maybe this was how it was supposed to work.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: You do the job, you get the card.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: The government does something right for once.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: And you take your wife to dinner and you don't count it against the balance.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe this was the corner they'd been waiting to turn.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: They drove home with the windows down because the night was warm for March, and Sarah put her hand on his arm.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_03: And they didn't say much.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_03: The road was dark and the air smelled like the last of winter giving way.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_03: And Danny drove under the speed limit because he didn't want the night to end.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_03: It was the best night they'd had in a long time.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Two weeks later, she went to the grocery store, she went on a Saturday morning while Danny stayed home with Lily.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: They loved to watch old cartoons together, they got on DVDs at the library, and Sarah loved the break.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: She had a list, the usual.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Diapers, pasta, chicken, bread, eggs.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: She pushed the cart through the aisles and put things in and didn't think about the prices until she got to the eggs.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: A dozen eggs cost six dollars.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: She stood there, picked up the carton and looked at it the way you look at something that has changed without telling you it was going to change.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Put it in the cart.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: She went down the next aisle, diapers were up, formula was up, bread was up.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: She kept putting things in the cart because you buy what your family needs and you figure it out later.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: But by the time she got to the meat case, she had already done the math in her head and knew.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: The beef.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: The ground chuck was$9 a pound.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: It had been six before the checks went out.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't know if the checks had caused it, didn't know anything about monetary policy or demand curves or inflation.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: She just knew that the ground chuck was nine dollars and the strip was nineteen and the chicken was up too.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Everything was up, and the three thousand dollars was almost gone, and what was left was buying less than what they'd had before it came.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: She bought the chicken, put the ground chuck back, she drove home, Danny helped her carry the bags up the stairs and put the groceries away, and Sarah watched him from the table where she was feeding Lily.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't ask what things cost because he had heard the guys say prices had gone up.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: The checks went out and everyone went to the grocery store with money they hadn't had before, and the grocery store raised its prices because that's what happens when everyone shows up with money.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: How bad?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: He said.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Eggs are six dollars.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: He nodded.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: She wiped Lily's mouth.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: The car seat's still in the cart online.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't buy it yet.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we should wait.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Danny put the last bag in the cabinet and stood there with his hands on the counter and looked out the window at the parking lot and the dumpster and the other apartment building across the way where someone was carrying groceries up their stairs.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Same as him.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: $3,000.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was already down to$800, and they'd been careful.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: They'd paid the delivery copay and the two months on the truck, and they'd gone to the bistro one time and bought groceries.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that was it.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: They hadn't been reckless, they hadn't bought anything they didn't need.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: The money just went where money goes when everything costs more than it did a month ago.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Sarah said from the table.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: My mom said everyone's saying the same thing.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: The money came and the prices came with it.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_03: Danny didn't answer.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_03: She said it's like getting a raise that isn't a raise.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_03: He thought about his father.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: His father had made less and owned a house by thirty, and eaten beef whenever he wanted.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_03: And never once, as far as Danny knew, stood in a grocery store doing math in his head about a carton of eggs.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: Something had changed between then and now and it wasn't Danny.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_03: And it wasn't how hard Danny worked.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_03: And it wasn't the$3,000 that had come and gone like a wave that picks you up and sets you down in the same place.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna go check on the truck, he said.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_03: He didn't need to check on the truck.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: He needed to stand outside for a minute.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: The way he needed to stand outside the portal every evening when he came out of the mountain and the sky was still there.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: He stood in the parking lot.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: The air was cool and the sky was gray.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: And somewhere out past the blue ridge, past the gap, past the gate and the tunnel, and the green stone walls, and the blast doors, the mountain was still there.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: Full of bunks and generators and reservoirs and springs built to survive the end of the world.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: Built because somebody decided it was worth building.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody had built anything for Sarah.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_03: The check was supposed to be the building.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: The$3,000 was supposed to be the thing the government finally built for people like him.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_03: And it came and they went to Bistro.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: And he went on a date with Sarah for the first time in a year.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: And for one night she looked like the woman he'd married.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_03: And the math worked.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_03: And now the math didn't work again.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: And the eggs were six dollars, and the car seat was still in the online cart, and the baby was coming.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: And now everything was more expensive again.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_03: He went back inside.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_03: Lily was on the floor pulling herself up on the coffee table and falling and pulling herself up again.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_03: Sarah was at the sink.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_03: We'll be okay, he said.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_03: I know, she said.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_03: She didn't turn around.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: They weren't drowning, but they weren't swimming either.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: The current wouldn't stop and the shore stayed where it is.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: They kept treading water because that's what you do.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_03: Because you're 26 and you have your card, and your baby's learning to walk, and the new one is coming, and you did everything right.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: You did everything right and the check came.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: And the check went.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_03: And you're still here.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to I Believe, where we talk about America.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Joel Douglas, and I believe in America.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining me.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: Act 3.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: A House Divided.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: June 1858.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: Abraham Lincoln stood in the Illinois State Capitol.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: He was not yet president.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: He was a lawyer from Springfield running for the Senate against Stephen Douglas, and his advisors told him not to say it.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: Too radical, too dangerous.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: He said it anyway.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: A house divided against itself cannot stand.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Most people remember this as a moral argument against slavery.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: That was only part of the argument.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: Lincoln believed slavery was wrong, but that night in Springfield he was making a structural argument.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: The nation could not endure permanently half slave and half free.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: Not because God would punish it, not because the slaves would rise, because a system built on a contradiction will be destroyed by that contradiction.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: A house divided.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: The beams can't support the roof and ignore the foundation.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: The roof will come down.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Not from an external blow, but from the weight of its own dishonesty.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: Lincoln understood this because he was, before anything else, a lawyer.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: He thought in terms of logic, structure, and non-contradiction.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: A thing cannot both be and not be at the same time.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot stand on the beach and the mountaintop simultaneously.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: You have to choose.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Without this principle, we could not know anything that we do know.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: Truth becomes impossible.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: Debate becomes theater.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Everything is true and nothing is.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln applied that principle to the nation.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: In an 1862 meditation, he wrote, God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: The Union could not be for freedom and for slavery.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: It could not promise liberty and deliver chains.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: The contradiction would find the load-bearing wall and tear it down.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: He was right.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: It took a war that killed more Americans than every other American war combined, but the House fell exactly the way Lincoln said it would.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: Not from foreign invasion, from the fracture that had been in the foundation since the beginning.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln's argument went further than the House divided speech.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: In a piece called Fragments of a Tariff Discussion, Lincoln wrote that at creation, the Almighty said, In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then Lincoln made the claim that should be carved above the door of every chamber of government in this country to secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor or as nearly as possible is a most worthy object of any good government.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: That is the standard.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not charity, not transfer, not a check in the mail.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: The product of your labor, the government's job is not to take money from someone in California and give Danny Kowalski$3,000.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: The government's job is to build a system where Danny's$35 an hour is enough, where the product of his labor sustains the life he's building, where Sarah's degree leads somewhere, where a man who works inside a mountain every day can feed his family beef if he wants to, and take his wife to dinner because he earned it, not because we taxed somebody in California to make it possible.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: That is what Lincoln meant.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: That is what the Constitution means when it says establish justice and promote the general welfare.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not welfare programs.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Welfare is the well-being and faring well of every citizen, a system designed so that work produces a life worth living.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: Today we are again a house divided.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: We have built an economy that promises Danny the product of his labor, and then designs rules that make that product insufficient.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: He earns more than his father, he has less than his father had.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: His father owned a house by thirty on lower wages.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: Danny and Sarah rent an apartment where four will be tight, with the same work, the same ethic, the same pride, and it buys less every year.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: Not because Danny failed, but because the rules changed.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: We think about tax codes with loopholes that let corporations paper their way out of obligation.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Trade deals that sent the jobs Danny's father might have worked to countries Danny has never been to.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: Corporate consolidation that killed the competition that once kept prices honest.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: Housing costs that rose faster than wages for thirty straight years.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Daycare that costs more than the income it's supposed to free up.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: A system that tells Danny to work hard and then moves the finish line while he's running.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: The system is broken.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not the root cause of the problem.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: The root cause of the problem is that when the distance between the promise and the reality becomes too obscene to ignore, we don't fix the system.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, the government writes a check.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: I do not hate the check.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: I want to be clear about that.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Sanders is not wrong that America's inequality is real.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: He is not wrong that 938 billionaires holding eight trillion dollars while Danny can't afford eggs is a crisis.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: He is not wrong that Danny needs help.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: But the check is a contradiction.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: It is the government saying the system we built does not deliver the product of your labor, so we will take the product of someone else's labor and give it to you instead.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: That is not justice.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: That is the confession that justice has failed.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: The check is not the solution.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: The check is the government being for Danny and against him at the same time.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: It promises him the product of his labor with one hand, and confesses that the system cannot deliver it with the other.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: Three thousand dollars went into every pocket in Chambersburg, and the grocery store raised its prices because that's what happens when everyone shows up with more money and the shelves hold the same amount of food.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: President Lincoln would recognize this.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: A system that promises the product of your labor and cannot deliver it is at war with itself.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: A system that tries to resolve that war by seizing and transferring wealth instead of fixing its own architecture is a system destroying itself.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: Lincoln told us in 1858, at the cost of nearly everything, that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: Still, there is a principle older than Lincoln, older than the Constitution, older than the Republic, the simplest command we have ever been given, and the hardest to follow.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: Love one another, the whole of the law and the prophets.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: Love is not a transfer.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: You don't love your neighbor by taking from one man's labor and putting it in another man's pocket, while the house falls down around both of them.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: That isn't love.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: You love your neighbor by building a house where the product of every man's work sustains his life, where every room is sound, where a man with a journeyman's card and a woman with a degree and a baby who's learning to walk can live on the work of their own hands and the dignity that comes with it.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: Danny Kowalski does not need a check.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: He needs a system that keeps its promise.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_02: Dishes in the kitchen sink, radio humming.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: The birds are singing, calling in the morning breeze, pictures on the shelf, whispers of another life, footsteps fading, feeling hearted, chasing a meeting light.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not running up beyond any more time.