There is a bright side to every circumstance. For example, the greatest moment of my freshman year of vet school occurred when our basement apartment flooded with sewage. Here is why.

About one month into my graduate studies at Colorado State, I decided to make homemade beer. As my wife and I were poor, newly wed, college students, I figured this would be an inexpensive way to have a beer while watching Monday Night Football. Nowadays the microbrew craze has made home-brewing idiot proof. In the 70’s we had such talented idiots that nothing was idiot proof. We home brewers utilized a lot of trial-and-error and my specialty was the error part.

My first batch was about done fermenting so I began bottling and capping. If you time the capping process correctly there is just enough residual fermentation to put a little fizz in your homebrew. If you cap things too late your beer is flat and if you cap things too early you have other problems. I capped too early.

It was a Wednesday evening, I was studying at the anatomy lab and Druann was home alone. I’m sure the explosion of the first bottle was unnerving but she quickly became accustomed to the popping sounds coming from our spare bedroom. As this was in the days before cell phones, all she could do was sit and wait for me to come home. I pedaled my bike up the driveway about midnight. Up until the time I opened the door, it seemed like a perfectly normal September night. Once in the living room, I could smell my brewery had suffered catastrophic failure.

Druann and I opened the door to the spare bedroom and quietly studied the carnage. There were busted beer bottles and pools of foamy beer everywhere. The carpet was saturated in barely and hops. I carefully opened the lid containing two cases of beer and was surprised to see four bottles still intact. “Those beers should be fine,” I optimistically quipped.

“Yeah right, look at the carpet,” Druann mumbled.

As I would come to discover later in married life, she was right. I spent most of the night on my hands and knees sopping beer into bath towels. The light of day revealed the carpet was a complete loss and I suggested pouring beer on the dry spots so as to eliminate the prominent high-water mark. I was wrong about that too.

Druann and I spent the next couple days worrying how to approach our landlords. Obviously we were responsible for the damage, but we were flat broke and had no way to make restitution. Our liquid assets consisted of four bottles of home brew which is not quite enough to trade for a new carpet.

Thinking we were in hopeless situation, that next weekend a miracle happened; our landlord’s septic line caved in and flooded our basement apartment with sewage. Standing ankle deep in toilet water, I was the happiest man in Colorado.

So you see there is a shiny side to every circumstance. For example, last week our nation’s unemployment rate hit 9.8 percent. This is a level not seen since 1983. If you add workers surviving on multiple part time jobs and people who have stopped looking for work, the effective unemployment rate is 17 percent. Socialist policies manipulating housing markets and money costs caused our mortgage crisis. Couple this with sky high energy costs due to the prohibition of domestic energy development, it is no wonder our unemployment rate is climbing. However, there is a bright side. This situation has awakened the sleeping giant of America’s freedom loving conservatives who recognize the socialist enemy.

Socialism creates dependency. Both President Obama’s climate change and healthcare proposals have the common thread of socialist redistribution of wealth via federal assistance to the poverty class. They do this under the guise of being charitable when there is nothing charitable about subjecting someone to a life of dependency. After all, federal programs are not designed to help you out of poverty; they are designed to keep you there---as a block of slaves reliably trading your vote for crumbs of assistance from your government master. I don’t much care for the bondage of socialism and I vote against it at every opportunity. Like all the tea-party and 9-12 patriots, I just want to be free.