We were gone for a week.
Seven days. One hundred and sixty-eight hours. Sunny, our dog, was in perfectly capable hands the entire time — fed, walked, loved on, and by all accounts living her best life. She did not suffer. She did not pine away in a corner. She was, by every available measure, fine.
None of that mattered when we returned and she laid eyes on us.
What happened when we walked through that door was less a greeting and more a full psychological event. Sunny lost her entire mind. Not in a polite, tail-wagging, glad-you’re-home kind of way. In a spinning, leaping, full-body-vibrating, I-thought-you-were-dead-and-now-you’re-not kind of way. She ran laps around the living room for no reason. She came back. She ran another lap. She made a sound I can only describe as a yodel of pure relief. She looked at Honey Doodle, then at me, then at the Wild Things, then back at Honey Doodle, as if she needed to confirm we were all still accounted for before she could begin the formal celebration.
It took her approximately two days to calm down enough to sit still, and even then she has been overjoyed to have her humans back in her life.
Now. I love Sunny. I love her completely and without reservation, and I say what I’m about to say with great affection.
Sunny has absolutely no idea what a week is.
She does not know we were gone for seven days. She does not know we were gone for seven minutes. From Sunny’s perspective, we left, and then — at some point that her brain cannot quantify or contextualize — we came back. The gap between those two events is simply a void. A blank. A loading screen with no progress bar.
She experienced our return not as the end of a week but as the end of everything. As far as Sunny is concerned, we may have been gone since the Eisenhower administration. She has no way of knowing. She has no frame of reference. Her world is the house, the yard, the people in it, and whatever is happening right now. That is the whole world. That is all of it.
It made me pause and think and ponder the world around us. Which is dangerous and the source of many of my columns. Here’s where I landed:
That is a genuinely lovely way to live, if you are a dog.
It is a catastrophic way to live if you are a human being.
Sunny’s world is small by design. She knows the yard. She knows the people. She knows the mailman is a threat that she personally neutralizes every single day through the sheer force of her barking, and she is quite proud of this. The mailman always leaves. Sunny always wins. She has never once considered the possibility that the mailman was going to leave anyway, that his departure has nothing to do with her, that he is simply a man with a route and a schedule and a complete indifference to whatever is happening behind our front door.
Sunny does not know this. Sunny cannot know this. Sunny is a dog.
The problem is that a significant portion of the American public is out here doing the exact same thing, and they have opposable thumbs and a vote.
Dr. Anthony Fauci sat before Congress last week. And the people who have spent the last several years convinced that he personally invented COVID in a laboratory, released it specifically to inconvenience them, and then orchestrated a global conspiracy involving millions of doctors, nurses, scientists, and pharmacists across every country on earth — those people were excited about this.
Here is what those people believe, stripped down to its bones: COVID was an American story. It happened here. It was done to us. By someone. Probably him.
Here is what actually happened: a virus moved across the entire planet. It killed over seven million people in countries that have never heard of Anthony Fauci and couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. It overwhelmed hospitals in Italy, in Brazil, in India, in places where American politics are about as relevant as Sunny’s opinion on the mailman. The world got sick. The whole world.
But if your world is the yard, and the yard is America, and America is the only thing that exists — then yes, it must have been the mailman. He was right there. He showed up every day. He has to be responsible for something.
Sunny would understand this reasoning completely. That does not make it correct.
The economy cratered after COVID. Inflation hit. Prices went up on everything from eggs to lumber. And both political parties did what both political parties always do, which is point at each other with the confidence of a dog who has just located the source of a smell.
The Democrats said it was the Republicans. The Republicans said it was the Democrats. Cable news ran the same argument on a loop for three years, occasionally pausing to run the argument again in a slightly different font.
Meanwhile, the entire world was experiencing the same inflation. Europe. Asia. Latin America. Countries that have never had a Democrat or a Republican in their lives were watching their grocery bills climb for the exact same reasons ours were — supply chains shattered by a global pandemic, energy markets disrupted by a war in Ukraine, and the entirely predictable economic consequences of the entire planet getting sick and then trying to start back up again.
This was a global economic event. But if your world is the yard, you don’t see the other yards. You just see your food bowl, and it’s empty, and somebody in this house is responsible.
Sunny blames the cat, by the way. We don’t have a cat. This fact has not changed her position.
Want another example? Let’s talk about tariffs, because this one is my personal favorite examplea of dog-brain economics, and I mean that in the most technically precise way possible.
A tariff, as it has been explained to a grateful nation by legions of confident people on television, is how we punish foreign countries for their bad behavior. We slap a tariff on their goods, they feel the pain, they come crawling back to the negotiating table, and America wins. Simple. Satisfying. The economic equivalent of barking until the mailman leaves.
Here is what a year-plus of actual economic study and experience found: American consumers and American companies paid somewhere between 90 and 100 percent of those tariff costs themselves. The foreign country did not pay. The foreign country charged the same price it always charged. The American importer paid the tariff, passed it to the American retailer, who passed it to the American consumer, who paid more for the item.
We barked. The mailman left on his regular schedule. We celebrated. And then we paid for our own fence.
Sunny does this every single day and she has never once questioned the results. She is a dog. She gets a pass.
The tariff enthusiasts, I’m afraid, do not.
And then — because the world is a web and not a yard — the countries on the other end of those tariffs retaliated with their own tariffs on American goods, which meant American farmers and manufacturers started losing markets they’d spent decades building, which meant the whole thing got considerably more complicated than “we punished them and they felt it.”
Sunny has on occasion triggered a retaliatory barking incident with the neighbor’s dog that resulted in both dogs being sent inside and nobody winning anything. She has done this, but she has never claimed it was a strategy.
Let’s see, we’ve done COVID, inflation, and tariffs and you’re still reading, so let’s see if we can take care of that with the next topic. Immigration. Now there’s a word that will clear a room or start a fight, depending on the room.
The conversation in this country treats the situation at the southern border as a uniquely American problem — our border, our crisis, our failure, our fault, pick your preferred framing. The argument is entirely domestic. The solutions proposed are entirely domestic. The outrage is entirely domestic.
Meanwhile, Europe is straining under the largest migration pressures it has seen since World War II. Latin American countries are managing their own internal migration crises. The same forces — conflict, climate, economic collapse, the simple human instinct to move toward somewhere better — are pushing people across borders on every continent simultaneously.
This is a global phenomenon. It has global causes. It will require, at minimum, a global awareness to even begin addressing.
But Sunny only sees the squirrel in her yard. She has no idea there are squirrels in every yard on the street. She has no concept of a street. There is the yard, and there is the squirrel, and she is going to handle this personally.
She never catches the squirrel. She has never caught a squirrel. She will never catch a squirrel. She remains fully committed to the strategy though and doesn’t realize there are other squirrels, other yards, and that the squirrel actually was living in her yard before she got here.
Here is what I want to say clearly, before Sunny wakes up from her nap and demands to be let out.
She is not stupid. She is one of the smartest dogs I have ever known, and I am not just saying that because she lives in my house,
But she is a dog. Her world is the size of her perspective, and she cannot make it bigger. She does not have the equipment for it.
We do.
We have history books and Internet connections and the accumulated knowledge of every civilization that has ever tried something and watched it fail. We have the ability to zoom out. To look at the whole map. To ask not just “what is happening in my yard” but “what is happening everywhere, and why, and what does that mean for what I’m seeing right here.”
We have that capacity. The question is whether we’re using it.
Because a dog who thinks the mailman is a local problem she personally solved every day is adorable.
A voter who thinks a global pandemic was a local conspiracy, a worldwide inflation crisis was a domestic political failure, and a tariff is a punishment we inflict on other people — that’s a little less adorable. When a dog gets all worked up because the humans she thought were gone forever have returned, it is adorable. When a voter gets red-faced, panicked or paranoid because they refuse to see the big picture, it’s intellectually neglegent.
Sunny is currently asleep on the couch, dreaming about something that is making her legs run. She is chasing something in there. She is certain she’s going to catch it.
She looks very happy.
I hope she is right.
B.T. Clark is the Publisher of The Georgia Sun and author of Principles Are Like Pants… You Ought to Have Some. Over two decades in journalism, he has served as Managing Editor of Neighbor Newspapers in metro Atlanta and Digital Director at Times-Journal Inc., earning multiple awards along the way. His work has appeared in newspapers across the state, including The Cherokee Tribune and The Marietta Daily Journal.
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