A budget is how we tell our story – and this story is Hard Times

State budgets are massive, boring things — numbers and line-items and political jargon that make even the most tenacious citizen recoil.

But all that fine print released by Governor Paterson on Tuesday is how modern societies set their priorities and articulate their goals.

Schools? Hospitals? Food for the poor? Investment in roads and bridges? In many ways, our spending is more definitive than our laws.

Right now, the story Paterson is telling is one of austerity and retrenchment. “This is the worst fiscal downturn in our economy,” he declared yesterday, “since the Great Depression.”

Do we have the guts and the creativity to weather hard times? If so, how?

Will it be the old game of Winners and Losers? Or will Governor David Paterson find a way to weave everyone’s narratives into that big, bad budget?

My sense right now is that no one quite knows how to react. There’s a deeply rooted desire to play the old “I want slightly more than my fair share” game.

But all parties seem to grasp that the coffers are truly empty.

Which means that something like statesmanship is called for as we teeter on the edge of something worse than recession.

How will it all end? No spoilers here. We’ll all have to wait until the authors gather in Albany for a final rewrite.