How big is a trillion? Let's try to comprehend the size of the U.S. deficit.

How about 1,000,000,000,000 — 10 to the 12th power, or a thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand?

First of all, a confession: I cannot begin to comprehend a trillion of anything. My mind can barely accept a million of something. I just cannot begin to wrap my brain around the idea of a trillion.

Here’s one explanation of a trillion, courtesy of NASA’s now defunct NASA Glenn Learning Technologies Project:

“In the U.S., one trillion is written as the number “1” followed by 12 zeros (1,000,000,000,000).” For example, using this equation (as noted on LTP) (1012 sec)/(3.16 x 107 sec/yr), one trillion seconds of ordinary clock time equals 31,546 years.

To put it another way, according to a CNN commentator, if a person started spending a million dollars “every single day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn’t have spent a trillion dollars.”

For a more visual idea of a million vs. a billion vs. a trillion, the technology-centered Web site Digital Inspiration describes a simple scenario: A person could easily fit $10,000 in his pocket, if it were made up of a bundle of $100 notes. Raise it to a million dollars and you could make it fit in a standard shopping bag (paper, I presume.) You could fit a billion dollars in $100 bills in a small room of your house (where it would not draw interest.)

“With this background in mind, 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) is 1,000 times bigger than 1 billion and would therefore take up an entire football field,” states the Digital Inspiration article.

(To read the article yourself and see the visuals, do a Web search for “How big is 1 trillion labnol”).

I had to put the idea of a trillion into perspective after the news broke on Monday that the United States of America is now more than $1 trillion in the hole. If you thought that I couldn’t fathom a trillion just as a number, you can bet that I am at a loss to comprehend a yearly deficit of $1.1 trillion — or the national debt of $11.5 trillion.

The Associated Press news brief Monday night gave this five-dollar explanation for the crisis: “The deficit has been propelled by the huge sum the government has spent to combat the recession and financial crisis, combined with a sharp decline in tax revenues. Paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is also a major factor.”

To me, that sounds like the handiwork of two presidential administrations. I don’t really care about the blame. All I know is that the current president needs help to help us to whittle away at this titanic amount of debt.

Whatever we’ve been doing in recent years must not be working. We can’t afford a war abroad, and if we’re not careful, there’s going to be a war of sorts right here on our own soil. They say foreign buyers are nervous about our debt. What about those of us who are living here in the country that is $1.1 trillion in the red? We’re nervous too.

We’re nervous about jobs, services, prices and the chance of recovery. And many of us are tired of the corporate big wigs and their big paychecks, wealthy people trying not to pay their way and too many people abusing the system so that you and I and others are footing the bill.

I can honestly tell you, I do not have the answers. I know that somewhere things have to change, or our financial system is going to implode.

On the subject of how big is a trillion, National Public Radio made this comparison: $1 trillion would be enough money to buy about 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States.

If only our country’s debt were as simple as eating some Caramel Delights or Thin Mints.

Walker’s column appears each Wednesday on the editorial page.