When I was kid my parents had a huge garden behind the house. We lived on the outskirts of Staples but we were still pretty much in town. My father wanted to grow as much food as he could, so to supplement the garden he had, he renting a acre of land on the other side of town, where he could plant those crops that needed a lot of room like corn and potatoes. My mother got her eggs and butter from her sister who did live on a farm near Motley. One of her other sisters lived on an orchard in Wenatchee Washington and she would send us boxes of fruit that mom canned along with the vegetables that wouldn’t keep in the root cellar. When I say root cellar it wasn’t one of those earthen buildings outside but it was about half of the cellar under the house where dad brought in sand and made bin’s for storing vegetables in. Mom baked all of her own bread and rolls, so all we had left to buy was meat, macaroni, matches, milk and spices. Oh yeah, we did get corn flakes or oatmeal. I was sixteen years old before I ate store bought bread. Didn’t like it then and still don’t. Dad was proud of being self-reliant. He cut all the wood to heat the house and encouraged us boys to fish and hunt and work for the neighbors when we could.
There were no food shelf’s, Medicaid or food stamps and had there been, Dad would have turned his back on it anyway, because he had little money but a lot of pride. There was also no free food from the schools. You paid or brown bagged it. There was county welfare for those in need but it was nothing like what we have now. The only homeless people I knew about, were hobos that rode in on the trains that went through town. Most of them would gladly work for a meal or some groceries.
I listen to some of the proposals being put forth by political people and can’t help but think how wrong it is to promise people free stuff for their votes. Our country is twenty-two trillion dollars in debt right now. They are purposing many more trillion dollars in health care, free college and forgiveness of college loans, but they are short on ways to pay for it, except enact more taxes. Most of it a Robin Hood type scenario of taking from the rich to give to the poor. The moderates on that same left where this is coming from, see this as fundamentally flawed, as do the Republicans who oppose it.
We need to get back to people helping people and people helping themselves. We need more people standing on their own two feet. This country has millions of unfilled jobs because there is little incentive for entry level people to work and coupled with a broken health care system and an unpopular President, who has caused a lot of turmoil, we could be in for an expensive ride. History tells us that once free programs get in place; they are hard to get rid of. Someday when this country does go broke, and believe me, it will, you are going to have a lot of people, in a lot of trouble, dependent on a government that is failing all of us badly-- that will by then be powerless to help anyone.
I hate to take sides in politics and I’m not now. I’m no fan of either party. The right has no good plans either but it shouldn’t be about the right or the left, it should be both of them coming together in a bipartisan effort to solve this countries problems.
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