Is from tonyahky. Please read Things My Dad Could Teach Us--Life Before The New Deal for a guide on how to treat those less fortunate than yourself and a warning about where we could be going.
An excerpt follows. It's amazing, and it's not even the most compelling part:
My dad was born in Malley, KY in 1913. As a young man, he lived through the Great Depression. He enjoyed a long bachelorhood, traveling the United States and Canada. He didn't settle down enough to marry my mom, who was 25 years younger than him, until he was 55 years old. We kids used to sit, transfixed, as he told tales about all of the places he visited and things he had done. Even in his 50's 60's and 70's, he ran his own construction business, and could work circles around guys half his age. To say that he was healthy as a horse was an understatement. What we didn't know was how his life experiences had shaped him...
When I was a little girl growing up in Knott County in eastern Kentucky, there was a family who used to visit us every week or two. Every single person in the Marshall* clan was mentally disabled--I don't know specifically what was wrong with them. They lived up the road from us in an old beat up shack with no running water or electricity, with an out house for a toilet. None of them were capable of holding a job or even driving a car. They used to walk up and down Beaver Creek, going from house to house begging for food, clothing, anything they could get people to give them that would help them out. When they came, all 6 or 7 of them, it was as if they would simply take over our whole house. But my dad didn't seem to mind. He would always dig up some food, or clothes, or something to give them, and would often have my mom fix them a hot, cooked meal. He always told us that they didn't know any better--we shouldn't get mad at them if they started picking up our toys and playing with them, or laid down on our beds to take a nap. He always used to say that you shouldn't begrudge somebody who was in a hard spot a little help. I had already started elementary school, and heard the jokes some kids, and even teachers, would make about the Marshalls. Most people weren't like my dad--they would shut the door in their faces and run them off their property.
One summer, we had a train jump the tracks right in front of our house--eastern KY has an extensive network of railroads that are mainly used to carry coal to various coal buyers outside the region. An engineer for CSX, who knew my dad (just about everybody in eastern KY knew my dad) came to pay him a visit on his lunch hour. While he sat on the porch talking with that guy, the Marshalls decided it was time to pay us a visit.
My dad greeted Old Man Dewey Marshall, the family patriarch, and sent my brother out to the garden to pick them some green beans and dig some new potatoes for them. I sat on the edge of the porch next to one of the Marshall girls--a young woman really--who bobbed her oddly round head up and down excitedly as I showed her my new baby doll. We sat and played while the men talked.
Soon, the Marshalls left. The CSX guy turned to my dad, and said, "I don't see how you can stand having those dirty-assed people around you all--you know they all have to be on the draw (getting welfare)." He launched into a cuss-word filled diatribe that I can't fully remember, but I recall the words, "retarded" and "villiage idiots." My dad just sat there, smiling and nodding his head--I knew that meant he thought that fellow was full of crap. That's what he always did to me when I would try to lie my way out of getting in trouble for something.
Full story here.
Thank you for sharing this tonyahky.
Update: At tonyahky's suggestion, I am adding my own thoughts on how we should treat those less fortunate than ourselves.
First, understand that I wish I lived up to my own suggestions all the time. I don't, but when I do, I feel that I've done a little to earn my life. I put it this way, because a recent conversation between Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett reminded me that all of us are so unlikely to be here that we have an obligation to live our lives making the most of our capacity for good.
So, what do I believe, and what do I think this story shows?
No matter what our beliefs in how we got here, our humanity is given at birth, but earned throughout life. We earn our own humanity by working, to the best of our abilities, to leave the world a slightly better place than it was when we entered it. And a large part of that is showing compassion to the humanity of others.
I also believe we will always make errors. With this in mind, we should always err on the side of generosity. Generosity is good in an of itself, and it serves as its own good example for others to follow.
And leading by example is one of the first steps to making real change. We need a lot of top down changes to fix the injustices we see, and we should never stop working at them. But further, we need to spend equal time working on the basic moral values of our society.
For almost all of human history, chattel slavery was a fact of life worldwide. The range of opinion about it ran from the belief that it was part of the natural order of things to the belief that it was terrible, but that nothing could be done about it.
Then, in a very short time, just a couple of hundred years again a backdrop of thousands, worldwide values changed. Prejudice, racial/gender discrimination and horrible unfairness still exist, but the idea of slavery is complete out of the realm of consideration in much of the world. Not all, but much.
And as we work to finish the changes of attitude toward slavery worldwide, we need to duplicate this sea change of thought in another area: poverty. As with slavery, poverty has been part of the human story for as long as it has been recorded. As with slavery, the range of opinion has run from the belief that it is part of the natural order of things to the belief that it is terrible, but that there is nothing we can do about it.
But belief often precedes the possible. We believed the three-minute mile was impossible forever, until it was finally broken. Subsequently, it was broken again and again.
Small example, but it serves to illustrate the point. If we believe, as a society, as writers, scientists, legislators, citizens, that poverty is is immoral and inhuman, we will find a way to end it.
Oh, it will be hard, but we will find a way. And we will earn our humanity by doing it.