Here I am sitting at home today, newly 41 (My birthday was Saturday)sick as a dog...thanks to a co-worker who refuses to ever call in sick...between all of my sniffling, sneezing and being whiney about having a cold...I have been thinking...not much else to do...The History Channel is running stuff on Nostradamus...and I really have yet to figure out what Cash Cab on Discovery could teach me...but I digress...what have I been thinking about...well, a lot. But you will have to go below the fold to find out...I do promise though...this is not about Obama, Hillary, Flag Pins or Rev. Wright. Lets dive below the fold...
What have I been thinking about, well for one, my own mortality...no male in my family has ever made it past 75...I am past the halfway point...sucks to have crappy genes...while thinking of my own mortality, I was also wondering...have I done enough in my life, what more can I do. I have served my country, I volunteer as a football coach at the Y. I am doing my best to raise my son as a single father. I want to do more to help the poor, however, I am pretty close to being poor myself...I think Ma Joad summed it up pretty well in "The Grapes of Wrath"
"If you're in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They're the only ones that'll help—the only ones."
Which brings me to me to this...my parents grew up during the depression, and one of my Uncles was an "Okie"...so reading the Grapes of Wrath is a bit of family history for me...and I wonder if we are going back to those times...My Dad’s side of the family lost a 220 acre farm in Minnesota, they ended up sharecropping on a 40 acre farm after that, they were lucky. My Mom’s side of them family had no money, my grandfather never had a steady job...he did whatever he could to put food on the table for fourteen kids. Yet if anyone needed help, both sides of the family did what they could to help...on my Dad’s side of the family come harvest time, they would go from farm to farm to help with threshing...on my Mom’s side of the family, there was always room for a hungry soul just passing through.
I learned my values from these people...not from a church, not from some talking head on what goes for news these days...what I see today is right out of "The Grapes of Wrath".
"The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it."
"They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat."
Nothing has changed, not a thing, not in 79 years...the banks do not care about you and me, the bank only cares about profits and shareholders. In the depression, thousands lost their homes, today, thousands are losing their homes...about the only differences between now and the depression...we are involved in a civil war we should not be in, and we are in a real war that we are not paying enough attention to. We are seeing families being squeezed by high energy costs, high energy costs we could have avoided if our country had had a comprehensive energy policy...we had one once, back in the Carter administration...however, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II made sure we had cheap gas and oil...and ignored the fact that it was a finite resource...imagine...had Reagan not rolled back many of Carter’s energy policies...we may not be in the situation we are in now...
The only thing is...when we start losing our jobs and our homes...where do we go? There is nowhere for us to migrate to...there is nowhere left for us to get a new start...funny, the Okies will look like they had it good in the 30’s...compared to what is going to happen to all of us...
In closing...the only political thing I will say is this...if we do not want another depression, we need to make sure a Democrat gets in the White House...the petty sniping has to stop...and we all need to let the media know that we want them to stick to the issues...I don’t care if Obama ordered OJ instead of Coffee...I don’t care what his preacher said...and I would prefer that my candidate did not wear a flag pin...it loses its Patriotism when it becomes a requirement...once it is required, it becomes Nationalism.