Governed by moral imbeciles
How do we wind up being governed by the likes of Bernie Sanders? Well, it’s a fallen world, it holds up sin as virtue, and he appeals to voters’ worst instincts. So of course he’s going to stir up racial animosity and frothing-at-the-mouth envy. He’s a socialist and that’s what socialists do.
Bernie: If You’re White, You Don’t Know What It’s Like to be Poor
Dude, most of us know damn well what it’s like to be poor! But if you need lessons, come on over and give me all your money. No, you can’t keep those three or four houses that you have. And let’s see if you can make one dollar do the work of five!
I daresay most of us have been there, done that. But I’ll bet you haven’t.
A few years ago, a person I knew was telling me about the hardships of being raised in a Hispanic family. There’s no doubt in my mind that his family faced their share of challenges, but my family would have seen his as being wealthy. Our (mostly) Northern European heritage hadn’t given us any seed money, and if you look back to the prewar generation of my family, most of them were barely scraping by, crowded into multi-generational homes.
I grew up in a family that was fairly poor. My parents built the house we lived in, which was in a somewhat remote setting. My father’s sweat equity was a big part of why we had that house. We lived there for several years without curtains, because the money was just not there.
Readily, I will agree that things could have been worse; we always had a roof over our heads, but the only reason that happened is because my father never gave up. He worked a job that held the risk of significant injury, for years, but to his everlasting credit, he drug himself there, year after year.
My parents clawed their way out of poverty, slowly, over a period of years. They were never anything close to rich, but they worked hard, and never gave up. When she died, my mother’s entire estate came to less than my take home pay for one day.
I realize that there are people far less prosperous than my family, but I remember praying that the $100 clunker my parent’s owned would start the next morning. No buses where we lived, and a minor auto repair could be a real setback.
I know something of what you are saying. I was born in the middle of the “great depression” (which may pale in comparison to the coming one). My mother and dad, and my sister and I lived with one aunt in my grandmother’s home, which was a big house with no mtg. It was paid in full, so with the cows and chickens, large garden and fruit trees, etc. we made out better than some people in the area. The modern conveniences had not yet come on the scene, so everybody had to do their share of the work. At age 4, I was washing dishes standing on a stool in front of the wood cook stove in the kitchen. I chuckle to think what a kid these days would say if asked to do something like that. Most of my relatives were farmers (except for two who were school teachers) and everybody had plenty of food and all the other stuff, but we had to produce most of it ourselves.
That reminds me so much of my grandpa’s family during the Depression. He had a big enough yard that he could raise a lot of what the family needed (plus chicken coop). Grandma never lost her knack for making grape jelly.