What goes up..must come down. I am hearing lots of doom and gloom. No one is jumping out of the windows of the NYSE.... yet.
It seems plain and simple to me... America's mortgages have out grown their crops. Until everyone begins to live within their means we will remain in a financial crisis.
My Grandparents were poor, it must have made a great impact on them. They used to call it "dirt poor" without even the dirt. There were times when they were hungry, times were lean. I cannot even begin to imagine, boiling up chicken bones and flavoring the water to feed to my children.
In their later years their two deep freezers were full, in the cellar the canning jars were all lined up with the summer and fall harvest. There were cows in the barn, chickens in the coop and a few hogs rooting around in the hog pen. The stairway to upstairs where 11 children had slept was cluttered on the far side of the steps with containers of Coffee. The pantry was full of sugar, flower, and all things to bake with. One time I was sent to the pantry for powdered sugar..there were many bags to choose from. Grandma was a food hoarder, being without food during the great depression must have left such an impression on her that she collected food. Being hungry with many mouths to feed will do that to you.
My Grandfather was a math whiz, he could add long columns of figures in his head, never using scraps of Grandmas paper to add or subtract. He sat with the checkbook and would do all the math in his head, I found this simply amazing. No newfangled calculators for him..you see he had a perfectly good calculator in his head and he used it.
Perhaps he could have been a banker, instead he was a farmer.
The demise of the family farms years ago is where the root of our financial woes stem from. When they should have been given a hand up, they had to sell out, or move out. There were no bailouts for them. We were on the wrong track then, and we are on the wrong track now. America can only be as strong as it's people, we had strong hard working dusk til dawn small family farmers.. and we put them on a train to nowhere. I am always deeply saddened when I travel the area and remember the farmers and their productive farms now deserted, in effect they were all small businesses, ready willing and able to put food on the table:)
7 comments:
Greed is what caused the bubble to get bigger and bigger until it had no other option but to finally burst.
I enjoyed your story. It's hard to think about what kind of a world I brought 3 little ones into. I have faith that God will provide for us!
That's really neat that your grandfather could add like that!
you are so, so right. Where WAS the government then? Don't those of us who have HALF a brain know that our COUNTRY depends on these selfless, but now few farmers.... We are screwing ourselves left and right. Thanks, George. (W.)
A lot of the farmers in our area are selling out to houseing developers. I just hate seeing all those houses on such good farm ground.
My parents are still hoarders, as were my dad's parents. It has come in handy when dad was out of work for a month, at least they could still eat. :)
The economy is really in a sad state but when I look around at what people have that they couldn't afford and didn't need I can't feel too sorry for them either.
Interesting to know.
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