Washpot in the Backyard

I was raised on an eastern North Carolina tobacco farm at the time of the wash-pot. The large, black, iron pot measuring about forty-five inches in diameter, around which a fire could be made used for the boiling of clothes in the laundry procedure of the wash-tub and scrub-boards. There were no water pipes in the White House until 1900; there was very little inside plumbing in eastern North Carolina until around 1930. The average farm family were happy to have a hand water-pump. Many people would still draw water out of the well with a well bucket. The wash-pot was used for weekly laundry, the making of lye soap, and the processing of lard when the hogs were slaughtered. It is a large black cauldron which most families want to forget, very few are old enough to remember, and those who used this necessity in farm life are long gone to another world.

Of course the wash-pot was not just used on the farm; most families in town did their laundry the same way and the clothes line was no stranger to any class. The washing machine and clothes dryer are relatively new appliances in the American home.

We have left such primitive laundry procedures behind but the need for cleaning is as necessary as ever. Not just our clothing but the dirt and corruption of the American lifestyle.

Nowhere is there a need for transparency and cleaning any more than in our political system. Malcolm Muggeridge, the great writer, said, “New news is just old news being heard by new people.” Political payoffs, nepotism, greed intrigue, predated Noah's Great Flood but is as recent as today's newspaper. We don't have to discuss Mr. Obama's crooked friends: Geithner, Rangel, Paulson, etc. We can find such, much closer to home. Some have already gone to jail in North Carolina: Black, Wright, Decker, etc. The escapades of the longest serving NC legislature is an embarrassment to every hard-working, decent, tax-payer of the “Old North State”.

Mr. Erskine Bowles, president of the University System, is supposedly angered by the incredulity of evidence oozing from the various campuses concerning such immoral, un-refuted accounting striations as the ex-governor's wife, Democrat prostitution of a system supposedly sanitized. Of course, Mr. Bowles, member of the board of directors of General Motors Corporation, should be well familiar with Democrat Party internal pollution. There is not enough Lysol or other disinfectants manufactured in this country to fumigate the Democrat Party in North Carolina and its infestation in all North Carolina life.

Mr. Bowles wrote me a letter stating that the Republicans voted for the Easley fiasco. There are no real Republicans on the Board of Governors. They are RINOs, Republican in name only, otherwise they would never have been appointed. Everything that goes bump in the night is not Santa Clause.

I remember the time when only white Democrat males were on the boards of the black colleges in the state. I remember the time when there was not a black, woman, or Republican in the state legislature. I am probably one of the few Republicans in the state who has ever seen the magnificence of the top floor of the Moorehead Planetarium building where the University Governors meet.

Even though very few poor people or blacks attend the University System, they, more than any others, will be paying the new additional one cent sales tax afflicted last month by the Democrat Governor and legislature.

It is an insult to the NC taxpayers and should be an embarrassment to decent people around the world that the NC legislature shows such a mockery of the state motto “To Be, Rather Than To Seem - Esse Quam Videri”.

At the dedication of the legislative building in 1960, in full military dress uniform, I walked across the great seal on the pavement in front of the building. A reporter from an eastern North Carolina paper said to me, “What does 'Esse Quam Videri' mean?” I said, 'It means 'slippery when wet' and it will be wet with the tears of the poor people from this state who are trying to pay the taxes for this extravagance.” The building was only the beginning of the extravagance as the Democrats, one hundred years in power, built more and more monuments to themselves while neglecting the most basic demands of good government:

One: Mental Health: Since the time when, as a child, I saw the annihilation of the black inhabitants of the “Hospital for the Negro Insane” at Goldsboro, until the present-day Cherry Hospital mockery, how long can this charade go on? (I understand one-third of the patients who leave the mental hospitals have no follow up at all. I understand around $600 million has just disappeared from the mental health funds.)

Two: Prison System: Revolving doors, throughout the nation, have been removed from buildings because of their attraction to criminals. (stealing purses from women caught in the revolving doors) The revolving doors are alive and well in the “Tar Heel State”. Out on parole, very few parolees are contacted. Even the president of the UNC-CH student body, almost under Mr. Bowles' nose, was killed by a parolee.

Three: Education: I have a collection of political advertisements going back to the campaign of Terry Sanford, always with the same political nomenclature “why Johnny can't read”. Those of us who experience the products of education; who try to employ some of the sixty-eight percent who graduate of those who enter high school, know that most although they have a piece of paper, cannot read, spell, or punctuate. As important as the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic in our public schools, is physical fitness, emotional fitness, and spiritual fitness.

Our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who used the wash-pot in their backyard for their laundry, their soap-making, their food preservation, had mastered the rudimentary concepts of education and political morality. Stay fit for life. Discipline determines character and character determines destination.