Adversity

I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. (Phillipians 4:13)

If there’s ever been a time in the recent history of this country that the average person is faced with adversity, it is now. Every television and radio program is punctuated by the financial dilemma, not only of the largest financial institutions in the world, but the average American citizen has become completely disillusioned and filled with despair over national and global turmoil in the financial world.

I was born during the Great Depression in 1930, the unemployment rate from 1930-1941 was 18%. It never changed. Automobile production went down 90%. I was just a child, but I can still remember relatives who lost their farms, moving in with other relatives who were trying to hold on to theirs and the stress that killed one Great Aunt as she stood in line all day, trying to get her money out of the bank.

These people had known stress before and they had heard of stress. For instance, my grandmother’s mother was a child during the Civil War. She told how her grandmother took the cows a long distance into the swamps to keep the northern soldiers from taking them as they made their sweep through the community. The only boy survivor in the family, who was about 12, went in another direction with the mules because they knew that if the cows were slaughtered and taken, there would be no milk for the babies or the old people who were sick in the home, and no transportation at all if the mules were taken. The northern troops normally took everything of any value. They cleaned out the smokehouse (smokehouse--an outside building used for the storage of hog meat after it had been cured), all the chickens they could capture were taken and the people were left with just the potatoes, onions, dried fruit, and other items which they had been able to hide.

The house in which my mother was reared, her father before her ,and his father before him and which still stands out in the community, was not burned as were most of the houses and outbuildings in the community, because there were two dead bodies in the living room awaiting burial.

When our forefathers crossed the Great Plains heading west to California often under attack by Indians, survival dictated that they circle the wagons to protect themselves, and their meager possessions such as food, clothing, and ammunition. In this time of global adversity (we have reason to believe that financial conditions in Europe are worse than in the USA) it is probably time for us to circle the wagons as our own personal survival is concerned.

Last nights academy award was given to a movie which tried to glamorize poverty, there is nothing glamorous about poverty. For those of us who have “been there and done that “ but those of us who have seen dire poverty in the world such as India where the movie was made, there is nothing romantic about poverty whether in India, Samoa, or eastern NC. If the area from highway 95 which goes north to south through NC and then east to the coast were a state, it would be the poorest state in the union.

My entire life has been spent studying the poverty of eastern NC, tenant farmers on cotton and tobacco farms and poverty stricken mill workers working in the cotton mills (living in houses and forced to buy goods in mill owned stores) striving to survive on the wages paid by the cotton mill owner families who lived in the big houses on the hill. The tobacco tenant farmers worked like slaves the entire year (in my case for $1 per day as a child) to bring the tobacco to auction warehouses where the product was stolen by the cigarette company conglomerates and the owners of the auction warehouses.

One of my aunts, who worked in the local cotton mill here in Wilmington( Spofford cotton mill) who’s workers houses did not have indoor plumbing, went to the Davis owner and suggested the windows of the building should be washed because work at these cotton mills usually led to blindness. The Davis family are still very much in charge in the area. He told my aunt, “ If you don’t like the windows or dirt on the windows, go out and find another job.”

I saw the same thing in India with entire families sitting on the ground in dark sheds working on rugs. Most were blind by the age of 23. A pregnant woman in India would go to the field to work, squat and have her baby, wrap the baby in cloth which she had with her, tie the baby on her back and keep on doing her day's work. I saw the cardboard shacks where these people lived. I saw the thatched huts all over Africa where children are raised and where 3,000 die each day of malaria. In the Sudan, and other places, I saw refugee camps where government agencies in this country would not allow hogs or chickens to live.

There is nothing romantic about poverty, Hollywood cannot make it so. The only blessing to my heart in any of these cauldrons of poverty was the attitude of hope and the smiles of appreciation which came from those with the least.

In this time of financial upheaval and adversity never seen before by most Americans, we can remember what Winston Churchill said when England was threatened by Hitler and the Nazi power “if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our country to our duty, and so bear ourselves that if the British empire and commonwealth lasts a thousand years, men will still say ,’this was their finest hour.’”