AUSTERITY

Someone said long ago that there is free cheese in every rat trap. This surmises the financial condition of the world at present. Everyone wants something for nothing, free money. It was never so and will never be so. From the Garden of Eden to your present back yard in order to eat it has been necessary to work.

Recently a university student (UNCCH) interviewed me about the Great Depression. Her professor was fascinated that there was a man available to her that remembered the Great Depression. This writer was born in 1930, at the beginning of this sad time in American history. Of course, there had been previous depressions but nothing compared to the Great Depression (1930-1940). We may see an even worse depression now because, unlike the Great Depression, the entire world is in financial chaos and today we have a spoiled, pampered population who think the world “owes them a living”. Many are willing to sit on their assets and spend another man's assets. Margaret Thatcher told us long ago, “socialism works until other people's money runs out”. Thatcher was reared in poverty in an apartment above her father's butcher shop, Granthum, England. God deliver us from leaders who have never had want for anything.

You never recover from poverty, this is one disease which sticks with you as long as you live. I came from the most devout, dedicated, hardworking people anyone could know. I so remember the hardworking tenant farmers, cotton mill workers of Eastern North Carolina...all just striving to survive.

America came out of the Great Depression because of World War II. The unemployment rate was about the same as it is now (20%). When America went to war against the Nazi and other axis powers everyone could get a job including women (for the first time in slacks pictured on Life magazine) who went to work in the “defense plants”, shipyards. My folks were just hard working, poor land owners. There was really no difference in the land owning people and the tenants, all worked. I well remember my precious mother, her children, working to make one dollar a day. The younger men, physically able, went to war. Older men, such as my father, were hired by defense contractors. My father, a carpenter, worked at every military base around (Fort Bragg, Camp Davis, Seymour Johnson, etc.). He lived in a homemade trailer. My mother, grandmothers, kept the farms going. I well remember that many times there was little on the table...just potatoes. She had a way of “fixing” boiled potatoes and then potato cakes. She kept her children in school. The women of the church kept the churches going while the men were away at war or defense projects.

America probably came as close to communism with FDR, “The New Deal”, agricultural stabilization programs as we have ever been until now. With acreage controls, coupon books, as far as government could reach, even when we had real news coverage (H. V. Kaltanborn, Gabrielle Heater) unlike today's politically correct, Obama controlled news outlets, fascism took it's toll. Roosevelt was fenced in by communist. His Vice President, Henry Wallace an avowed communist and so until his death. His Chief of Staff, Harry Hopkins a communist. I still remember my mother, grandmother, standing in the road crying as the Roosevelt Gestapo troops, employees of agriculture – acreage controls cut down growing corn, tobacco, cotton crops. Millions of pigs were slaughtered. Just as hungry farm animals could not eat the corn cut down by the government, hungry people could not eat the swine-calves killed by the government. As people talk about European austerity programs they do not realize that 9 million Americans starved to death during the Great Depression.

Austerity, like Conservatism, must be a mindset, a way of life. Those of us who have experienced poverty, regardless of our later good fortune, never feel free to just “live it up”. We know that dimes make dollars, dollars take care of themselves, you only make money with money.

I saved my money as a child. Always lived frugally. As far as I can remember, I have never spent one dollar unless it was necessary. My entire life, until this day, I save .50 of every dollar I make. Of the .50, mine to spend, the other .50 invested. The tithe is the Lord's whether you give it or not just as 10% of your time belongs to God whether you give it or not. I had rather have that left blessed than holes in the bag of that which I keep. Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages [to put it] into a bag with holes. (Hag. 1:6)

A bitter pill which American's must swallow, we have allowed greed – avarice – corruption to take over our government and banking – financial systems. Before Merrill-Lynch closed down, it lost 27 billion dollars yet paid it's executives 3.4 billion and so is the story throughout – government retirements, entitlements. Senator – Governor Corzine who lost 6.3 billion of his investor's money, still rides around in a limo and eats from a gold plate. Politicians – bureaucrats – academia retire well, know nothing of austerity, as we common folk survive.

God wanted this writer to see the world, the inequities of it all. I had experienced the inequities in college and the lifelines of survival in Eastern North Carolina. If for no other reason to believe, the agnostic must temper his disbelief with the realization that there must be, if not from above, some equalization...a leveling of the field required for life.