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Highlands Today

Lean Times Make Us Ask "What If?"

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 8, 2009

Lean economic times always seem to make us take a long, hard look at our lifestyles and what it takes to maintain them. Usually, that's a healthy exercise.

Many have noted that we've become a nation of consumers rather than citizens, and that's not a healthy thing. But lately, it seems even worse. We are becoming an audience, not an electorate - watchers, not workers. It seems all we want is to be entertained, wined and dined, spoon fed.

Look around you. There's a restaurant on every street corner while grocery stores are going bankrupt. Video games fly off the shelves while bookstores have to sell coffee, toys and lottery tickets to stay afloat.

We'd rather play than produce. Nowadays, we don't make things, we just manage them, or worse yet, import them. And we don't even do that very well.

Every year we spend more money on eye makeup than eye research. We pay professional athletes more than brain surgeons. You can make more money playing video poker than teaching people to read, write, and manage their money.

We watch reality television to avoid facing the reality of life.

Back just two generations, people still taught their children to be producers, living off the land. My grandparents grew all their own food. They made their own soap from the fat of pigs they raised and slaughtered on their farm. They even made their own medicines from roots and herbs gathered in the woods on that farm. And they heated their home with wood grown on their land and cut by hand.

The farm workforce was comprised of their own 11 children, who learned cooking, gardening, sewing, and childcare by doing it every day right alongside their parents. They did laundry by hand in a washtub, hung the clothes outdoors to dry, and ironed them with a flatiron heated on a woodstove. They didn't even own a refrigerator.

Food that needed to be cool was stored in the cellar or consumed so quickly by their large family, it didn't have time to spoil.

The kids learned plowing, harvesting, home maintenance, and machinery repair, because they had to. There was no alternative. They milked cows, delivered piglets, and plucked chickens. It was messy, dirty, honest, hard work from dawn to dusk. And then, they did it all over again the next day.

They had no telephones, no computers, no electricity. They had no cars, no trucks, no tractors. They used hand tools, horses, wagons and elbow grease for everything.

We've all heard people joke about walking miles to school through hip-deep snow, but my parents actually did that. They learned to read, write and "cipher" in a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher for all eight grades. And it made them self-sufficient.

If they had to, our parents' generation could find a way to live off the land again. They might not have the physical strength to do it, but they would know how. Would you? Would I?

I might be able to grow some vegetables in my back yard, with the help of commercial fertilizers, pesticides, and power tools, but that could hardly be called self-sufficiency. You might be able to sell some of your possessions for money to buy food. But how long would that be enough?

When our economy is not strong, and people are losing their jobs, vehicles, homes, and businesses because they can't make the payments on them, we always come back to this question. What if we really had to go back to being self-sufficient?

The last generation of Americans that even knew how is quickly slipping away and taking that knowledge with them - a sobering thought.

When I was in junior high, the standard curriculum, for both sexes, included cooking, sewing, gardening, woodworking and plumbing/electrical repair. Maybe we should take another look at that.

Agree? Disagree? Email Joyce Minor at jomin8549@gmail.com

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