Monday, October 15, 2007

100 Years ago in Arkansas...

Most of the roads were gravel. You would generally travel by mule. The main social event on any given week was church on Sunday. Although there would be an occasional quilting bee or barn raisin'. The County Fair was the highlight of every September. Everyone entered their canning and handwork and feuds could be started over who's pickles were better.

Work was hard but life was simple. There was never any question on whether or not a child should be taken from his/her parents. There was never the issue of domestic abuse. If a man hit a woman and any of the family ever found out about it, that man would quietly disappear, no questions asked.

You knew what was in your food because you raised it. There wasn't any tainted wheat gluten added to the preformed meat patties, because no one would eat something like that. Meat was only made out of an animal, not a preformed, chub packed, vitamin enriched, breaded, heat and eat meal that is so popular these days. Every woman knew how to cook. Every one. It may not always be gourmet, and it usually wasn't, but it was filling.

Granted, 100 years ago in Arkansas, we were about to be struck down by the flu pandemic followed closely by WWI. But no one protested outside the White House. No one dodged the draft. And the press most certainly didn't spend every waking moment trying to find dirt on the President, the Cabinet, and high ranking military officers.

My husband's family at this time still spoke German in the home. Louis was bilingual, his parents only spoke German, and we have a very nice picture of him in his American WWI uniform displayed proudly on our den wall. He was the last family member, at least on that side of the family, who was the proper age when a war broke out. Although my late father-in-law did enlist in the Coast Guard at the end of WWII. The war was over by the time he got out of basic but 2 of his future wife's brothers were involved in the fighting in Italy. No protesters for that war either.

IMHO, it would seem that our generation has gotten into the habit of whining about what it takes to be free. We all want our liberties, but Heaven help us all if we actually have to do something to protect it.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Going to Hell, and we are letting it

This country, and the principles it was founded on, are going to Hell and the citizens of this fine nation are just blindly letting it happen. We have policed and law suited our way into a virtual police state.

We have regulated all of our small businesses out of existence in favor of mega chains and McFood. It used to be where anyone with a couple of hundred dollars could open a store or a cafe and make a living. Now all of the major corporations have forced regulations thru Congress that make code enforcements, inspections, fees, licenses, and other money grabbing BS mandatory in the name of protecting the pubic. What they really do is limit the amount of competition in the market place and thus protect their own profits.

Our kids can't even be kids anymore. They can't play the games that we played as kids. Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, even Tag is off limits. Heaven forbid if someone's weenie ass kid gets tapped on the thigh. It would be sexual abuse in the grossest sense of the word.

It is bad enough that a child who is upset about getting in trouble with his parents can call SCAN and claim abuse, but the harassment that parents are put thru over it is just insane. A friend of ours had to discipline one of his kids while in a store waiting in the check out line. A lady that they knew was in the same line and saw the screaming child get a single swat to the behind. She felt it was her civic duty to sic the government on them. It took 6 months and a home visit from a child advocate to get it sorted out. But now they are on "the LIST!"

We are letting the government rule our lives. This is not what the founding fathers had in mind when they started this (once) great nation. The government was not designed to regulate our lives, it was designed to ease trade between states and foreign nations, and to enforce the Constitution. It was not meant to regulate, tax, educate our kids, tax our businesses or our paychecks, tell us what we can eat or feed our kids, or where we could build our homes, or what doctor we could go to, or subsidize drug companies, farmers, schools, or people who's job it is to have babies so they can get a bigger welfare checks.

100 years ago, if you didn't work, you didn't eat. You may not have worked a 9 to 5, but you worked growing your own food and hoped you had enough to sell so you could buy the kids an orange at Christmas. You made do with what you had and nothing went to waste. And the government stayed out of your business...unless your crop was moonshine.

Now we are taxed on the amount of money you make every paycheck, you pay sales tax on anything you buy, you pay property tax on any thing you own, you pay tax again on the money you don't spend (savings accounts, CDs, retirement accounts, stock dividends, college funds, etc) and when you die, if there is anything left by that time, a death tax is imposed. If your kids inherit, then they have to pay an inheritance tax. So that money that you worked so hard to get is actually taxed up to six times.

And we have done it to our selves. We voted for the idiots in congress who think that the government should pay for everything. Nice concept but it has to be paid for somehow. That somehow is taxes. And we voted them into office. We gave ourselves over to the government and now they are paying us back for our trust.

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