Little Boxes

When I was a little boy my parents were struggling financially as were many depression-era people who had lost so much during the economic meltdown of that time.

My father went to work everyday to a job he really didn't like and my mother, as did so many of her contemporaries, stayed at home to shop, cook, clean and, most of all, chase me around.

There wasn't that much money to go around and what there was was organized in a very specific way.  My father would give his checks to my mother and she would create a budget for our household.

There was a drawer in the secretary at the front door that was full of little boxes.  "Food", "Oil", "Clothes", "Misc."

My mother would allocate an amount of money to each box dependent upon the relative need of that "department."  And it was cash.  Bills and coins.  $1.50..$23.00...$5.76...whatever the item called for.

And my family never went without.  We always had what we needed.  We had food, shelter, clothes and even entertainment.

Granted, my parents shopped for bargains and cut coupons and saved trading stamps to redeem for whatever they needed.  But we had what was necessary and sometimes more.

We weren't poor.  We were solidly middle class with our own home and two cars and a dog and my father even had a boat for most of my childhood.

What the difference was between what my parents did and what's going on in Washington today...literally today...is that my parents lived according to what they had.  They saved and cut corners and were smart shoppers.  On the very few occasions that my parents were forced to borrow money they paid it back fastidiously.  If $25 was due on the first of the month it was paid on the first of the month.  My parents were NEVER late nor did they ever renege on a financial commitment.  EVER...

My father would sometimes work two jobs and turn the collars on his dress shirts. My mother would darn socks and squeeze the tube until the last drop of toothpaste was on the brush.

I don't want to make my parents out to be pioneers struggling to eke out a subsistence living on the Great Plains or loading up the car with everything they had to go to the growing fields of the San Joaquin Valley.

They were not Dust Bowl refugees so poignantly captured in Dorothea Lange's masterpieces.

They were just ordinary Americans living, working and raising a family in the 1950s. But what my parents did was take individual and honorable responsibility for their lives and the costs associated with having that family.

They didn't ask for help and didn't avoid their duties, parental or otherwise.  They were good, honest folks who believed in personal ethics and took their roles very seriously.

They wouldn't have done well in Washington (ironically, my father grew up in D.C. in the early 1900s) what with the dishonorable and cowardly way in which our elected representatives are conducting the nation's fiscal business.

The politicians are pointing fingers and, as Soledad O'Brien adorably described it on CNN this morning, just saying "blah, blah, blah" when discussing the sorry state of the budget "negotiations" taking place (or not taking place really...) in the Capitol.

We have borrowed more than we make and enshrined programs that we can't pay for.  We are in debt to our enemies and are in denial about the real sacrifices necessary to fix the financial problems that we have.

We are overrun by corruption and special interest influence and "led" by back biting, small minded, selfish people enamored of celebrity and money and power and not possessive of a shred of concern for the suffering their intransigence has caused or the general welfare of the citizenry.

Shakespeare wrote it right for Polonius when he said "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."

Thomas Paine said it better when he declared,

"Lead, follow or...GET OUT OF THE WAY!!!!"