First Rule of Holes: When Your'e in One,...

At different points in my life, my mom used to tell me I had “dug myself into a hole”. This ranged from smaller problems like when I was in the 3rd grade and put off my science fair project until the last minute all the way up until I was 24 years old and almost decided to marry the wrong man. Her advice no matter what magnitude of the “hole” I had so efficiently dug for myself was, “stop digging”.

Our nation has dug one heck of a huge hole. It is going to take a collective effort of the government as well as us “ordinary people” to put down our theoretical shovels and “stop digging”. It is getting deeper and more challenging every day.

Let’s start with us ordinary people, considering we are truly what make our country what it is. We are by no means without blame in the current state of our economy. So many of us would like to point our finger at “big brother” and lay all the blame at Washington’s feet. This is far from the truth. Our current culture, obsessed with name brands and having the latest personal technology, defines itself by these inanimate objects. I have a friend who is a “poor college student” and she moonlights as a waitress; she just bought a $500.00 cell-phone. Another person I know is on food stamps; he had no problem coughing up the dough for a $600.00 video-game console. A woman next to me at Wal-Mart was complaining about the cost of her 4th grade son’s school supplies (I estimated what I saw to be approximately $25.00 worth of notebooks, pencils, and crayons) while she toted a $1000.00 Prada hand bag. Is it just me, or do these situations seem to be drastically skewed? We as a whole need to drop these superficial attitudes; we must get back to our basic roots of what necessity is and our real needs in life. We have to take the responsibility upon ourselves to not spend money like teenagers with free reign to our savings accounts while our parents are out of town for the weekend. We can blame the evil credit card companies that allow us to make obscene purchases that usually would take a normal person months to saving to afford; however, it would be better to accept responsibility for our actions. Each day we are driving ourselves and our country further into debt with large interest payments almost a certainty. Perhaps we should turn that finger at ourselves for using those wicked little plastic cards to live beyond our means.
Living beyond our means has kind of become the norm in this current generation. People who make $30,000 a year shouldn’t be trying to rent or buy half-a-million dollar homes or making $400.00 per month lease payments on BMW’s. I know people like this, and it makes me sick. This is not something that the government will ever be able to regulate. This is something that comes within each one of us, making a decision and commitment to ourselves and to each other not to succumb to the pressures of ads on television or peer-pressures of what it takes to be “in-style” or “cool”.

On a larger scale, we must understand what the government can regulate, or should be regulating MUCH better. One of my biggest pet-peeves concerning a government program is welfare. Don’t get me wrong; by no means am I against welfare; it is just the opposite. During the Great Depression when my grandpa was a 10 year old boy who was trying to support his widowed mother and young sister, understood that his family would have starved to death or died of related complications had it not been for the government programs; some of these resembled welfare. However, these programs were drastically different in those times, and really were meant for the people who needed and deserved it; it was not people who were looking for an easy way out and abused the system. I used to work in a place where many “less fortunate” souls would come to donate bodily fluids for money. Many of these people were on food stamps. They would sell their food stamps for 50 cents on the dollar to anyone and everyone who would buy them. Now don’t tell me that the government cannot come up with a better way to regulate this outrageous abuse of this multi-billion dollar system. I know a single mother, raising her two young children after their dead-beat father ran-off with another woman. She was working three jobs just to try and make ends meet, but just simply couldn’t do it without help. She applied for assistance and they told her that she made too much money. She reluctantly quit her jobs, but then she was able to get all the assistance she needed to be able to take better care of her children. How is this right? What happened to helping people who help themselves?

Another thing my mom would always say, was the old saying “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” By giving people things without them having to work for them does nothing but increase the drag on our society. My grandpa didn’t get a hand out during the Great Depression. He had to do a full day’s worth of “man’s” work at the tender age of 10 just to get enough flour for his family for the day. The government has got to find a way to fix a plethora of problems; however, it is unlikely to do it without our understanding, sacrifice, and commitment. There are many things that need to happen at the government level as well as on a personal level to first combat the recession into which we have gotten ourselves and then we must stop digging.