Please read this all the way through because I am not sure who is responsible.
I would like to think “Washington” (not George) is responsible for all the merchandise, products and even apple juice shipped in from China. Here in Ohio, the biggee KROGER store (started in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1883. I believe it was Barney Kroger who started in the grocery business near the corner of 8th & State. When I went to college I probably drove by his store every day and never realized that’s where KROGERS started. I doubt if anything in Barney Kroger’s store was made, produced or grown out of the United States except maybe for bananas but I could be wrong.
I have become a nut on reading labels but it is becoming harder and harder to believe America makes, grows, manufactures anything any more. I first discovered apple juice in one of my favorite stores was imported from China when I was comparing prices. Believe me it isn’t easy to find that little electronic image on a curvaceous colored plastic bottle but there it is, somehow they can image hundreds of bottles flying through a product line, “…concentrate from China…” Funny, I thought OHIO was a great apple producer. Jackson, Ohio, is THE place where apples are touted like bourbon is in Kentucky. Right here in Fairfield County (Ohio) we have at least three fruit orchards. The state of Washington is another great apple producer.
I just looked on the Internet and found 44 (forty-four) states have apple orchards. Funny, you would think the 2,500 varieties grown in the United States would be a sufficient resource, and OHIO is third on the list of those 44 states with apple orchards. But that store I mentioned in the first paragraph wrote me saying simply they could not get the supply of apples needed unless they go offshore. OK, let’s change the subject slightly.
“Made in China” is not the problem. A few years ago I heard a former government worker admit he got in trouble “because he didn’t know what he didn’t know”. At first I thought that was just more mumbo jumbo but the longer I considered his confession the more sense it made. If you read my friend, T. J. Ray’s essay which recently appeared on THE WORDWRIGHT (“What we have become”), this could well be called a sequel to Professor Ray’s article. What is the problem?
We are the problem. When I was a kid (I was born in 1932) you could number the Holidays on one hand. Today you have to take off your shoes to count the holidays and they are all PAID holidays. Alright, not for everyone but the government and businesses lead the pack for paid holidays, let’s face it. And as I write this the Post Office is trying to convince us they want to cut back to five days to carry the mail. Again, looking back to “when I was a kid” we had residential mail delivery TWICE A DAY and the businesses down town got mail THREE TIMES A DAY. Yeah, I know we’ve gotten bigger but we haven’t gotten BETTER even with high speed OCR machines that sort mail. Gone are the days, well, almost, when someone would holler out at the Post Office in Lancaster, Ohio, “Who knows Venrick?” For fifty years my Dad was the only VENRICK in town (his household included his wife and two boys). As recent as a couple months ago I got a letter with a wrong street address but fortunately our carrier recognized the family address and “we got the mail”.
How many paid holidays do you get? Once a fellow employee of mine was griping because we did not get a certain holiday. Being the nerd that I am I asked him, “Did you every stop to think how much our company spends to pay all the employees for NOT working?” The conversation came to an abrupt halt. I must have hit a nerve.
What about the auto industry? Wonder why we have automobiles from ten or more foreign countries? Oh, a few English autos might have been seen 50 years ago but the Big Three concept is history. Wonder why? When the employee insists his employer give him this, and that, in benefits it is no mystery to me why the industries got tired of so much pay out and simply caved in to getting the job done cheaper. Note I said “cheaper” and I am talking about CHEAPER rather than less expensive! I have a pair of shoes that I recently purchased from a former ALL AMERICAN shoe company (you will have to guess the name) and one pair before my last purchase are still around – I bought them 25 years ago and have had them half-soled and heeled three times. The last pair of shoes I bought from this company is the last pair I will buy from them. I got a good price, sure, but I had to send the first ones back because “that shoe is ‘sized small’” whatever that means—nothing was said in their catalog. Of course it meant “Size 11 D has to be ordered as 12 M.”
Name any industry folks, and it isn’t Washington who is at fault. Pogo had it right: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” When our grandfathers were the wage earner there was no such thing as “benefits” past the overtime pay. Benefits do not come cheap and neither is it cheap for the employer to “keep track of our money” until we retire. We are in a financial mess today in America because we trusted the wrong people and unfortunately some of those people were banks.
Solution: PRAYER will help, but the most important response we need to see is an improvement in is ourselves and what we need to do–NOT our employer or the government. Some might say, “The government’s already done enough.” And I rather think I agree with that conclusion but I don’t think we can get off Scott free without admitting to contributing to the problem.
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SOME AFTER-WORDS relative to the above…”Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy — Only “old people” know what it used to be like and the young(er) people simply have no knowledge of how it “used to be” and unfortunately do not know how hard their fathers and grandfathers worked to get and keep what they had. It was a Spaniard who observed: “We either learn from history or we are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana. Sorry, Mr. Santayana, no one was listening when you wrote those words. THE WORDWRIGHT