Hearing today’s news is like living my early childhood over again in the Depression of the 1930s. When Wall Street failed on Black Tuesday, October 1929, the world was thrown into turmoil. My father lost his job in a logging camp where he was saving what he could to get through medical school, and also supporting a wife and family.
The family was split up when he was looking for work in Seattle for a few years. My younger sister, Mary, and I were sent to live in Tacoma with Grandma Josie. My ill little brother, Franky, and mom went to the farm in Eastern Washington with my grandparents. Dad would get a day’s labor job, sometimes sleeping all night in a park close by to be at the hiring first. Anything to put food on the table.
There was nothing to help families in dire need, but churches in every neighborhood were doing what ever they could, just as they do now. When food assistance came along, we spent whole days in line to get a few commodities. If we were in luck, we ate oatmeal three times a day. On Saturday evenings you could buy leftover fruit and veggies at the Public Market for pennies.
Jobs were then and now the biggest need. Even with the few jobs out there today, you have to have a job to get a job? Something is very wrong here. When my father was hired in the Works Progress Administration in the mid-1930s, through President Roosevelt’s “Executive Order,” we celebrated. My parents had the greatest respect for FDR the rest of their lives.
It was after this that my family came together. I hadn’t seen my mother and little brother in two years, but we survived. Roosevelt’s WPA program saved our cities and towns, by giving work in repairing and building infrastructures like bridges, dams and roads. Congress voted “no” on the jobs bill today. No, not just Republicans, but a few Democrats as well. I’m for a jobs program, having lived through this type of economy before, and know that a work program is the only way to go. We need jobs that put money back into the economy. So what if the U.S. spends more money? It’s our taxes anyway. Is it not the old saying of the wealthy, “It takes money to make money?”
I applaud the people in the street protesting because it’s time we all woke up. I’m sick of the multi-millionaire congressmen and billionaire magnates crying in their champagne that they don’t want more taxes on themselves. They really want to see the middle-income vanish so we can all work for them at peon wages again, and watch the rich get richer. It is the same pattern all over again.
The annual holiday bazaar at Redeemer United Methodist Church will be held on Nov. 18, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Nov. 19, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. A percentage of funds will go for community needs.
A new program, the “Kids Bazaar,” will be added. Children may shop for little gifts of 25 or 50 cents, and have them wrapped for family members. The pie corner will be adding a bowl of chili or home-made soup. Also, there will be a silent auction and a raffle for two beautiful quilts made by the Prayers & Squares group. Redeemer UMC is located at 9900 Shorty Campbell Road, Kingston. Hope to see you all there.
