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There was a hand-made sign on the door of the restaurant I sometime frequent that informed the restaurant's patrons that they would close at 11:00 a.m. on July 5th. The way this restaurant operates seems a little weird to me in regard to when they close for holidays. It makes no sense to be open on the 4th, close at 2 p.m., and then open the next morning for breakfast, but close for lunch. Why not take the whole day off? Jeez! The employees can't catch a break.
It's not like I care about the employees. The same people have worked there for several decades. They deserve whatever they get. No matter who is currently managing the restaurant the cooks and waitresses are the same people. They're all lousy cooks. They cook lunch room food because that was the first healthy food a lot of these people had when they were children.
I have written lately about how poor this area was when my parents moved here from Mississippi. They felt right at home on the coastal plains of southeastern North Carolina. The more well-to-do people in these agrarian villages were themselves cash poor, but with collateral. Usually, they were owners of the larger farms in the area, and had white trash tenant farmers who had blacks working for them. Everybody was barely surviving from a modern perspective.
I don't think they knew how poor they were in relation to the rest of the United States. Their not knowing they were poor was what kept them in good spirits to some absurd degree. There were not many fat people around as I remember it. Everybody, including the relatively well off big farmers lived out of gardens and pig sties.
Our family had meat because my father was a hunter. We ate anything he killed and was glad to get it. Some of our neighbors weren't so fortunate. Some families didn't know how to kill their own meat. Their real problem had more to do with not knowing how to prepare dead animals for consumption through the winter. They didn't know how to smoke meat or preserve vegetables through canning or in glass jars. Many of them were illiterate. They lived hand to mouth.
Their ignorance was the reason my parents moved here. The State of North Carolina not only mandated the hiring of agriculture teachers for every high school in the state, but Home Economics teachers too. It seems strange in a way, but the Civil War killed off many of the people who knew how to do this agricultural and housekeeping stuff.
In some cases, practically the entire adult male population of a region was either killed, debilitatingly wounded, or shell-shocked until there was nothing civilized about them after the Civil War. Waving Willies of one sort or the other. Standing on the street corners waving at everybody who passed them without a clue who they were. A lot of widows lost the farms their dead husbands and sons left them burdened with. It took a hundred years, two World Wars, and a Great Depression to recover.
It's a little laughable to me to think about how I was raised out of a large garden and the animals we slaughtered. By the time I joined the Navy at eighteen years old that way of subsisting was practically gone. Even my parents stopped gardening and bought most of their food from the grocery stores.
As an adult I've practically lived out of a commercial grocery stores or even more frequently, I eat in a restaurant. Just for old time sake I decided to plant some tomatoes this year. What astounds me to some degree is that bought the dirt I grew them in at Lowe's. I doubt many people even a decade younger than me ever knew how to grow their own food to eat.
If something happens to the food distribution system and the world stops shipping the people in the United States food grown in other parts of the world, a lotta people are gonna starve from sheer ignorance of how to grow their own. Cannibalism will run rampant. Some will eat their own children. Why would they not?
If the civilized ways of a once proud people can dissipate into a hand-to-mouth existence because the knowledge of their men killed in war provided was lost to them, then modern people will be just as helpless when the United States goes broke because of their voracious penchant for war-mongering.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
