Here’s another story from my childhood. This experience deeply influenced my point of view and helped me to understand the power of family or media or culture.
When I was eight years old, one of my house chores was dusting. My nemesis was a green wicker horn of plenty, overflowing with sticky rubber fruit, sitting on top of the dining room table. One day, as I was attempting to dust these bulbous round grapes, I asked my grandmother, “Why do we keep this? It’s old and it stinks. Can’t we get something new?” She sat down at the table and told me a story about the Great Depression, something I’d never heard of at that young age.
The Great Depression began right as she was finishing high school and filled her 20s with gloom and despair. Sometime in the early 1940s, my great-grandmother brought this wicker basket home from the five-and-dime and sat it on this dining room table. That night great-grandmother announced to the family, “We’ve had enough of being poor. We’ve had enough misery and worry. As of today, we have everything we need. There is enough to go around!”
“You see,” grandmother told me, “the Great Depression didn’t end ceremoniously one day when somebody announced it in 1942. It ended family by family and city by city as folks like my mom made declarations of abundance like this,” as she gestured towards the horn of plenty. So it stayed and I learned to love it.
Please share this story with others that would-should-must declare that the recession (the end of growth) is OVER. Regardless of what Wall Street says or does, we need to invest, self-educate, dream and give again. You have a choice to be the Phoenix or the fodder. And you can’t lift others up laying face down!
