thenorphletpaperboy: Hard Times

thenorphletpaperboy: Hard Times:                          HARD TIMES Sometimes I get inspired to write a particular column, and late last Thursday afternoon, when Ve...

Hard Times

                         HARD TIMES

Sometimes I get inspired to write a particular column, and late last Thursday afternoon, when Vertis and I were sitting under our little wooden pergola down by the pond having a little something to drink, a column idea hit me right between the eyes. We were listening to Apple Music via a great little Bose speaker, which along with our IPad, allowed us to hear nearly any artist recorded in the last 50 years, and I just happened to run across an album by Joan Baez. It was her 75^th Birthday album. Well, if you are a child of the 60s Joan is really a turn on, and as that clear, silky voice echoed in our back yard as the shadows lengthened, my mind drifted back to when I first listened to her. I was in college and her songs were on everyone’s playlist.

We smiled and settled in for a pleasant late afternoon of music.  Of course, we started by picking a few of her most popular songs, and then we listened to Joan sing with Emmylou Harris, and the ballad was called Hard Times. Well the lyrics popped up on our IPad, and as the two singers wafted in the steamy, summer afternoon, and as we listened and read the lyrics, memories flooded back. The two singers fit together perfectly musically, and while the song was being played we read the lyrics. Below is one of the several verses:

Let us pause in life’s pleasure and count its many tears, while we all sup sorrow with the poor. There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears. Oh, hard times come again no more.

‘Tis the song, the sign of the weary, hard times, hard times, come again no more. Many days you have lingered all around my door, oh, hard times, come again no more.

Well yes, as the song title indicates the song is about hard times, and that brought a flood of memories. Actually, I think, if you read the lyrics while the song is being played it amplifies the impact of the music, and by the time the song was over we were pretty much washed out mentally. All of the turbulent 60s flashed back as we sat there, and we relived some of those times as the song continued, Vertis said it first, but it was on my lips, “I can’t take it anymore. Play something else.” No, it wasn’t the quality of the voices or the music or the lyrics it was all of them put together intertwined so wonderfully, that it left us a basket case.

Actually, Vertis and I have been poor, but we have never really gone through real hard times. We had food on our table and clothes on our backs, and we knew, if we worked hard, we would be okay. As a pre-teen living on a farm without access to a balanced, wholesome diet, I went through numerous winters where, from bad nutrition, I developed boils and carbuncles on my neck, but never in the spring and summer when our gardens were putting forth more vegetables than we could consume. Yes, of course I worked and our whole family struggled just to make a living, but we never considered that we were going through hard times. It was just the way things were, and although we had to stretch our money to get along, our family never moaned about hard times. Those times were just what they were and hard---meant one thing---hard work, and my upbringing was instilled with a work ethic from my father and mother. Yes, they were trying times, but not really hard times.

After Vertis and I married we were still in college. My mother wasn’t financially able to help us with college expenses, and our part time jobs were all we had to fall back on.  However, even then, Vertis and I considered we were just going through a tight time financially, but with her working at the Baldwin Organ Factory soldering components in organs for $1.35 an hour as I bounced around the University from job to job---simultaneously. I was student manager of the Bough Commons, the dining hall, an employee of the University Bookstore---where I punched the time clock every time I had a had a free hour between classes, and in the late afternoons I worked cleaning cases and sweeping floors at the University Museum on the fourth floor of Old Main. No, we didn’t see many movies or go out to the Venesian Inn very often, but we made it.

 However, there were a few bumps. When Vertis went to the supermarket and checked out, it sometimes went like this.

 “When you hit fifteen dollars stop. Okay?”

“Sure, just a minute, oh… that sack of potatoes put you at $16.50.”

“Okay, hold everything…let’s see if I put this jar of peanut butter back…no that’s not enough…yes, the peanut butter and this box of cereal will do it….I’m sorry, y’all. I’ve got to put this back on the shelf.”

Yes, it was a little embarrassing, but Vertis, who could make her soldering console quota at the Baldwin Organ Factory with a couple of hours to spare while wearing gloves to protect those good-looking fingernails, wasn’t going to let putting back a jar of peanut butter bother her.

Of course, our parents and grandparents didn’t just ignore us, and our frequent trips home weren’t just because we were homesick. When the spring gardens were in we could count on Vertis’s grandparents to load us up with enough vegetables to hold us for a couple of weeks, and even as tight as money was, we could usually count on someone in the family slipping us a twenty.

 In today’s world our children have very little understanding of what hard times are. Most of our adult children and teenagers have never experienced anything like hard times, and they have no understanding of how to cope with the lack of essential services, food, and other amenities we take for granted. No, I’m not someone who goes on and on about our kids not knowing what hard times are, and secretly hope those sassy youngsters find out. Nope, I hope we all have the best of times ahead and none of us will ever experience what past generations went through.

A comment from a good friend, Dr. Jim Shepherd points the way back to what were really hard time.

 “We were lucky to be raised by the Greatest Generation!”  

Yes, looking back on that generation it is sure hard to argue with Jim. That generation lived through true hard times, but to them it was just part of life. However, as steel sharpens steel, those steel sharpened young men and women, who in the 1940s, fought and died for our freedom didn’t pick up courage, daring, bravery, and toughness in training before the War. They had it instilled in them from the time they could walk by our fathers and grandfathers, who did really have hard times, and those hard times had a name; The Great Depression, and those years were real hard times.

The Alarm Bell is Ringing

             The Alarm Bell is Ringing!

Stephen Hawking, who was called one of the smartest men who ever lived, made this statement a few years before his death; “In a hundred years, we will have polluted the Earth to the extent that it will be uninhabitable, and we will have to find another planet on which to live.” Dr. Hawking was basically saying the Earth will become so toxic that it will be a wasteland of landfills and rafts of plastic that will have filled our oceans. In some bodies of water it doesn’t have far to go. In the Pacific, there is already a plastic raft of material nine feet thick larger than the state of Texas.

Of course, a large portion of the World may already be under water from global warming caused by climate change before we have to vacate this planet, as Stephen Hawking predicted. Recently, His Holiness Pope Francis spoke out decisively about the threat to billions of people around the World from climate change. The Pope called climate change an international emergency that threatens everyone.  (Want more info on climate change? Read the great Voices Column on 7/9/18 by Dr. Malcolm Cleaveland professor emeritus of geosciences at the University of Arkansas. His area of expertise is paleoclimatology and climatology.)

Centuries before, Chief Seattle said: “To harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.”  I will paraphrase that by saying “Christians don’t trash our Earth.”         

I guess my little exercise routine has something to do with my current environmental reactions to what I see as an avalanche of pollution that is quickly trashing our earth. The exercise I have developed is a fairly rapid walk leaving my house on Calion Road on the edge of town, and then in a few hundred yards, I connect with the 167 By-pass. It’s about 3 and a half miles, and I was a jogger a few years back, but now I’m a rapid walker. Brisk walking is a good exercise and it gives you a chance to look at your surroundings. The Bypass is a pretty bland piece of a South Arkansas landscape, but the shoulders are wide and there are no hills, which I like.

As I walk, I see everything that can blow out of the back of a pickup truck, or a person can throw out a car window. When I view the huge amount of roadside trash one of the most obvious items I see are things that are not biodegradable. Yes, big word, but it means essentially plastic. Plastic everything from hundreds of plastic water bottles, to plastic straws including everything you can imagine made of plastic. Of course, we just ignore things such as plastic straws, but a little fact might make you reconsider when you suck up that Sonic Coke. Every hour, let that sink in, every hour 500,000 plastic straws are trashed, and since they are plastic, they will be with us for generations. You would think a garbage problem of that magnitude would have some folks up-in-arms to force straws to be made of paper, and sure enough over a dozen cities have already banned plastic straws. Seattle has not only banned plastic straws, but also banned single use plastic forks, spoons, and knives. And since I mentioned Seattle, let me make a comment about the town. It is considered one of the most livable cities in the country with a superior quality of life. Trails and sidewalks connect the inner city and almost 1/3 of the downtown workers either use bicycles or walk to work. They lead the nation in protecting the environment. But thank goodness Seattle isn’t the only city that’s trying to control the flood of plastic that threatens to overcome us. According to the number of legislative bills being proposed and nationwide polls, several states are ready to ban plastic straws and other one-time use of plastic utensils. The U. K. has already banned them, and Starbucks just announced they will eliminate all plastic straws. That will keep one billion straws a year from going to a landfill. I’m always looking for a good reason to stop at Starbucks.

However, plastic straws not only contribute to the overall landfill problem they actually are a significant part of the overall plastic trash. An estimated 7.5% of the landfill plastic trash comes from plastic straws. But there are other negatives in using plastic straws. Plastic straws can be detrimental to your health. Using a straw contribute to gas, bloating, and tooth cavities. Well, here’s another little problem with plastic straws, and you ladies might find this a good reason to quit the plastic…smoker’s wrinkles. That’s right, sucking on a plastic straw for years will do the same thing puffing on a cigarette will do…give you wrinkled lips!

Of course, plastic straws are only the tip of the plastic iceberg when you consider the 300 million tons of plastic products that are made each year, but those numbers are don’t reflect the actual enormity of the plastic problem. This is the number that is staggering…50% of this plastic goes into the one-time-use category such as plastic bags and other one-time uses. It is estimated each plastic bag is only used for 15 minutes and the vast majority end up in landfills or in our oceans. Recently a pilot whale beached itself in Thailand, and went through an agonizing effort to throw up the plastic bags it had ingested. It died and 80 plastic bags weighing 17 pounds were found in its stomach. The next time you grocery shop and come away with a half dozen plastic bags of groceries, think of that magnificent whale dying on the beach because it swallowed plastic bags.

I know it’s hard to understand the magnitude of the problem, but if you visit a landfill and view the hundreds of tons of non-recyclable plastic and other pieces of trash and then consider the World’s billions of people, maybe then you will have a better concept of why Stephen Hawking said in 100 years those landfills and other items that degrade our planet will become so numerous that future generation will be forced to live in squalor and Earth will become a toxic wasteland. That is the part that’s not under water from climate change.

Well, yes, there is hope for our planet, but it’s not from Washington. The plastic problem is a local problem, and it must be solved by local initiatives. Communities all across the country have already banned many of the items listed above and even a country, we might consider an undeveloped county, Rwanda, has banned all one time plastic products. That was ten years ago, and the country is doing just fine.

There are hundreds of web sites that offer reusable bags and other items that you can buy if you really want to help, and you can insist on either paper straws or no straw when you order a drink, and if paper straws aren’t available, then just sip the drink, and know that studies have shown a person will drink less of what is usually a sugary drink----and guess what? Lose weight.