How People Adapt to Hard Economic Times

In this installment of These Ozarks Hills, long-time journalist Marideth Sisco reflects on hard economic times and the ways people adapt.

This is Marideth Sisco for These Ozarks Hills. Summer is upon us, and the farmers markets are bursting at the seams with the fruits of the farmer's labors. But even this season of plenty seems a season of discontent, too, and it's not just the heat. High prices at the pump are making it harder to fill the pantry, and the news seems worse every day. Those of us old enough to remember talk of what it was like in the 30s wonder if we may be gearing up for another long run of bad times, and I think about what Satchel Paige said: "Don't look back. Somethin' might be gainin' on yuh."

Now I know it doesn't pay to get too excited about the national news, for a couple of reasons. One, some of what happens out there doesn't get all the way here. My mother said that in the Great Depression nothing much changed except nobody had any money. But since they didn't have any money to begin with, they hardly noticed it.

The other thing is, the news isn't what it used to be. Time was, you could tell the difference between the supermarket tabloids with their three headed Martian babies born to an Arkansas teenager and the more reputable sources that would give you just the facts. But by the time these corporate media managers get through with the news, we don't know if what we're getting is what there is, or just what somebody thinks we ought to think.

Just the other day I saw an article in USA Today, that talked about families who had adjusted real well to the recent changes in the economy by growing a garden, raising chickens, and substituting stews for their steaks, and peas for their pate. I thought that was charming. I might have tried that, except I was already doing stews and peas, and the dogs the townfolks left at my place when they couldn't afford to feed them anymore had already eaten my chickens. So those ideas didn't really help me much,

The next day there was an article in the Chicago Tribune, a good article, about a group of African American people, led by their minister, who left the Chicago area in the 1960s and settled on a large farm near Cape Girardeau. They took their children out of the city to raise them nearer to the life they had lived in rural Mississippi. They took them, as they said, back to the Promised Land.

Those children, now grown and with families of their own, described it as a paradise. But for them, it has become paradise lost. For the children, having begun in the cities, took jobs off the farm instead of learning the skills of farm life. Where their parents and grandparents could grow corn and sorghum, raise pigs and chickens and cows, and feed the community on what they raised, the children could only make money. Now the land lies fallow, the children live in town and bicker over what to do with their lost heritage and dreams.

A sad tale, especially when placed against the blithe chatter about raising chickens and growing a garden as the quick and easy fix to our worsening economic woes. No mention is made there of the months of effort and expense between the chicken and the egg, between the seed and the tomato. If we think gasoline is expensive, what might be the cost of a little good sense?

Those two stories called up a serious question in my mind. I know how to make do, and so do a lot of country people my age. But what about this generation or more, now, of our neighbors who have no memory of hard times, or how to survive them.

I'm thinking it may be time we started making a bigger fuss over the gardeners, the librarians, the wisdom-keepers, those who know, or remember, how to do or find out a lot of the things that people might need to learn all over again to do for themselves, things that, in hard times, help keep a civilization - civil. We might start by teaching that basic Ozarks rule, the one right after "take care of each other." It goes like this: Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. Maybe not as catchy as trading pate for peas, but more likely to get us through the hard times, in these Ozarks Hills.

This is Marideth Sisco. Thanks for listening