Posts Tagged “Great Depression”
By Larry Oscar
Well, here we are well into another year. We have a lot more people now that have moved to our lake in Northeastern Oklahoma, and they have come from all parts of the nation and all walks of life. They have brought with them their customs and the local culture from whence they came.
Some of them have found it hard to adjust to our frontier way of life. Oklahoma is just a bit over 100 years old . We have our own way of doing things and our own outlook on life. For the most part we are individual self-reliant people who want to be left alone. The pioneer spirit and that culture of freedom rings true for all Native American people. And in Oklahoma that is our native culture.
That is one reason we see things so different than many of the other more populous states. One thing we are not very good at is following the crowd. We are independent thinkers. Which is one reason we are slower to adopt change. It is also why we don’t suffer the problems that other states get themselves into.
The common sense of the people in Oklahoma is without question. “Look before you leap “ has been a very common practice among our people. It is for that reason we are not in the financial trouble many states are in. We are leaders in many other ways. While we are a heavy oil and gas producing state we are also the third leading producer of wind powered energy.
Our state also has an abundance of lakes and water resources. That is often a shock to those who live in coastal states. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard the phrase “Where do you sail in Oklahoma?” In fact, the Catalina Nationals will be held this summer on Lake Fort Gibson for the second time. I travelled in 48 of our 50 states in my travels. During all of those travels I found no other state that had a better quality of life than we do here in Oklahoma.
One thing that has made Oklahoma a great place to live is our work ethic. We have always been a people that has a “can do” attitude. A strong work ethic and family oriented value system has been a hallmark of the Oklahoma people. My grandfather, Earnest A. Hetherington, owned a farm just west of Cushing, Oklahoma. He fathered and raised 8 children in the middle of the Great Depression and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl.
Yet he never took a single dime of government handout money. It was a matter of pride with him. Compare that with today’s new millennial generation of over emotional whiners and complainers. There is a stark contrast to be made here. It is my belief that the move to a dependant society in our country is due in large part to single parent families.
It was my father that told me to “suck it up, nobody owes you a thing.” If I had been raised only by my mother I would have grown up thinking that we were all just going to dance in the daises and sing kumbaya. The ethics parents pass on to their children does matter. In a world that is growing more emotional and intolerant of others beliefs you can expect change agents to cause a higher degree of social upheaval. Our close link to the values of our forefathers has kept the people of Oklahoma more grounded in reality than other states.
Regardless of the situation you can count on Oklahomans to survive. We have survived floods, tornados, droughts, fires, and even a losing season at OU in our past, and we are still standing tall. So bring on 2019, hoist a few beers, grit your teeth, and hang on.
(Larry Oscar is a graduate from the University of Tulsa and holds a degree in electrical engineering. He is retired and lives with his wife on a lake in Oklahoma where he brews his own beer, sails, and is a member of numerous clubs and organizations.)
By Larry Oscar
With the end of winter, thank God for global warming, We can expect an increase in stupid behavior.
Now most of us old timers know the best place to enjoy the show will be lake area boat launching ramps. Nothing like sitting back in the warm sun with a cold beer and taking in the show. Interesting thing is how regardless of how many times you tell folks what they need to do before they put their boat in the water they never listen and learn. It must be something in the human mind that turns off their common sense, or maybe they never had any to start with.
Physics is the study of matter and energy and the interaction between them. Merely by observing, we have been able to develop the mathematics of a great deal of the universe. It has been amazing to me how much of the interactions in the universe we can now accurately predict. Yet we cannot predict, with any mathematical certainty, most of human behavior. There are several psychologists who have sophisticated theories on human behavior, but none seem to work better than good old common sense.
For example: Water flows downhill because it takes the path of least resistance. So does electricity, and so do humans for the most part. Even though humans are supposed to have enough intelligence to stop and reason things out, they seldom do. This behavior is observed in governments, businesses, and in our personal lives. Why is that governments continue to spend beyond their means when they are warned the day of reckoning down the road will be much more painful than dealing with the problem today?
Why is it people will let their business deteriorate to the point it collapses before they pull their head out and change course? The old saying that if you don’t learn from history then you are doomed to repeat it is taking place right before our eyes.
My parents grew up in the Great Depression and spent their young adult years in the shadow of World War II. They saw the National Socialist German Workers Party (The Nazi Party) lead by Adolf Hitler rise to power in Germany. Germany was a left wing socialist nation lead by a man most consider pure evil. Adolf Hitler’s belief system was also developed in the aftermath of World War I.
Funny how you won’t hear that from the left wing Democrats that are spewing the so called values of socialism today. An absolute fact they won’t ever mention. Adolf Hitler used a from of deception and promotion of the seven deadly sins to sway the German people to support him to the point of idol worship. The lessons learned then that helped guide my parents throughout their lives are not part of our modern culture today. My parents worked hard to instill the values of freedom, individual responsibility, and capitalism into their offspring.
Today we are facing a generation who has not been exposed to the human destruction and misery that socialism brings with it. We are, in fact, repeating history. Evil almost never confronts you head on. Evil uses deception and works to promote the envy, lust, greed, sloth, gluttony, wrath, and pride in human nature to it’s advantage.
The leaders of nations and churches today, just like Nazi Germany then, are preaching the same things that Adolf Hitler preached to the German people during his rise to power. And all you have to do is look at the votes these preachers of socialism get to see how the masses of stupid people are swallowing it hook line and sinker. Frightening isn’t it. And what makes it even more frightening is that many nations today have what Adolf Hitler’s war machine was trying to develop then. The atomic bomb.
We have spawned a crop of humanity that seems to inevitably march toward socialism with the capability to push a button and annihilate the entire human race. What is surprising is how this year”s carnival of politicians lambast and berate each other and never point this out. The similarities between what happened almost one 100 years ago and what is happening today are obvious to any of us who are old enough to live between those turbulent times in world history.
“And you will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and in various places there will be famines and earthquakes.” Matt 24:6-7.
Larry Oscar is a graduate from the University of Tulsa and holds a degree in electrical engineering. He is retired and lives with his wife on a lake in Oklahoma where he brews his own beer, sails, and is a member of numerous clubs and organizations.
As one of the longer hottest summers on record comes to a close we can 
reflect on the changes that have taken place in the lives of Americans in just a few short months.
The debt crisis, a prolonged recession, a volatile stock and housing market, the failure of Keynesian economics, social unrest in the Middle East, higher diesel and gasoline prices, inflated food prices, European economic failures, tornados and hurricanes, and the prolonged heat wave creates an environment of stress throughout our country that Americans haven’t experienced since The Great Depression of the 1930’s.
It may be that the stresses in the lives of Americans are indeed even worse today than it was over 80 years ago. During the 1930’s people were more self-reliant. We were a nation of individuals who were not too many generations removed from the self-reliant pioneers who settled this country.
Over the last 200 years Americans have lost the ability to take care of themselves. We have become a nation of lemmings who depend on someone else for nearly everything in our lives.
Gone are the days when we grew our own food, built our own houses, stitched our own cloths, and provided for our own future. Today we have so many people who look toward the government, or “Federal Family” as the spin doctors are now calling the government, for everything in their lives.
We have become walking zombies. What is interesting is the difference in the attitude of the people who live in different states. Our nation was designed as a union of individual states. The idea being that people who live in the states can govern their own lives with local and state governments, and that the federal government is to be limited and nonintrusive in our individual lives.
However, over the past 200 years the federal government has been growing and growing. We are at a crossroads as a nation. Do we continue with this bloated federal government and the increased financial burden it places on the people, or do we start to shrink the federal government back to a manageable level?
That will be the question facing us in the coming elections in November. Our nation has survived and prospered over the past 200 years to become the greatest nation that has ever existed. Our brand of freedom and capitalism has fed more people, created more prosperity, spread more democracy and freedom, and increased mankind’s knowledge of medical science and technology than any nation in history.
Now we face a danger, not from a foreign threat, but from a threat of human complacency from within. Do we allow ourselves to become the beings of George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four, or do we stand on our own two feet as our founding fathers did?
Our society has developed a disturbing pattern of behavior in our people. Nobody is willing to take responsibility for their lives or their actions. We are constantly blaming the conditions of our lives on anyone or anything but the results of our own actions. This even goes all the way to the Oval Office. Obama has blamed his failures on everything from the last president to earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan.
We didn’t elect him to play the blame game, we elected him to fix the leak. “Joe the plumber” could have done a better job. Unfortunately we have complete states with this type of mentality. I hate to keep picking on California, but they are the best example of the worst of us.
California, a state of lemmings, has 12% of the nation’s population and 32% of the nation’s welfare. And they wonder why they are in debt $24 billion dollars and getting worse every day. Now what’s wrong with this picture?
All of us need to stop and re-evaluate our lives as individuals. Are we to become a has-been nation of lemmings, or a revived nation of individuals standing on our own two feet. It is now time for the nation to decide.
I, for one, think we are about to see a great revival in this country. A revival that will embrace our brand of capitalism and crush the socialist marxist leanings of many of our lemming citizens. But I have been wrong before.
It is tempting to let big brother and the nanny state do the things for us that we should be doing for ourselves. Laziness is a very human temptation. So stand in front of a mirror, fully clothed of course, and take a good look at who is looking back at you. Is that person taking on the shape of a lemming? If so, go out and wash and wax your car.
That’s exactly what my wife is going to do this fall. And she may even wax my truck, as she promised after her team lost the Super Bowl earlier this year.
— Larry Oscar
More and more often you here the phrase “you just can’t make this stuff up.” Funny, most of the time it’s in regard to something from Washington. Just when you think the world can’t get any more crazy…… it invariably does. It seems like the entire world has lost all common sense and irrational behavior is now the new norm.
Lliving in Oklahoma, and having my ancestry go back to before the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run, it is easy to see why we think very differently than much of the rest of the nation. Oklahoma Territory was settled by a diverse set of fiercely independent people. They range from native American tribes, outlaws, oil barons, farmers, coal miners, cattle ranchers, and even bootleggers. The makeup of our state is not a socially unified group of people.
If you walk up to a native Oklahoman and tell him “we are all in this together,” you will more often than not get a frown, and a reply that lets you know that they will be the judge of who and whom they are “in this together with” and not you.
We are individuals in Oklahoma, and not members of some group of human lemmings like they are in other states. If you have moved here from the “Left Coast” or “Taxachusetts,” you will quickly learn that we don’t appreciate socialists. In fact, you may get invited to return from whence you came!
There is such a thing as “Oklahoma Values” and most Oklahomans will take up arms to defend them, including me. Here are some of our Oklahoma values:
1. You must stand on your own two feet! Nobody “owes” you anything. Your success in life depends on your decisions and your behavior. It’s nobody’s fault but your own. Got that “Oblama!”
2. We “give”…We don’t “give back”! As Oklahomans we have worked hard to get where we are in life. When you “libtards” ask us to “give back” you are marginalizing our accomplishments in life. We didn’t get where we are by being “lucky” or “fortunate.” The vast majority of Oklahomans got where we are by hard work and being willing to take a business risk. If you want us to donate our time and money you better just ask us to “give.” Don’t insult our individual accomplishments by asking us to “give back.”
3. Never blame your parents! Your parents only have you for about 18 years. And by the time you reach 13, you won’t listen to anything they have to say anyway, so take responsibility for your own life and your own actions. You won’t find 40-year-old Oklahomans blaming their parents.
4. We shoot guns! Oklahoma is a land of the outdoors. We fish, hunt, camp out, hike, and we love things that explode and make noise. If you come from a part of the country where you have never been exposed to firearms, don’t bring your anti-gun mentality to Oklahoma. We are proud of our western heritage and WE SHOOT GUNS!
5. No whining! Oklahomans are not whiners. Good and bad things happen in life. That’s just the way it is so learn to live with it. You will have good and bad times. We lived through the dust bowl, WWII, and the Great Depression all at once. The woosies among us left for California. I could write a book on that.
6. The government can roll it up into a nice tight ball and put it where the sun never shines! Oklahomans don’t want a nanny state government. We will take care of our own and ourselves. Whiz on the government. We are a free people who will live free or die. Don’t bring your big government mentality into our state. You will find that Democrats and Republicans in our state consider themselves as Oklahomans and brothers first. We Oklahomans stand together, and we will determine how we live and not some all powerful dictator from Washington.
The list of Oklahoma values is much longer than the six listed above, and any native Oklahoman will be happy to expound on the full list if asked. Oh…one more Oklahoma value. We like burgers, hot dogs, BBQ, fried chicken, and 32oz soft drinks. Got that New York? — By Larry Oscar