Who are the New American Po Folks?

It's all a matter of mathematics. A simple, ordinary, garden variety math equation and not even "new math" at that! Ok, raise your hands....who remembers 'new math' now days?

Back to the subject, and that is the New Po Folks here in America. America is no stranger to Po Folks by any means, heck they been around since the first settlers stepped off rickety ships just landed on these shores and I reckon they are going to be around for as long as we are a nation so we aren't talking about OLD po folks, we need to take a long, hard look at the NEW po folks and how they got that way and what can be done about making them at the very least middle class once more.

New po folks are...well, us, in a word. We the people. You and me who aren't quite making it out there in the land of milk and honey.

The math part? Here's the deal, we each have so many dollars to use as we see fit at the end of the week or however you out there get paid and those dollars have to last until the ink dries on the next teensy-tiny check the boss man hands us and how we manage that money usually determines whether or not we get the medical care we might need, our household utilities being cut off or staying on so we can light up our modest homes and play our X boxes, car repairs...no, not even repairs cause the clutch don't go kaflooey on the family vehicle every week, but we DO have to suffer the humiliation every day of buying gas that is now in the range of a precious commodity kind of like diamonds or gold...being $3.00 a gallon and all, and food.

So, we start out with X dollars and we mentally countdown each expenditure, "I got two hunnerd and if I buy this, I'll have a hunnderd, sixty-seven left....now if I can catch a sale at the grocery store I can buy corn dogs and frozen pizza and mac n cheese for at least three nights worth of supper....sigh" And, if you are like me you hang around wistfully staring at the meat counter each time you stroll by it, not looking people in the eye cause then they might now without a doubt you can't really buy anything you are just looking at meat skyrocket in price and remembering when you could feed your family good old American beef for a reasonable amount of money.

You agonize over every dollar that dwindles away and makes your wallet lighter and lighter as the bills mount and the the stress takes it's toll. Sometimes when it gets too much to bear I have seen women and men alike get that "Po Folks" look on their faces and you can tell these aren't people living in shacks with cars on blocks in the front yard, these folks work and pay taxes and make a little money and try hard to hold their heads up even though the mat problems of making a buck stretch get harder and harder by the day.

Politicians and government? Don't make me laugh! In the first place it isn't the governments J-O-B to make all our troubles go away or to protect us from all the bogeymen out there in life. We swallowed hook, line & sinker all the BS the government fed us back in the sixties and we bought into the theory that they, the slickers and the scammers who took over Washington, spooned into our waiting and wanting mouths.

WE allowed government to make our decisions for us, to order our lives and to "protect" us from the many waves of change blowing like sour winds across our nation's landscape and we thought, some with the convictions of an old timey revival meeting, that government could and would coddle us as a people from the cradle to the grave.

Nope. We can no longer blame government but we CAN change the course of how we feel and what we believe and how we vote. Whatever happened to crippled Frank Roosevelt leaning on the podium in front of Congress and assuring us all that "The only thing we have to fear...is fear itself!"? Where did the America that fought World Wars, pulled itself up by it's bootstraps and overcame dust bowls, depressions, droughts, unemployment and a host of other ills go?

The generation that achieved so much sent the next generation off to universities and educated them so that they could grasp for the torch of time and carry it into another era. Trouble is, those kids got taught not what the universities KNEW for a fact, but what the teachers THOUGHT they knew and it was mostly hog-wash. And, look what happened? Don't we all wished they would've just stick to the facts?

We have a lot of issues social, economical and downright personal that need to be addressed but I am told the height stupidity is doing the same thing over and over the same way and expecting different results. Right now we are battling all these issues with the same mentality that gave us $3.00 gasoline and a $12. rump roast from the grocery store.

While people still run this government who have no clue whatsoever who we are out here in America and what we go through on a daily basis to survive, we won't ever be able to do anything more than the simple grinding, heart wrenching mathematics of trying to make a dollar stretch far enough to just exist.

"Let's see....I can do without a phone this week, maybe new tires next payday, well ONE new tire....Awww man, whatabout food?"