It's All About The Money

A couple of interesting things about the all-mighty dollar I ran across in the last few days:

There was an ad in the Mansion section of the Wall Street Journal for the Blessings In A Backpack organization. The 20% of the children in this country facing food insecurity normally can count on a hot meal at school but what happens on the weekends? This is where Blessings In A Backpack comes in. According to the ad, $100 will pick up the slack for a whole school year, so they can count on eating on the weekends as well.

A couple of pages before the ad was featured a $45 million estate for sale in Austin, Texas and a little blurb about Jane Fonda buying a $5.45 million townhome. This is after selling her ranch in 2015 that was listed for $19.5 million and her Beverly Hills home is currently on the market for $11.495 million. I'm not going to rag on Jane Fonda, that's another story, but it does spell out the disparity of incomes in this country. On one hand you've got kids going hungry and whose lives could be greatly improved with a measly $100, and on the other you've got a celebrity downsizing to a $5 million home.

Also in the WSJ was an article about credit card debt. Seems it has reached $1 trillion dollars again, which puts it up there with car loans and student debt. I would imagine some of these households are also the ones where the children are wondering where their next meal is coming from.

Photo From Here

I noticed in the Vintage Motorsport magazine e-mail that Jaguar has initiated the Jaguar E-Type Reborn program. Knowing that kids are going hungry and dreaming about owning a factory refurbished E-Type is probably not the most humanitarian thing going but there's no way a retired school teacher is going to cure the hunger problem or buy an E-Type that the factory has gone through. 

There's always going to be rich people and poor people. There's no shame in being poor but it's a real shame if you can't feed your kids, regardless of how that came about. I think the schools could do a lot more to remedy the situation by bringing back a more traditional education with Home Economics (FACS), agriculture classes and making the students aware of the resources of their county extension agent. The county I live in has more than a few poor people. It also has thousands of acres of agricultural land. Have we become so ignorant or lazy that we can't grow some vegetables or keep a few chickens to help feed ourselves? I don't have all the answers but teaching the young a few skills like gardening and food preservation should never have gone out of favor. Now's the perfect time for all of us to be thinking about a garden, by the way. Your own, a community garden or a CSA.