CNN.com ran the following story (which has several good points about saving and the value of negative thinking) with the headline “Ready to eat squirrel soup?” I’ll give you an excerpt:
Memories of salvaging and stealing to avoid going hungry are part of the legacy of the Great Depression. Some iReporters say they can’t help but look at the current economy and feel the past holds lessons for the present.
Donna LeBlanc of Waxia, Louisiana, says she carries no credit to this day as a result of the frugality and self-reliance instilled in her by her family. Her husband keeps the couple’s credit card and maintains a zero balance.
The Great Depression meant scary times for many households as a period of economic downturn spread throughout the world. Historians trace its start to the “Black Tuesday” stock crash on October 29, 1929, and argue that the resulting global desperation set the stage for World War II.
LeBlanc said her grandparents were fortunate that they didn’t have investments and could grow — or catch — their own food during the Depression years.
Her grandfather Lester was a “Cajun cowboy” often seen wearing a cowboy hat, and her grandmother Ida was a resourceful woman who spent much of the 1930s working as a store clerk. LeBlanc, always told never to keep credit card debt, heard frightful stories from Ida. iReport.com: See a photo of the happy couple together after all these years
“She remembered vividly the barrels of flour, the bolts of cloth and the hunger in the faces of people as they begged for store credit,” LeBlanc said. “The store must have been at least marginally successful, because my grandmother was able to purchase, a piece at a time, a complete six-person setting of Gorham Chantilly silverware for her trousseau, linens and even a Lane cedar chest to house her treasures.”
The couple would catch wild hogs, feed them corn for a year and eat them once the wild taste was out of the scavenging animals. They also took advantage of available squirrel meat, a common food in the South at that time.
“It was a uniquely disgusting thing … to see my grandfather take a stewed, skinned squirrel’s head, smack the skull’s dome with a heavy silver tablespoon, and dine on the brains,” LeBlanc said.
Nothing like making people scared to death they might end up eating squirrel brains! Instead of focusing on some of the valuable information from that era, we’ll focus on people stealing, starving and barely making it out alive.
This is the kind of destructive negative thinking that gives real negative thinking a bad name. The sad part about it this article is there are some lessons to be learned…if you’re not too freaked out by the horrible circumstances they portray.
It’s not news…It’s CNN. How true!
