By Louise Mathews
As summer wears on, I have pondered an opinion piece by Les Rubin entitled, “John Adams Made a Terrifying Prediction. America is Close to Proving Him Correct.” Rubin reported that our second President said, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
This dire prediction contrasted with an experience I had last week.
Rubin outlines the grave danger the always increasing national debt places on our nation, its current social, political and economic health, and its future. I had not realized that the debt is somewhere in the cosmic environs of $40 trillion. The gross domestic product (GDP) is somewhere around $32 trillion meaning our national debt is now 125 percent of GDP.
Rubin compares the annual addition of $2 to $3 trillion to the debt to death by “… a thousand cuts; the damage appears manageable. Eventually, however, the cumulative effect becomes fatal.”
Over a decade ago, I attended a quarterly report by financial advisers to the college foundation board. They described countries that were in danger of collapse and referred to Greece which at that time had a debt equaling 100 percent of GDP. The Rubin article explained how the European Union bailed out Greece.
It further stated that no entity or country is big enough to bail out the United States. If we fail, the world fails, with “far worse devastation than the Great Depression.”
My parents vividly remembered the Great Depression. My father always fretted that the Depression would return. His worries created an imagined “wolf is at the door” scenario that haunted my early working years in the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1930s America, they might not have needed wheelbarrows full of worthless Reichsmarks to buy food, but my parents ate a lot of bread and gravy made from one small piece of meat during their Depression era childhoods. My husband’s Southern family ate biscuits and gravy often created from a squirrel or rabbit and survived because they lived on a farm and grew most of their food.
The post-World War I German economic collapse in part contributed to the rise of Hitler and the horrors of 1933 to 1945. A friend who survived the Holocaust as a child hidden in a convent once told me, “Always have a diamond that’s big enough to cut in half to buy a loaf of bread.”
In contrast to my ruminations about economic collapse and the subsequent political and social chaos that would ensue, I thought about an extraordinary encounter last weekend.
One of my brothers is a permanent deacon in the Catholic Church. As a deacon, he can preach and perform baptisms, marriages, funerals, and worship services other than the Mass. The weekend I visited with them, his parish hosted a nun from the Comboni Missionary Sisters who serve the poor in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. My sister-in-law, who is as much a minister as my brother, offered Sister Tsega a room and dinner with the pastor and the family.
It was quite the international event, with two missionaries from Africa (a fellow Comboni sister came for dinner), the pastor from the Philippines, and three suburbanites eating a Charleston recipe, Tradd Street Chicken, in Victor, New York.
Both sisters came from Eritrea, located in the horn of Africa, bordering the Red Sea. After a disastrous 30-year war, their country obtained its independence from Ethiopia in 1993. A president, Isaias Afwerki, was elected. Still president 33 years later, he might be the poster person for the word “dictator.” Eritrea saw its first Christians in the third century CE, and the population is almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims.
The per capita GDP (PPP) for Eritrea is about $2,500. For the United States, it is $90,027.
Sister Tsega, with whom we spent the most time, joined the Comboni Sisters in the late 1980s and worked as a midwife in Sudan and Uganda. Despite a childhood marked by war and innumerable difficulties, living with very little among people who have even less, she was one of the most cheerful, optimistic people I have ever met.
I wonder how people who have next to nothing survive and do so happily. Certainly, they have great faith and trust in the Lord who feeds us. We know that some of our neighbors experience real hunger and need, but most of us have the means to eat three squares a day. We fall apart when our cell phones don’t work. A storm that takes out the electricity for a day really derails us. Could we survive not having cars or gas to fuel them, or empty supermarkets, or shuttered stores that have nothing to sell? I wonder.
In his article, Les Rubin warned that America needs to get its financial house in order if we are to have a future. Until voters demand that Congress and the President pay attention to the national debt, they will probably continue to add to it. I believe that as individuals we must also consider how we might live more frugally, what we truly do not need, and what is most important in our lives. If we count our blessings, we might just achieve true happiness.
Louise Mathews retired from a career in community colleges and before that, theater. A 13-year come-here in Beaufort, she has been a dingbatter in North Carolina and an upstater from New York.