Remember the Waltons!

No surprise, my favorite television show as a kid was The Waltons. They did more than love their children, they cherished them despite living in poverty. Well, they said they were poor, right? They were mountain people living off the land. In the Christmas episode they weren't going to get presents. The grandparents lived at their home. They drove around in an old pickup. Poor John Boy. How was he going to go to college without the money to pay for it? To my mind, the Waltons represented the poor in America.

My mother often complained about her own childhood poverty and oddly enough, she didn't like the Waltons. Not at all. I started understanding why when she showed me her childhood home sometime around my 12th or 13th birthday. First, I saw the land near Tell, Texas where she and her family farmed. Sounds idyllic but they didn't own the land. They were sharecroppers. My grandfather had lost what little they had in the 1920's when the farming economy went bust long before people started to use the word "Depression". Their shack was long gone, but their home in Childress, Texas where they moved when my mother was five still stood. Not much bigger than a shack, maybe three rooms, an outhouse, and a stove that required firewood, nine people lived in that house. Where was the big Walton House with a dining room, living room, the big staircase and all those bedrooms? John Boy even had his own room. And where was Coldsmith Mountain? The Waltons might have been cash poor for a few years, but they were not ever asset poor and they never went to bed hungry.

My mother and her family were hungry all the time. My Uncle Sonny's favorite story was being home with my mother, his older sister with no food in the house except wilted lettuce and bacon grease. My mother fried it up the lettuce in the grease and that was dinner. He was grateful for that meal because he was fed something before bed.

Hugo Chavez had many faults but he did something for Venezuela no one had done before; he listened to the plight of the poor. He heard their stories and he acted. It is why he was so beloved by his countrymen. It is why he was re-elected even after the coup. And weirdly, it's why they will put him in a glass coffin and hold him in stasis just like Snow White. I don't know if he made their lives any better. I hope so. I am not a Communist but I strongly support a regulated and modified Capitalist economy which serves and promotes the poor and the middle class.