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Just like no gas in the tank… Panic gets us no where.

By Kimberly Kelly
Sep. 30, 2008 at 08:14 PM

I watched ‘panic’ yesterday. As I drove home I saw a gas station with lines out into Hwy-153… into a highway! Cars swarming pumps, like bees on a piece of rotting fruit… panic.
NOT panic to the extents we have seen however… Some 79 years ago, “The Great Depression” began. October 24, 1929 started it all, “Black Thursday”, and according to history books, “Panicking investors lost faith in the American economy”.

My grandmother lived through the “depression”, and as a child it was just a word to me… and the reason that she drank Un-sweetened tea.
Sugar was too luxurious back then and so she acquired a taste for it that way, or so she said. Looking back, I wonder if she didn’t just drink it that way as a reminder of the hard times she had been through and seen. She also saved things… magazines and newspapers, butter tubs and scraps of cloth. Nothing was wasted. Old panty hose were ties to hold tomato plants up. Meals were heated and reheated until they were completely gone, not until we were, “sick of that”. Water was collected in rain barrels off the side of the house to water plants and animals. I was not alive during this ‘great depression’, but I felt the ripples it left, over 50 years later.

I was born in the 1970’s… perhaps I sat in a car seat, in a gas line during that decade. Only to later in life, see gas used in frivolous ways… crowds gathered by the tens of thousands, just to see this precious nectar burning lap after lap.

While it is true, we are NOT as bad off as we have been. Luckily, we haven’t panicked our way into bread lines and bank runs, but times are at least sobering… and while there is no “Great Prozac” to cure our ills… families and small businesses are feeling it.

Perhaps a blessing, we tend to really see life in perspective, during ‘sobering’ times. While in, times of excess we close our eyes to so much.
 
So a few things…
What are you seeing more clearly now?
What (if anything) are you doing differently?
What innovative savings have you found?
And then lastly… what little thing have you done lately, to bring a smile?
You know, a simple splurge: take the kids to the zoo, a date night to a local restaurant, SWEET tea, or a scoop of ice cream…

Let’s be smart and leave the panicking up to those facing political debates!

See you on the show,
kimberly

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