Mamacita says:  I’m going up to Indianapolis today with my mother and my daughter, to my lovely niece Stephanie’s baby shower.  I hope she likes what I got for her. It’s not what anybody would call a “conventional” baby shower gift, but my family is used to me and my unconventional ways.  I have a feeling she’ll like it.

I am thinking about making a Christmas quilt and putting it on eBay.  Do you suppose anybody would bid on it?

Quotation Saturday already!  Other people are so much better at “saying it” than I am.  My intentions are good, as I told a dear friend just the other day, but sometimes when I open my mouth to give comfort, toads spew out.  Not so with OTHER people:

1.  The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.  –Pascal

2.  It’s not a slam at you when people are rude – it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.  –F. Scott Fitzgerald

3.  Men of sense are really all of one religion.  But men of sense never tell what it is.  –Earl of Shaftsbury

4.  Common men talk bagfuls of religion but act not a grain of it, while the wise man speaks little, but his whole life is a religion acted out.  –Rmakrishna

5.  Your life is made up of years that mean nothing, and moments that mean all.  –Unknown

6.  Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence.  Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.  –Joseph Conrad

7.  Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge.  –Claude Bernard

8.  The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.  –Katherine Fullerton Gerould

9.  Even the Lord didn’t do it all in one day.  –Andy Rooney

10.  It is easy to know God, as long as you do not vex yourself to define Him.  –Joseph Joubert

11.  Genius is a promontory jutting out into the future.  –Victor Hugo

12.  Even the lion has to defend himself against fleas.  –German proverb

13.  Insane people easily detect the nonsense of other people.  –John Hallam

14.  Never make fun of people who speak broken English.  It means they know another language.  –Jackson Brown, Jr.

15.  . . . (he) has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.  –Aneurin Bevan

16.  If I try to be like him, who will be like me?  –Yiddish proverb

17.  All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.  –Claes Oldenburg

18.  You have to pay dearly for being an imaginative person.  You see a great deal and feel a great deal, but there is ugliness to see and feel as well as beauty, and in yourself as well as in others.  –Sherwood Anderson

19.  In this world there are only two ways of getting on – either by one’s own industry or by the imbecility of others.  –Jean de la Bruyere

20.  It was the kind of flop that made even the audience look bad.  –Fred Astaire

21.  No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.  –C. S. Lewis

22.  Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.  –Robert Graves

23.  A gentleman is a patient wolf.  –Henrietta Tiarts

24.  I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my work.  –Oscar Wilde

25.  A conquered foe should be watched.  –E.W. Howe

26.  Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.  –Gandhi

27.  Praise undeserved is satire in disguise.  –Henry Broadhurst

28.  I’ve never been poor, only broke.  Being poor is a frame of mind.  Being broke is only a temporary situation.  –Mike Todd

29.  Poverty is not essentially a lack of money, nor is the mere lack of money poverty.  Rather, poverty is the lack of ability, in any given set of circumstances, to get whatever is necessary for comfortable living.  –Edward Hubert Faulkner

30.  The best thing about humor is that it shows people that they are not alone.  –Sid Caesar

31.  Not to be able to bear poverty is a shameful thing, but not to know how to chase it away by work is a more shameful thing yet.  –Unknown

32.  To ease another’s heartache is to forget your own.  –Abraham Lincoln

33. When you harbor bitterness, happiness will dock elsewhere.  –Andy Rooney

34.  Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.  –John Wain

35.  Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man’s superiority to all that befalls him.  –Romain Gary

36.  There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money.  –Robert Graves

37.  Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.  We have guided missiles and misguided men.  –Martin Luther King, Jr.

38.  Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it.  –Langston Hughes

39.  Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.  –William Beveridge

40.  The Ku Klux Klan never dies.  They just stop wearing sheets because sheets cost too much.  –Thurgood Marshall

41.  The highest form of wisdom is kindness.  –the Talmud

42.  Every man, either to his terror or consolation, has some sense of religion.  –James Harrington

43.  To insure peace of mind, ignore the rules and regulations.  –George Ade

44.  We can call only the want of what is necessary, poverty.  –Clement I

45.  There can be no mischief where there is music.  –Cervantes

46.  He was a man who acted from the best motives.  There is one born every minute.  –P.G. Wodehouse.

47.  You cannot really understand any myths till you have found out that one of them is not a myth.  –G.K. Chesterton

48.  Who has the longer view of things, anyway, a prime minister in a closet, or a man on a barn roof?  –Elwyn Brooks White

49.  It is said that if Noah’s ark had had to be built by a company, they would not have had the keel yet; and it may be so.  What is many men’s business is nobody’s business.  The greatest things are accomplished by individual men.  –Charles Haddon Spurgeon

50.  One ungrateful man does an injury to all who stand in need of aid.  –Publius Syrus

Back in the middle school, our literature textbook used to contain a short story about an old man who, for just a few months, many years before, had been forced to accept public welfare.  He was so humiliated by this experience that he vowed to someday repay the ‘system.’

He planted a huge garden, and when the vegetables were ripe, he gathered them and brought them to the Welfare Office, that his bounty might be distributed to others who were on the dole.  Instead of gratitude and thanks, all Welfare got were complaints about how someone got more or better than someone else, and how someone wanted more, and people threatening lawsuits because of inequity in the giving out of the produce, and people  whining about how so and so didn’t deserve all that fresh corn and why didn’t I get any of that? and how this stuff had better be here again next month, by golly, and more of it, too.  The story ended with a completely messed up and disorganized Dept. of Welfare, a clientele of screaming complainers, and an old man innocently walking back to his garden, smiling at the thought of hungry children eating his vegetables.  He can’t wait to replant and do this again, as soon as he can.  Finally, he thinks to himself, he’s able to repay the system for that horrible year when he, himself, had to accept charity.  The story’s themes were gratitude, ingratitude, unselfishness, selfishness, generosity, the spirit of giving, and how the best of intentions can backfire.

The story was removed from our book because it was deemed offensive to the poor.

I maintain that the story was offensive only to the greedy, the “entitled,” and the ungrateful.  I also maintain that it might be good for such as those to see themselves as others see them once in a while.  But what do I know?  I’m so insensitive, remember, that I believe only in EARNED self-esteem, and in giving rewards only to those people in any circumstance who deserve them.  And there is no one on earth now or ever who is born automatically deserving either self-esteem or rewards.  They have to be earned.  Children know this.  It’s the adults who have to be placated.

I think two of the many sad things that have happened to us as a population are the downplaying of gratitude and the emphasis on entitlement.  It’s as if people just expect things to be handed to them, without any effort on their part at all, and these people don’t even know they’re supposed to be thankful and appreciative.  Honestly?  I think there are ADULTS in this country who don’t even know that decent people WORK for their money and their homes and their insurance and their food and their clothing, and that Welfare is supposed to be a temporary thing, to help working people who are in a jam. I’ve had students who are fourth generation Welfare recipients.

Sick and sad.  And disgusting.

51.  One of the consequences of such notions as “entitlements” is that people who have contributed NOTHING to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.  — Thomas Sowell

52.  Once the government becomes the supplier of people’s needs, there is no limit to the needs that will be claimed as a basic right.  –Laurence Auster

53.  The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.  –Thomas Jefferson

As long as this lifestyle is temporary, and NOT of one’s own choosing, I have no problem with it.  Anybody can need help at times, and that’s what Welfare is for: to help someone out, temporarily, until he/she can get back on his/her own two feet again.  Most people who live on other people’s money are not proud of it, and are striving to be self-sufficient.  I am glad and proud to help such people.  The day could very well come when I would need help, too.  What I have a problem with is people who don’t even KNOW anybody who works for a living, and who EXPECT their money to be handed out to them, and who, when they get their money, don’t take good care of it.  I spent a summer, a few years ago, working in a grocery store so Belle could go on the big band trip.  I was sickened by many of the people who patronized that store.  Often, they came in late at night so nobody would see them purchasing luxury items.  And somehow, most of them miraculously had the cash to buy cigarettes and beer.  Sigh.

To be a recipient of “charity” was once a shameful thing, and now, people brag about it.  This is wrong, on so many levels.

Again, when people use it as it was intended: temporary, and the sooner off the better, I have no problem with this at all.  But as a permanent lifestyle, and living better than many working people?  I don’t THINK so.

In the public school, it was the people getting the freebies – lunch, books, after-school care, etc. – who complained the most.  Color me naive, but when someone is getting something for free, to complain at ALL is singularly crass.