The Great Depression of the last century occurred the year of my birth.
I was born at home because there was no money for the hospital.
I was born into a poor family and we were subsidized by relatives.
My father's job was to deliver ice to homes that only had an icebox, which meant no refrigeration.
I remember him using large tongs to hoist a 50 pound block of ice onto a leather shoulder saddle and take it from the truck into the house where he deposited it in the icebox.
He injured his back and was now out of work.
My mother did not work and kept a clean house, clean clothes, clean children and cooked very simple meals.
We were taught cleanliness, table manners, respect for adults, and to never lie, cheat or steal.
The only violence in our home was my father's temper.
He did not beat us.
Instead, he used his tongue to lash us and it was psychological abuse.
It was verbal abuse.
This country emerged from the Great Depression with the event of WWII.
Women were freed up to work in factories and many of them never went back to being a stay-at-home mom.
My mother was one of these women.
I fulfilled a childhood dream of traveling the world by joining the Foreign Service of the U.
S.
State Department in 1952.
I trained in Washington D.
C.
to be a code clerk.
I was sent to work at the embassy in Paris and later to Tokyo.
I observed and learned much from this experience.
I was a naive young woman fresh out of segregated, bigoted Texas.
It was a major turning point in my life and I call it my uncommon education.
It was an eye-opener when my training supervisor told my group that she was in the code room when a message came in stating that the U.
S.
had broken the Japanese code.
It revealed that the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
She placed the decoded message in the proper outbox and this was ten days before Pearl Harbor was bombed.
She had no idea where her decoded message went to or who read it.
This is when I began becoming aware of what was happening in the world.
Since WW II, I have observed the evolution of it into the Korean War.
The Korean War evolved into the Vietnam War, whose purpose was to save the Golden Triangle from the VietCong.
The Golden Triangle covered Vietnam, Laos, Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand where were were great fields producing opium producing drugs.
When I was with the embassy in Tokyo, I married a career military man.
He spent two tours of duty in Vietnam and our military were introduced to drugs.
This escalated to the U.
S.
and the protesters of the Vietnam war.
They knew the Vietnam War was immoral and the leaders they looked to were assassinated: John F.
Kennedy, Robert F.
Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
The assassinations broke the spirit of the revolution that was at hand in the U.
S.
We became a nation of drug users.
The American population has also been sedated by commercial programming on television, the movies that have escalated into explicit sex in some cases and violence, which is now termed action.
People have been conditioned to having luxuries such as microwaves, big homes, swimming pools, two or more vehicles, cell phones, big screen televisions and other items.
Their attention is on sports and NASCAR has become a religion for some.
Corporate America has now become Corporate World and most of the corporations operate in foreign countries with outsourcing.
This is a major clue that a Great Depression is in the making.
What have I learned from all of this? It is to feed the mind with knowledge and learn how to grow a garden for food.
It may mean giving up the comforts one is use to, but the freedom of being unshackled from them is immense.
Knowledge is power--the power to make choices.
The greatest tool we have is our brain.
With knowledge we can become creative.
In all adversities there is a jewel.
We only have to use our mind uncluttered, which means not giving into fear or worry.
Attitudes and emotions of worry, anger, fear, jealousy and feelings of victimization is not the solution.
To fall into depression is anti-living.
Life is a gift and it is to be cherished.
When the major crash occurs, this is the time to be still and not to panic.
The solution is to develop the mind by going into solitude and allowing the solutions to come.
At first it is a challenge, but once one gets into the swing of it things happen.
Preparation is preparation with an uncluttered mind.
To the journey.