On April 27, the area I live in was devastated by a tornado. Lives were lost, homes and businesses destroyed, jobs lost. People lived in shelters for weeks. Churches, businesses, individuals came together in a great outpouring of effort to assist those in need. Slowly, very slowly, my little town is taking shape again, a few businesses are re-opening, and some of the jobs are coming back. Still, there are hundreds of houses with blue tarps on the roof. Cherokee Valley, the hardest hit area, has a huge field where downed trees are taken and turned into a mountain of mulch. There are billboards in surrounding towns inviting people to shop in downtown Ringgold. For our newest Treepers, some of the details of the devastation are here.
Today I found this quote in an article about the Waffle House re-opening.
“I saw on the Waffle House Facebook page where they were going to finally reopen,” said LaRoche, “so I contacted them and told them ‘for Karma reasons’ I wanted to come and pay my bill from that night. My wife had just looked at the bill when the tornado came and she remembered the total was for $9.62.”Read more: CatWalkChatt
Doesn’t it feel good to encounter stories of everyday values, where people, normal, not very exceptional or special people, go about their lives with honesty and integrity? Who would blame you for forgetting all about a nine dollar bill under these circumstances? Would you even think to try to repay it? Yet, it is just these values, just these beliefs, that unite us as a people, standing together for what we believe in, sharing comfort and courage in moments of danger and need, coming forward afterward to celebrate survival, rebuilding – and to pay a debt no one else remembered. This is what makes us who we are, what we are. The obscure people who go to work, pay our bills, and expect the same of others in our community. The honest people who would like to see Washington adopt these values we stand for:  stand on your own two feet, practice good stewardship of what you have, be honest and trustworthy – even when no one is watching.To me, people like these are the salt of the earth, the people who get a community organized in times of need, the people who make things happen in instead of waiting for the government to arrive and take charge. To many of the liberal politicians, these are gap toothed hillbillies who are making such a ruckus nationally with their tea party agenda of actually running a government that will be able to pay it’s bills. I have no personal knowledge of the people in this article, nor their political beliefs. But I respect those beliefs and I believe if we ran our country with that kind of honesty and integrity, we would not be in the economic mess we are in, nor would we have trillions of dollars of deficit hanging over our heads. I read plenty of the analysis and cause and effect and economic theory articles and statements by people much more educated than me – and I have a pretty good education myself. I am not impressed, I am not intimidated, indeed, I am very unimpressed by all the studies, theories, books, and classes. By all the politicians, economists (especially the Nobel Prize winning kind), by all the pundits, experts, and think tanks.
I submit to you that if our government officials were as honest in their dealings with our money as this Waffle House customer, that is all the solution we would need. Just honest people acting with integrity. That is the solution. However, we stand a better chance of fixing what is wrong with our economy by following some of these complex and convoluted plans by politicians because we are never going to have a government of honest people. I am not sure we even want one. Just ask Rick Perry, as he is attacked for stating a very obvious truth about Social Security.