My grandfather, Tandy Walker Davis, joined the Confederacy in Alabama. He was in the Cavalry and had to provide his own horse. After the war, he drifted to Mississippi, married my grandmother and that family drifted on down to East Texas.
Tandy was a skilled craftsman and carpenter. He was deaf from canon fire but he could build fine furniture or houses. The railroad was coming through Texas and he secured a contract to build houses for the railroad workers. Before he could do that, he had a stroke and died, leaving my grandmother with 7 children. She did what she had to do. She took in railroad workers as boarders. Her oldest boys worked as farm hands for farmers in the area and her oldest daughter worked as a maid for a wealthy family.
We are a long way from that kind of self-reliance but we need to wean ourselves from total dependence on the government.
The social security system was a decent idea but it became corrupted. Most government programs do. It should be dismantled and revised. But blaming current and future recipients in the heartless way that some people do is wrong and mean.
