Bucking Trend, They Stay, Held by Family and Friends

[demnan]

<snip>
Blessing or trap, the lure invariably is family — the family ranch, the homestead, the business, the assurance of help with a job. Sociologists and demographers do not know whether families like the Bartons are the stragglers of an exodus who will finally be swept away, too, or whether, like the survivors of fires and floods before them, they will adapt and hold on.

<snip>

In this make-do economy, you pay a mother-in-law something to baby-sit, just not a lot. You leave a note when you enter an unlocked house and take something. Pauline McNeil, 80, the retired postmistress and widow of a carpenter, sews. "I don't charge for it," she said. "Someone will say, `I've got a pair of pants that's too big.' "

No one need buy maternity clothes. They are delivered to the doorstep, worn and dropped on another doorstep. In Reydon, families put the surplus from backyard gardens inside the post office door, for others to take. Cousins fill in for cousins who call in sick. You try to get a job with a telephone company, utility or oil field company, because then you get a truck to take home.

</snip>

Have these people found an alternative to the slavish devotion to corporate America? A backwoods socialism of sorts?

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/national/02OKLA.html?hp

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Uneffing believable.

This is EXACTLY how the rest of the world operates. The NYT makes it sound like they're some lost tribe.

I remember there was a used clothes drive at my daughter's Christian pre-school, years ago. I packed up all my daughter's hand-me downs and gave them to the school. Well, a few minutes later there was this power-mom going through my things and she looked over the clothes and commented, "How can anyone have the gall to give this trash to someone else."

Since then, I box up the hand-me downs and give them to my younger brother whose daughter is always enthralled to receive them. Or to my mom who goes back to the old country every now and then. Never, NEVER has anyone been ungrateful for receiving those things. Nothing is wasted.