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Linda Whitlock

Recent columns

• Seeing racism where it's not
• Sanford could still be a hero
• Skeptics or traitors?
• School freedom is elusive

From the RoundTable blog

When one of my uncles developed emphysema after smoking for most of his life, he didn't sue the cigarette manufacturers. He didn't blame them either. Whatever the tobacco companies had or hadn't done, my uncle knew he was the one responsible for his smoking and for the disease that would ultimately kill him.

My uncle's attitude is increasingly rare. Whenever anything bad happens, most of us want two things: someone to blame (and pay) and someone to make sure it doesn't happen again. Candidates for the former are endless, but the government is becoming the "someone" of choice for the latter.

"But Mr. Roosevelt's a gonna save us all."

So goes a line in "Song of the South," an old Alabama hit about the Depression. Since Roosevelt's time, and in no small part due to his policies, many Americans have come to believe "the federal government's a gonna save us all." That seems to be the thinking of some Obama supporters, anyway.

In the same speech wherein Obama slammed Phil Gramm for calling America a nation of whiners, he also said when homes are being lost and property values are dropping, "It isn't whining to ask government to step in and give families some relief." An MSNBC clip on YouTube shows that line brought the crowd -- or at least those seated behind him -- to their feet.

Obama supporters, though, are hardly alone in their thinking. The federal government does have a legitimate responsibility to protect us from certain kinds of harm -- terrorist attacks among them -- and to maintain the country's infrastructure. But we want more. We want government to save us from ourselves.

Trouble is, as economist Thomas Sowell has noted in a couple of recent columns, government, through the laws Congress passes and the way those laws are enacted, often brings about or exacerbates the very problems we later look to it to solve. The housing crisis, according to Sowell, is one of those problems.

Instead of expecting government to get us off the hook whenever things go awry, maybe we'd be better off if we took more responsibility for solving our own problems -- and for avoiding them to begin with.

My uncle, as he well knew, could likely have avoided the agony he endured with emphysema if he'd never started smoking or quit years before he did. Some caught up in the housing mess today could have made different decisions and spared themselves some agony, as well.

In response to my last column, a reader chided me for minimizing the economic woes some people are facing. To cope, her family had, among other things, resorted to several meatless meals a week. I'm no vegetarian, so I could sympathize. Still, it did occur to me it wouldn't hurt if more of us ate less meat. Both our health and our pocketbooks would benefit.

Martin Fassero would agree. During his "The Whole Truth" seminar I attended this past weekend, Fassero showed a clip of open heart surgery that illustrated the ghastly results of eating too much meat and fat. It got my attention.

Fassero and his wife, Stephanie, have taken responsibility for the eating habits of their family of 11 and offer a model for others who'd like to save both their money and their health. For the Fasseros, who are Christians, it's an issue of financial and physical stewardship.

In part, to have resources available to support indigenous missions in various areas of the world, something they feel led to do, the Fasseros live simply in a house they built themselves (frugally) on around $800 a month -- close to what the Department of Health and Human Services considers the poverty guideline to be for a household of one. They spend about $250 a month on food.

They don't do that by making weekly grocery runs to the local Wal-Mart, of course. Or by growing their own food. Or by starving themselves. They eat better than I do, in fact. If you're interested in how, check out TheWholeTruth.org.

The Fasseros are unique. We may not all be able or even want to duplicate their lifestyle. We can, though, all learn a few things from it. It's up to us to take responsibility for how we live. And we can live on a whole lot less than we think.

Whitlock, a Roanoke Times columnist, is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.