Reading my publishers “Country Comments” last week about how our current youth have this toxic aversion to work reminded me of my own misspent childhood. During this time, I would have probably accepted with glee a lot of Senator Bernie Sanders’ liberal thinking toward child labor. I found some of the work my grandpa found for me to do down on his Eastern Oklahoma farm very untimely and unwanted back in the “war years” of the early 1940s. “Stoop” labor like covering newly planted watermelon hills with pages out of a Sears Roebuck catalogue. Bad. Cutting sprouts could be tiring too.

But my own toxicity to hard work as a youth extended beyond farm labor. I hated having to load and unload 100 lb. sacks of feed for Claude Cooper down at his grocery store. But it didn’t hurt me. My local employment officer, (my dad) helped me find this job and often found other distasteful jobs for his young son to earn money from.

As a matter of fact, I didn’t find it unusual to find myself overemployed many times during my childhood. Many of the kids I went to school with over at Stonewall suffered from the same problems. Farm work on the family farm took precedence over almost everything else. And I sure never witnessed much “breast beating” on the part of parents on the hard work their kids had to do on behalf of the family. I think some of that work was simply a part of survival. Or as Paul said in the Bible, “Let those who eat, work.”

Actually, that sounds pretty fair to me. Senator Bernie Sanders, a guy who makes Putin look like a freedom fighter, has engaged in almost tearful breast-beating over kids as young as 14 working at McDonalds. Of course, the Senator probably considers McDonalds a hateful symbol of capitalism, something else he hates. Strange that the people in New Hampshire choose to send him back, over and over, to the Senate. I mean, we are a capitalistic society, not communist, system that has helped us to become one of the wealthiest and best-off nations in the world. Go figure.

But alas. We have raised a generation of kids who not having had to work much as kids find the very act of having to do labor to live something of a mystery. Some, hating to own up to their own laziness and lack of ambition, point out that artificial intelligence, robots and other worksaving devices will soon take over and all we should have to do is push buttons and wait on the checks. Here in SE Oklahoma kids sometimes reply (when asked how they expect to make a living) that they will do just like their parents do, just get on checks. This idea has worked fairly well currently because there are still enough workers turning out products and creating taxes and wealth to cover the ones on “checks.”

But one wonders how far this theory will work as the number of product producing and tax generating workers diminishes and the number of “slackers” increases. The wealth of a nation has always been and depended on national productivity. Or to put it this way: How much does a nation produce, sell and how many taxes do they collect.

People such as the aging socialist Bernie whine, when cornered that the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes. Their taxes need to be raised. Bernie dwells on corporate taxes which he claims are all too low. But how much should corporations pay? Can it ever be fair? Are taxes on publicly owned corporations an exercise in futility? These taxes are simply passed on to the consumers. Us. And I sure don’t like to think of how to squeeze money out of corporations without putting the squeeze on their owners, mostly retire pension funds. To put it another way, young people: Learn to work and get a job. There isn’t any free lunch.

And lastly, may I remind all of you to go to church next Sunday. It doesn’t require much work and is free.

Wayne Bullard, DPh cwaynebullard@gmail.com