Oh happy days!

Yesterday I posted the Tommy Douglas "Mouseland" speech from 1944 and today I am posting his "Cream Separator" speech. I love this guy and I know why many Canadians loved this guy. He tells a good story and he tells it in such an affable way that even if you don't agree with him you still end up smiling. The days of Tommy Douglas are gone and they probably won't becoming back again but I just wish that the politicians of today would let us have a little fun like Tommy did. Here is "The Cream Separator" by Tommy C. Douglas:

So, you know I used to visit farm homes in the early days. Of course everybody was always busy. Feeding pigs, chickens, pitching hay and oat sheaves. Even the youngsters were busy at important jobs. Now, you know, they couldn’t trust a city boy with anything important, something skilled, like milking a cow! I was given the one job anyone could do...turning the handle on the cream separator. They’d pour the milk in, I’d turn the handle, and out would come cream from the cream spout and skim milk from the other. One day it penetrated my thick Scottish skull (that can take time) that this was how our economy worked!

We’ve got the producers: the farmers, the fishermen, the loggers, the auto-workers, they produce and pour in the “milk” and then there are the service workers, the office workers, the nurses, and the clerks. They turn the handle. But then I thought, wait a minute, there’s someone missing here in this economy. What about the guy who owns the cream separator? Where is he? Why, of course! He’s the little fellow sitting on his stool, very contented, big smile on his face, his mouth wide open drinking all the cream from the cream spout! And everyone else, well, they take turns on the skim milk spout. Now nobody likes skim milk! It tastes awful, right?

So they were angry. But were they angry at the little fellow, no. They’d blame each other for the missing cream; “If only those greedy union members/farmers/nurses didn’t ask for such high wages, we’d have more cream!” But of course, they were wrong. There was nothing wrong with the producers or the service workers. The problem was the darn machine! It was designed to give the awful “blue” milk to the workers and the cream to the corporate elite. But sometimes it produced even more cream than the happy little fellow could digest. The darned machine would produce a surplus! So the fat little fellow would get indigestion from being such a pig. Then he’d shout, “Stop! We have a recession. You’re all laid off.” But, then after a while, he’d burp, pat his ample stomach, the cream had been digested and he’d say, “Okay, boys. Happy days are here again. Start the machine!”

Now what we have been trying to tell Canadians for a long time is that the time has come. The time has come, my friends, for the people to get their hands on, to get control of the regulator of that machine...to get the machine to produce homogenized milk with cream in it so that there is a little cream for everybody in this land!”