We Will Never Understand the Great Depression

It goes without saying that I am looking for a position in the worst economy since the Great Depression.  Although - raised as I was hearing the stories of the Great Depression - I think it is callous, selfish of us to even consider this comparison. Things are not - from what I can tell - that bad! There is no way - even if we listen to stories, or watch old movies from the era - that we can experience the suffering, the hardships that they went through.  I do not see children walking to school in three feet of snow, barefoot, selling rotten apples to passersby, happy to get to school because they had heat there.  Then again we do not tend to get three feet of snow in Philadelphia...now or when grandfather was raised in Philadelphia, come to think of it.  This may also put his teacher's name - Miss Ophelia Balls - into uncertainty.  I'll have to check Philadelphia public school records from those days.  

Also unseen are hatted newsies on street corners hawking newspapers and certainly none of them are bursting into song.  No one is in black and white either I might add, we can apparently still afford color in these times.  I do not see people lining up at soup kitchens, after hawking their gold rimmed eyeglasses at pawn shops.  Men do not come calling with carts at six in the morning for rags, old bits of tin, etc and their wives are not taking in sewing and laundry.  Although given our access to cheap clothes from Asia (even GOOD clothes are being made in Asia, don't let the designer fool you), since we sent most of our garment jobs there, and the commonality of washing machines we have knocked these two alternate sources of employment out of the water in these times.  Sad...I could EASILY take in wash!  Have any dirty knickers?  

Furthermore, banks you know are insured now, thank you Mr. Roosevelt for inventing the FDIC.  Granted...there has been an increase in commercials and websites offering to buy your old, unused gold jewelry.  I did - briefly - think of selling the gold band of my grandfather's ring then turning the diamonds into a much more simple ring.  However, it was stolen by a contractor's assistant, so perhaps he sent the ring into one of those companies, I don't know. 

I understand the phrase Great Depression however and it's not understood by people today.  I don't think we will ever be able to understand it because of the fact that private investments are insured.  It is a product of our very selfish, materialistic natures that came out of post-WWII that even allow us to compare these times to those dark days.  The Depression refers not only to the financial depression of our grandparents but the way working people felt. This was a country of factory workers! When they were unable to work they had no credit to fall back on. They had their identity taken from them. Yes, someone might only have been a seamstress or a pipe fitter but when you lost your job in those days - essentially - you lost your trade. In terms of education and society in those days you did not have the skill sets of the modern drone, the office worker. You could not therefore hope to reinvent yourself as easily.  If you are unaware of the plight of the poor in the 1920s I suggest going to youtube.com and looking up 'The Kid,' bu Charlie Chaplin. It will make you cry perhaps! I cried because I have seen pictures of my daddy in his 1920s gear, familiarity made me sad. In that movie - you see these urchins, these paupers, with NOTHING! There was no aid as we have today. Watch that film, and you will NOT be able to say we are in a Great Depression. Granted the film was made before The Crash of 1929 (I think) but it gives you a TRUE version of their plight! The Great Depression of having to line up at soup kitchens, avoid bill collectors, take welfare, and the like made people much more depressed than most of us could ever feel today over this financial crisis.  Today people will mourn the loss of the vacation, the new car or the new flat-screen TV that they can't buy. Not that their savings went because banks were uninsured.  Today, as in the family stories, I don't see people taking in boarders to supplement their incomes (like my ancestors did) or keeping chickens in urban courtyards against the blind eye of local police.  (Although I did find out South Philly was never dezoned rural and well...I might be buying some hens to keep in the garage, haha!) I wonder how many suburban back yards will grow vegetables this summer?  Probably no one will do this, no one will consider that getting dirty to save money is the right way to go. In the early part of the last century everyone had a veggie garden, even in the city! Today, people would think that it wouldn't look right to have a vegetable patch near the swimming pool.  Speaking of food, I hear of people making cutbacks to food budgets because gas is so high. Even in cities like Philly which have decent public transport, people would rather cut food budgets as opposed to taking the subway! It's unreal! Eighty-years-ago however I am sure the car would have been the first thing to be cut out of household budgets.  I also know - full well - that we will never once again have the trust, the naivete, and the idea that we are all in this together that family stories (with the exception of Ophelia Balls) have conveyed.  We have - in the strive to be individuals - separated ourselves from our brethren.  People have become too insulated, thanks to iPods and cell phones so that even when on a subway or walking down a sunny avenue we shut ourselves away from our fellow man.  In sum, no one will ever knock on my backdoor asking if he can sleep in the barn for a night, to be welcomed instead into the house, and into the kitchen to receive a free meal before he jumps a train to "look for work."  Then again...the back door is separated from the house by a long, storage-choked garage.  If they knocked we would not hear them in the rest of the house and...furthermore we don't have a barn.  We live in the city.  I don't think we would invite them in either, as my half-pit, half-fox terrier mix requires a criminal background check on anyone entering the house.  If Sugar bit this wayfarer we would of course be sued, something else that would not have happened 80 years ago, I am sure! Oh, about the ring, the stolen ring. You might ask how the contractor's assistant got past her.  Simple, he had a dog of his own whose scent must have been pleasing to Sugar.  (Or, perhaps like I, she thought the contractor was the cutest boy to walk in here in AGES and for that did not hop onto MacBook to check his background!) 

So as I look for jobs, as I search for them online, by word of mouth, by making phone calls I am still hopeful.  For once we lose hope that is truly when we can expect another Great Depression.  This might - dare I say it though - actually bring us closer together.  This might be what can remove Americans, Western Europeans and the like, from our insulated worlds.  We might instead be more willing to let people sleep in our barns, take a meal with us and commiserate together.  It might make us realize that we must become more human to our friends, neighbors and strangers.  Perhaps culminating into a democratic-socialism, the likes of which Europe adopted after WWII.  Whether socialism is reinterpreted according to how we treat each or develops into a new form, a new interpretation of government, now is the time.  Perhaps we need to erase our tablet, perhaps we need to become totally reduced so that we can rebuild afresh.