Not the Depression

As bad as things seem now, this is no depression. Just ask the people who lived through the real one.

Indiana seniors in their 80s and 90s who’ve heard comparisons of the nation’s current financial woes to the Great Depression say today’s crisis can’t compare to the hardship that followed the 1929 stock market crash.

Joseph A. Furman, a 93-year-old from Cedar Lake, said he’s fed up with people calling today’s economic troubles a depression. He said the current troubles are a few cry from the mass layoffs, hunger and hard times that followed the stock market crash.

“I don’t think it will ever get to that point. Life was just unbearable,” Furman told The Times of Munster for a story published Sunday.

Like other Hoosiers from that era, he recalls people struggling to scrape together enough money to get food for their families to survive. Furman remembers people selling apples to earn a little money, and the days when he and his relatives shared and borrowed clothing.

Other Hoosiers who lived through the decade-long Great Depression recall collecting coal that fell from passing trains to heat their homes and stuffing cardboard in their shoes when the soles wore out because they couldn’t afford a new pair.

I remember the stories my step-father, grandparents and grand uncles told me about the depression. What we’re going through now, as bad as it may seem, is nothing close. Of course, it could become a depression, and it might. But I don’t think it will be as bad as the Great Depression. For one thing, our infrastructure and social services, strained as they may be, are going to prevent a lot of people from suffering the way they did in the 30s. They had no such systems in place then.

For another thing, the world economy is more integrated and elastic. Once we shake through the problems that were created, the system can repair itself and bounce back.

Of course, it all depends on how the various world leaders and markets handle the mess in the interim.

What annoys me is how so many Democrats used the GD phrase leading up to the election last year. They wanted it to get bad, because that was the Dems last great hurrah, when Roosevelt offered up the New Deal. But like Johnson’s War on Poverty, the new deal left us with a lot of lasting bureaucratic messes that have caused decades of damage. This is where the problems of good intentions can get us into trouble. Big government isn’t going to save us, even though many will ask it to.

James, you’ve become a daily read for me.
My Dad was growing up on a farm in Arkansas thru the great depression.  Grandpa was a sharecropper when it started,  and owned his own farm, after the recovery.  Dad and his brothers,  didn’t know much about the depression.  Their food still came from the farm,  and they traded for things with produce or traded livestock, just like they had before the depression started.  I’m not sure,  but I believe Grandpa traded a horse team,  for his very first Farmall tractor,  pretty much in the middle of the depression.
Anyway,  what I was getting at, is,  sometimes it’s all a matter of perception.  I’m pretty sure there were people farther up in the hills,  that never heard about the depression.

Posted by AuGres  on  01/11  at  05:47 PM

Thanks.

My family were farmers on both sides. So the real depression hit them hard, though my dad’s side did not lose their farm. My grandpa moved west though and started his own family out here. Some of his brothers followed.

The stories I have heard are so different than anything happening today its absurd to even compare them. The media also makes things sound as bad as possinle.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  01/11  at  08:39 PM

My grandmother (94) says she knew the Depression was mostly over when they finally got Christmas presents one year. 
Each kid in the family got an orange.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  01/12  at  02:01 PM

Yep, I heard stories like that from some of my family. Even the economy following WWII was rough for a time. My dad said he only got clothes for Christmas when he was a kid.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  01/12  at  02:52 PM

Here’s the modern “equivalent” of those stories:

A parent tells her daughter on Christmas, “Sorry, I can’t buy all the Bratz dolls you wanted.  It’s because of Bushaitan’s laissez-faire capitalism.  But don’t worry, the Newest Deal is on the way to save us from the New Depression.”

And a year later, the MSM announces the victory of ecOnomics.  Yes, they CaNN!  With prosperity coming Real Soon Now, the mother gives her daughter an extra Bratz doll for Christmas.  The girl remembers that, and votes accordingly for the rest of her life.

Seriously, watch as people cite the slightest setback as “proof” of the New Depression caused by the worst president of all time.

Posted by Amritas  on  01/13  at  01:16 PM
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