| Comparing Hard Times |
| Thursday, 17 December 2009 22:42 | |||
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Tuesday, December 15, 2009 – There’s an old adage that says If you lived through it, your ‘hell’ was the mother of them all. If true, that makes it tough trying to convince anyone who has experienced the difficulties that have been building over the past decade that he/she is much better off than those who went through the Great Depression.
I missed the first go-around, but was on this earth at the time one of our greatest booms was occurring – the long building period following the end of World War II, which was so strong that it wasn’t dented by the Korean War and only slowed a little by Viet-Nam. So my recollection of any ‘bad times’ are colored by having experienced both my “then” and our “now.” The current recession, tough as it is, apparently pales in comparison to what went on back in the early to-mid 1930’s. More people were unemployed then than now, and there were no government-supplied organizations that were around to help us out like there are today. On the good side (if you can call it that), on the eve of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term the American people were less spoiled, could do more with less, and proved they had the mettle to see it through. Americans then were also more easily satisfied and easier to convince. Many were angry, but they sublimated it, using every ounce of strength they could muster to survive. It took a great president, new programs (The New Deal and most of what it created) and a global war to rescue most of those alive during that time from slipping into the abyss. The big question today as we end a year most of us are happy to see leave town is: Do we Americans of the 21st Century have the moxie to recover? Can we do more with less? Will we have learned from what’s happened to us since 2000? Being the optimist that I am, I believe that we will. What I’m also hoping is that as we move together down the road to recovery, as we recognize and deal with the attitudes, groups, individuals and thoughts that helped put us in this fix we’re trying to pull out of – we will get tough, and help our leaders put in place the changes we need to return us to a new prosperity, one that has some intelligence behind it that will enable us to keep it growing, hopefully for generations to come. That means as we grow in our resiliency, we support our president, get behind the scary issue of global warming, help reverse the incidence of obesity – and in general work toward significantly reducing the number of children and adults in the world who don’t get enough of the right foods to eat. I know, I know – it may sound like pie in the sky, but if we work for it, at least these changes may happen to some degree. And any change for the better is good. Happy Holidays.
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