differences between the great depression and great recession

Comments on the chat list regarding how some folks don't understand what being poor is really like, reminds me that I also was a child of the Great Depression. 

Now, living in the current Great Recession, I note a number of differences in what it is like to be poor. 

Back in the 30's, after the 1929 Crash, poverty became a way of life.  But White Americans believed that this was only a temporary set back.  They still believed in the American Dream, a home, a job and a happy family. 

There was no mass media pressure to buy, buy, buy.  No bulk mailings of credit cards.  No easy credit at all. 

The objective of most folks was to have security, not stuff.  But the poor of this Great Recession are coming from a different mind set.  A great many of the poor are people of color, as well as people of disability.  These people understand what disenfranchisement is all about. 

They did not fall from Grace, they never were there in the first place.  Some are the children of generations of people living in grinding poverty.  They hold out no hope of cashing in on the American Dream.  And they are under an all out attack by the mass media to believe that having the latest gadget is the most important status symbol in all Eternity. 

Drugs play into this, also.  In the Great Depression alcohol and tobbacco were the drugs of choice.  Now, in the Great Recession it is a no holds barred Drug Store.  Over the counter, under the counter, in the back alley and over the back fence, anything your little habit craves is availible. 

So it appears that we have seperated into three major worlds.  There is that world of the First Class Corporate American.  Then there is the dwindling Working/Middle Class Americans, the fodder for the needs of the First Class.  And there is the world of the poor.  They function as a dumping field for the glitzy gadgets manufactured by our international corporations in China and shipped in to tempt them.  They are also a ready source for bodies in the never ending war on Terror. 

 

And that is my view of some of the diffeerences between the poor in the 30's, when hope of a brighter future still existed, and the poor of today, where all hope has been lost. 

 

Curious Carl