Do people who lived through the "great depression" forget what it was like and did they forget to

[kelliekat44]

tell their children and now their grandchildren? Did they forget to tell them how tough it was for everyone and how everyone in their poverty and depression stuck together and tried to help one another? What is wrong with America?? What has happened to our soul? Why do our leaders love war so much? Is it because they see great opportunity to gain more wealth and power? Why do people love guns so much? Why do they hate the poor and the disadvantaged? It is all so maddening. Really, is it all because Obama won...twice?

[JustAnotherGen]

1. I don't know kelliekat

Robert Redford was born in 1936 - how did this one man become such a champion of humanity and earth -

Yet James Dobson and his ilk (a few years older than him I think) become such a monster?


I don't know.

[shenmue]

2. Could be

The right sees their stranglehold on the wealth of this country being threatened.

I miss my grandparents. They told me lots of stories of what it was like to live during the Depression.

I just wish nobody would ever vote Republican again. We Democrats aren't perfect, but we are definitely different from the Republicans.

[Skidmore]

3. My parents were children during the GD.

My mother used to tell us stories about it. I think lots of that generation has passed and the stories are gradually being silenced by their passing.

[eShirl]

4. Most of the people who lived through the great depression are dead, dying, have dementia, etc

[no_hypocrisy]

5. My dad grew up in the Depression.

His father had a failing business and gambled away whatever profits he made.

I figured the experience and the humility would make Dad compassionate.

No it didn't. Dad called the homeless men who knocked on doors for something to eat "bums who refused to work". He said that.

I don't know why he felt that way other than he was afraid of going hungry if his mother gave away HIS food.

[NickB79]

6. My grandparents NEVER forgot

My grandfather and grandmother were both in their teens during the Depression. It changed them for life. They could stretch resources like you wouldn't believe. I have wonderful memories of working around the yard with Grandma, picking apples, tending to the immense garden, gathering chicken eggs in the coop.

They raised 8 sons on a family farm in Minnesota, and when he passed on, my grandfather left $1 million CASH to split among his sons. He left the family farm (now worth over $1.5 million in land alone), an undisclosed amount of savings, as well as a house in town, to my grandmother.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

7. Most of the people I know (or knew) who experienced the Depression

remained very frugal throughout their lives. My own parents were teenagers in the '30s. Although both of their fathers managed to remain employed, they were nevertheless pretty conservative about money. I knew a lot of older people (I say that even though I am now an older person) who were very careful about reusing things, even pieces of aluminum foil (I still do that), not throwing anything away if you could fix it (but things these days usually can't be fixed), etc. But I don't think it's living through the Depression that turned people mean. My own parents were Republicans, but nothing like today's Republicans. Anyhow, most of the people who were adults in the '30s and actually had to deal with those difficulties are now either dead or very old - it seems like it's the Fox demographic, people who are 60+, maybe retired or close to it, maybe the children of Depression survivors, who have gone mean, along with some younger people who still think Atlas Shrugged is great literature. I believe a lot of it has to do with the disturbing success of right-wing media - Fox and Rush Limbaugh and their ilk - who have managed to convince people that it's perfectly OK to be a selfish, racist bastard.

[HockeyMom]

8. My Grandpa picked through the garbage of the food store

he worked for (lucky to even have a job?) and brought it home for the family to cook for dinner. Remember, this was WITH wages, which all went to paying the rent. Let's end the Minimum Wage? Dad told me all this and how they would tie rope around their falling apart shoes to keep them on their feet. This was in NYC and my Grandpa was an EDUCATED man from the UK.

My Mom's Italian/American NYC family didn't have it as bad in the Great Depression, but their livelyhood was involved in ILLEGAL activities.

Graw your own conclusions on both sides of my family.

[jwirr]

9. I was born in 1941 so it was not so bad then but I do not think they forgot. They lived frugally and

tried to be as self-sufficient as possible. They told my generation about it and I have tried to pass it on but while they are trying to live that way - many of the younger ones either do not think it is needed or they resent the need to give up the luxuries that are available in our world today.

Also all elderly do not think like that. Many of us still remember. I have a signed picture of FDR hanging above my desk to remind me of what he did when that generation was suffering in the Great Depression. I honestly think that President Obama would be doing things like that if he did not have such idiots in opposition. Especially the rethug House members.

[Squinch]

10. We didn't stick together and try to help one another. The right was just as idiotic then as now.

At first they wouldn't do a damn thing to the point where tent cities were springing up all over the place filling up with homeless people. Then they fought FDR tooth and nail on every measure he proposed. Then, after he had begun to turn things around, in 1937 when he had reduced unemployment from 25% to 15%, they forced austerity measures and brought the economic recovery to a screetching halt, sending unemployment up into the 20's again, and causing untold misery.

And check out that Spanish American war if you want to see idiotic reasons for war. It's the same old story.

I don't like what I see right now, but there is no such thing as the good old days. The jackasses have always been with us, and they have always been just as bad.

[Cooley Hurd]

11. I'm not all that old (under 50)...

...and my Mom lived thru the Depression. We ate a LOT of meals - mostly ad hoc stews - that she learned from HER Mom during the depression.

I'm a Gen-Xer who knows what the Depression was about. And I wouldn't trade that experience for anything in the world.

[Barack_America]

12. Consumerism.

I blame the obsession with the acquisition of shit for just about everything.

Big driver of our energy consumption, trade agreements, jealousy and suspicion of one another, etc.

[joeybee12]

13. Most of them are no longer around, and no, they didn't forget...

My parents grew up during it and the effects lasted throughout their lives...don't blame them, blame the 80's babies who grew up during the time of the scum Reagan.

[starroute]

14. I think the "good years" of 1945-75 blurred their memories

My parents told me stories about having it tough during the Depression -- but their generation also tended to have a sense that they'd survived the Depression and won the war and that as a result they deserved everything the society could give them.

In the 1950s and 60s, the economy kept growing and their standard of living kept rising. By the time they retired, Social Security was at a comfortable level, Medicare had been enacted, and most of them had tidy nest eggs, investments, or pensions.

So even the stories they told their children and grandchildren pretty much boiled down to colorful anecdotes about the bad old days and how now they'd fixed everything and it was never going to happen again. Meanwhile that sense of everyone having to pull together and give each other a helping hand got lost along the way.

[Art_from_Ark]

20. I think you're on to something there

In fact, I think you've summed it up quite nicely.

[rhett o rick]

15. Dont you dare lay this at the doorstep of the generation that survived the First Great Republican

Depression. They taught the lessons, us baby-boomers didnt listen. Our parents worked hard to make our lives better than theirs. It's us that let the following generations down. Our generation allowed the Viet Nam war. Our generation elected Nixon, Reagan and the Bush's. Our generation that thought electing a Democrat in Clinton would put us on the right course. IMO it's my generation the baby-boomers that were complacent and did not leave an America where our children could have it better than us. Well I still have a little fight in me, and I only hope to live to see this bullshit turn around. That's why I have no patience for the Third Way Status Quo crowd.

[JoeyT]

16. That attitude predates Obama's election.

It's the bullshit "Greed is good" narrative that started in the 80s all grown up.

[LeftInTX]

17. Yep...

My dad was an FDR dem. Then, he voted for Nixon, but Nixon basically left FDR's programs in place.

Then, he voted for Reagan.

When I questioned him about Reagan's dismantling of FDR's programs, my dad basically said "FDR was needed back then, but not anymore".

I think my dad fell for the Reagan's "welfare queen" propaganda - cuz based on his memory as a kid, they didn't have "welfare queens" when he was growing up.

People tend to have short memories....and they tend to see other groups as "the problem".....

[JoeyT]

21. My grandparents on one side basically voted the same way.

Though they didn't even bother to frame it as altruism or even logic. "We needed it back then, now it doesn't help us and costs us money, so time for it to go." was their attitude.

[applegrove]

18. My thinking is that the GOP knew that, as the greatest generation aged, those people coming

behind them had no memory of war or poverty or of coming together to make the country a greater place. My grandmothers used to talk of how people who were in poverty should never be made to feel embarrassed that they needed help. They should be respected. When you go through traumas you don't forget what matters. And petty little things and selfish ideas go by the wayside.

[kickysnana]

19. To live through the depression you had to be born before 1930.

Auntie born 1935 now, 78 only remembers what she was told.

If you want to hear about it stop into a low income senior resident and grab a cup of coffee*. Nobody else wants to hear about it, including my kids, but they were told by me.

My parents generation moved out of the city into the suburbs (to forget?). My generation at least heard about it in school, my much younger sisters neither heard about it from anyone nor at at school. They are now about 46 and 48.

*Corkie lived in South Dakota and along with the Depression the water dried up. There was not enough, there was NO market for the cattle her Dad had so he dug a trench, herded them in, shot them and buried them. He had no choice.

[kiva]

22. A couple of things:

First, most of them are dead - my parents were born in 1914 and 1919, so would be 100 and 95 if they were still alive.

Second, it's a Walton (as in the TV show The Waltons) fantasy that everyone stuck together, it was the same as today, some people did and others didn't. I've heard (can't remember the source) that in a poll the majority of white Americans at that time thought that it was wrong for a black person to have a job if a white person didn't.

Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans (and some Mexican Americans) were deported. Whites from the southeast ("Oakies" and "Arkies&quot were migrant workers in California and the appalling way they were treated was documented by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.

Generations moved in together not because they necessarily wanted to but because they had to in order to survive. Men, ashamed of their inability to support their families, abandoned them. The divorce rate fell, not because people were more committed to each other during a bad time but because couples couldn't afford to get divorced.

Don't buy into the fantasy and tart up history, it's far more interesting when you look at what actually happened.

[Warpy]

23. People who were old enough to remember the Great Depression as teenagers

are now in their mid to late 90s and rapidly dying off.

My own parents had stark memories of it, my mother of eating oatmeal three times a day until she graduated from high school (at 14) and found a job. Then she had an incredible luxury of a five cent, once a day fried egg sandwich. My dad's family was in better shape, but he had to go out and hustle pennies and nickels for his baseball and biker movie habits.

Their memories are why I was always more of a saver than a spender and why I always distrusted anyone who wanted to extend me seemingly unlimited credit. I had a credit card for about 2 years, until they started to charge junk fees. I could smell a scam coming so I sent it back in pieces.

Had I been able to get health insurance, it would have been just fine.