One out of Four

One of every four workers was out of a job at the height of the Great Depression (1933) which ran from 1929 to 1941. But not my parents. They both graduated from high school in May 1930 and started at the same college that September (having met the summer of 1930 on a blind date). During their school days Mom worked in the college library and Dad worked in a local restaurant. When the college closed Dad worked at the printing plant and on the neighbors' farms and Mom worked as a domestic until she too could find work at the plant. Both U.S. presidents of this awful period threw money at the problem--first Hoover then Roosevelt to no avail. Both prices and tax rates soared. "We the people" have been left with the residue of broken social programs and burdensome regulations and bureaucracies which were expanded beyond anything Roosevelt could have imagined Americans would tolerate by President Johnson in the 1960s (all of which I thought were wonderful then because I believed they would end poverty). And what may be worse, we've elected men and women who actually think a decade plus of those policies worked! If first it fails, do more of the same. The poor of the United States are rich in material goods beyond anything a well-off family in the 1920s could have imagined, but not because of government programs--houses with bathrooms, electricity, automobiles, telephones, closets full of clothes, freezers, refrigerators, insulation in the walls and paved roads for our cars. But in values and common sense we seem to have become impoverished by layer after layer of government programs and safety nets. We are a naive, ungrateful people and have made mud pies from the tears and hard work of our parents and grandparents.