Great Depression?

My father was born in 1920. My mother in 1921. They were children during the Great Depression. As a result, I grew up hearing stories about their experiences in those very, very hard times. Unlike urban dwellers during this time, my folks lived on a farm which provided many advantages, especially when it came to food production and basic survival.

YouTube is replete with video posts about the period. After watching and listening to a number of these video history lessons, it occurs to me that the growth and maturation of any number of supportive national institutions since and because of that Great Depression provide us with protections and tools that my grandparents' generation did not enjoy. For this we should be grateful. I take so much, so many benefits for granted.

Watching and listening to events just 80 years ago causes me to respect my family and pause for a moment to be thankful even in this current challenging time.

Retro message for these times: The Grapes of Wrath

Quote without comment:

The decay spreads over the state, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people come from miles to take the fruit, but this could not be… And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

…Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, pp. 362-363).

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Primer on depression

I can take you there.

To the current, on-going "Great Depression."

It's been around for decades here in Dallas.

Sad thing is, its pace is picking up considerably.

You can see it in our Resource Center here in East Dallas.

Or, if you prefer a neighborhood expression, complete with lots of children and weary adults, I can take you there to several different versions of the same terrifying reality.

For here, let's look at our Resource Center.

Folks still call it the "Food Pantry."

Consider:

Through the first nine months of 2007, our volunteers served 14,487 hours and interviewed and served 31,603 individuals from 19,418 presenting family units. These "contact" numbers represented 7,968 unduplicated family units and 13,438 different individuals. Lots of people with food and life issues. Lots of work.

Through the first nine months of 2008, our volunteers logged 12,621 hours and interviewed and served 40,118 individuals from 23,272 presenting family units. These "contact" numbers represent 9,151 unduplicated family units and 16,037 different individuals. Even more people with nutrition and life issues. Lots of work.

Twenty-seven percent increase in individual contacts. Twenty percent increase in family contacts. A 15% increase in unduplicated families and a 19% increase in unduplicated individuals served in this one venue. It is also interesting to note that we experienced a 13% decline in available volunteer hours to do even more work.

Tough times for people who have little. But, not new times, not new at all.

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Bail out failure and the poor. . .

Random thoughts on an afternoon that could become "historic" in a very bad way. . .

What does it mean to be in "leadership" in our media driven, poll-sensitive, "ear-to-the-ground" political version of democracy?

Constituency concerns and opinions should always be received, acknowledged and followed whenever the elected leader feels that such advice is sound in view of the nation's overall well-being and health.

But a huge part of leadership involves informing constituencies about "the rest of the story" or the larger picture that comes in the context of naitonal leadership alongside other national, elected leaders.

At times, being a leader means going directly against the grain of popular opinion created by ill-informed or inadequately informed constituencies.

Voting along ideological lines, especially in a time of national crisis, is worse than foolish.

Allowing political concerns and campaign "wisdom" to completely overrun the national good is immoral.

These are hard times.

Possibly the Congress will come back over the next few days to act responsibility.

I know that my very low-income friends will survive.

Here's what may sound like a surprising prediction: If the very worst comes to pass economically, our nation will see how the poor rise to the occasion to care more deeply for all of us than most of us in positions of relative wealth today have cared for those crushed by the weight of a poverty that has made life feel like the Great Depression has been here for a very long time.

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