When was this published? If someone's not being paid $10 an hour today, they can't pay a week's rent.
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I met an old man about 5 years ago. I asked him to tell me what life in the depression was like. He thought for a minute and said, "We used to eat grass."
Then his eyes lit up a bit and he said, "it tastes really good with salt!"
bttt
Good advice!
The other church ladies and I are planning garden and egg swaps this summer. One gal said she’s got a cherry tree and when she calls, come and get ‘em before the birds do. The kids loved the sound of that!
Maybe a slight silver lining? Working together?
My dad says his family used the Sears and Roebuck catalog when he was a kid. My grandparents didn't have indoor plumbing until the late 40's, but the good news was they had converted over from catalogs to TP around 1940.
Glenn Beck is saying the same thing on his weekly TV show with Fox News.
The one that always sticks out in my mind is the one of her standing next to some tomato plants outside the boxcar her family was living in at the time.
She used to tell the story of her mother sewing underwear from the flour and sugar sacks. The sisters used to fight over who got the one with the brand label.
And she used to tell a story of one winter when there was no work and her mother took the last of the cornmeal to feed the wild birds. Her mother then caught them and that was their dinner.
I always marveled at how she “made it” from such humble beginnings.
Oh, did this bring back memories of my dad. He died 2 years ago, but if he was still alive, he would have had one giant 100th birthday party this August.
His family also has a '2-seater' and many times he would reminisce at dinner about the Sears catalogue & glossy vs non-glossy pages, which always got my sons laughing.
In fact, when we met with the minister before dad's funeral, he asked us about our memories & that was one of the first. Did that bring a smile to my uncles' faces during the service!!
One, many of us already have cut spending to the bone, given up anything superfluous, and deprived ourselves of every pleasure that might be bought. Many of us are already baking our own bread, raising and canning our own vegetables, hunting our own meat. And we're still having a very bad time.
Two, I too have had conversations with survivors of the Great Depression: my 99-year-old mother-in-law and a 97-year-old cousin. Both of them emphasized that they were farm girls, were very poor in the sense that they had no money to buy objects, but they could eat because the family raised its own food and did not have to pay for food, water, or electricity.
Their expectations were lower: they didn't have central heat, and merely chopped wood to feed the woodstove or fireplace. This was free. Water was free. Health insurance was unheard of and medical care unsophisticated, so there was no money slated for it: if a child got scarlet fever or dad got a heart attack, he simply died. One didn't get bills for electricity, gas, car insurance, car registration. Property taxes and income taxes were minimal. Neighbors bartered goods for services.
Today, few people can do any of this. Our houses are often too big or too full of windows to be heated with a woodstove, even if we could afford to go out and buy one, even if we could find the constant supply of wood. We can't get our own water. A quarter-acre lot can't raise enough food for a family. We can't keep chickens, goats, or pigs in the suburbs or cities. Most people can't hunt, and mark my words, there are going to be a lot of ugly hunting accidents when ignorant suburbanites take their shiny new rifles out to hunt in the suburbs for their first-ever deer.
In addition, we have millions of dependent, helpless poor and illegals here, sucking up resources. We didn't have the huge population of illegals during the Depression.
Forgive my negativism, but I see that this situation could be far worse than the Great Depression.
Most people are only renting their living quarters now, and monthly rental fees aren’t likely to go down before all else does.
The modern interpretation is, "Don't be too proud to be a parasite."
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