Count on my wife to bring things into perspective. I had rented a movie made in Mongolia about the rise of Ghengis Khan. I remarked that it was a hard land that bred hard people. My wife commented that people who whine in this day and age should keep that in mind, that they have no concept of hard times.
My parents grew up in the Great Depression. My dad quit school at 15 to go to work in a knitting mill, working twelve hours a day for 7.50 a week, and then delivering soft drinks for his father’s bottling business, until it went bankrupt. After he got finished paying his parents to help with their expenses, he had about 50 cents a week to spend on himself.
In the 1950’s, he and my mom were raising my brother and I and didn’t have enough money for the doctor bills, so my dad started a coin business, which he operated part-time while he still worked 7 to 5 every day in the knitting mill, and our family began to prosper enough that by 1959, he could afford by buy a second car.
Now, when was this middle class time of paradise for which we wax nostaligic?
I remember Perotistas calling Rush during the 1992 campaign telling that things were so bad that they could not get worse. They can, and they might, especially if Obama gets re-elected and even more so if the Dems regain Congress, but we boomers and echo-boomers have no concept of hard times.
Have never seen that movie but will try to find. Unfortunately, in another 10-15 years most everyone that was a small child at the end of WWII will be gone and with that no more grandparents to pass on the history of that time when they were a child. I don’t think of them as hard times. It was what it was. I had food to eat, clean clothes to wear, a warm house to live in, parents who loved and cared for me and God was the center of our life.
Today’s definition of hard times too often involves not having material things, like Jordan tennis shoes or an iPhone. Sad state of affairs.