Occasionally someone says something so dumb it causes my fingers to twitch and search for a keyboard. It happened recently when I heard someone on TV say, “I didn’t live through the Great Depression, but I know that things are every bit as bad now as they were then.”
My mouth jumped into gear and I said, “Look Bunkie, before you sound off, do your homework. Otherwise hundreds of idiots in TV land will believe your dumb statement and begin whining that the government hasn’t done anything to help them.”
I didn’t live through the depression either – not all the way through. I entered it in England in the early 1930s, so I saw part of it. Although I don’t remember the details, my parents filled me in. Dad had remarried, started a second family, retired, and moved to England. He bought two large houses, one to live in, one for income. When he got cut off his income from the Alberta farm, he lost both British properties. During the depression, no government offered to help him or the mortgage holders. Although already in his 60s, his survival instinct cut in. To him the answer to personal catastrophe was simple: he sold personal belongings to buy steamship tickets back to Canada, returned to the farm with $6, and started over.
Unfortunately, he took ill and landed in a provincial mental hospital. The government assessed his keep at $1 per day, and took control of the farm to pay for it. They allowed mother and her three kids (I was in the middle) to live on the farm and scratch out a living any way she could. Unlike today, the government offered no medical insurance or welfare. It did allow us to use the farm buildings, so mother ran a big garden, and raised chickens and animals.
She also picked up a few dollars by occasionally cooking for the town hospital. Even though we lived three and a half miles from the railway, unemployed men sometime came by looking for farm work. At best mother would ask them to split some wood, give them a meal and send them away with her best wishes. During the great depression nobody offered retraining courses to mother or the men who rode the rails looking for work. Without health insurance, mother created her own system; she paid for each doctor’s visit with a chicken prepared for the oven.
In the dying years of the depression mother managed to restart her life by moving to Ontario. She sold personal belongings to buy day-coach tickets for the three-day trip and had enough money left over to put $100 down on an elderly house in London. She cleaned offices and homes and managed to raise three kids who stayed out of trouble. We were on our own; no one paid relocation allowances to stranded families or made huge grants/loans to students.
If I could ask mother to compare today’s circumstances with the great depression, I doubt you’d get anything more than a derisive look. But if I asked her how to survive these difficult times, she’d answer without hesitation: “Work at whatever you can find, even at minimum wage; sell anything you don’t need, even your car; dig up the back yard and grow vegetables; and don’t expect the government or anyone else to help you.”