I think that looking back at the Great Depression just puts everything into a much larger context for me. As students, most of us hear the media talking about the increase of job loss and the increase of the national deficit and hear about the various reforms and etc but I find that we don't really listen. After reading Introduction and Hard Times to Hooverville, I have really come to grasp just what these numbers and statistics mean. Take the statistic 9.8% and 10.2%. If you look at it as 10 pennies out of a dollar, it doesn’t seem like that much. If you actually pay attention to what the statistic is on and realize that the "pennies" are people and not just double digits, but double digits with about 4 zeros after, the severity of these statistics is shown in and emphasized in a brighter light.
To students, we live a very easy life. We wake up, go to school, text at lunch, facebook after school, eat dinner, ichat, then go to bed and wake up and do it all over again. To parents, a day consists of making sure that your children get to school, get picked up and fed, WHILE balancing a job and a marriage (if there is one). I think that reading the Great Depression shows that the people that lose their jobs aren't just poor people who didn’t go to school and don't work hard every day and live as law abiding citizens. These are people, mothers, dads, adults fresh out of college, etc. who are trying to live their own American dream, but can't because the economy is sinking.
The Great Depression informed me that the numbers aren't numbers that people fool around with to get you to donate money to charities that you just write off on taxes. This article also makes me look around and notice what is happening in the news and not only how all aspects of life were affected then, but how life is slowly changing now. There is definitely a parallel between the events leading up to the Great Depression and events that have happened in the past half century after the Great Depression. To say that the unemployment rate is the highest since 1983 should cause concern for all Americans. The article that I read says that the only way out is through government help and regulation, but this causes one to ask if the reason we are back in this situation of a recession again is because of poorly run and monitored regulation. This article causes the reader to ask if there needs to be more regulation or just reformed regulation and I think that if we sat back and compared the past to now and looked at the outcome of the Great Depression and the problems and successes following it, we might be able to come up with a better solution because adding to the deficit without a plan to pay it back seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
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article that i read was the NY times article.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opinion/08sun1.html?_r=1
Wow--this is one of those responses that made me say wow--that's my sign of an A level assignment. You're last paragraph in particular raises some excellent issues--how do we proceed from here and is more of the same going to actually make a difference. I love the fact that you have personalized this when talking about unemployment. You're right--the people that lost their jobs in the 1930s did not lose them because they were not qualified. That's true today too. And what happens to people when they can no longer find work or support their families. Today at least we have a govt. safety net. In the early years of the Depression there was no safety net. Where do you turn? I cannot imagine the fear that this must have instilled in people as they struggled to figure out how to put a roof over their family's head and to figure out how to feed and clothe their families. Keep all that in mind as we read more about FDR and his response to the Depression. Nice work. Definite A.
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