Sometimes when we feel we are surrounded by chaos and uncertainty we fail to put things into perspective.

Right now we are being forced to make great sacrifices. Imagine being forced to wear a mask, or produce a vaccine card to enter a facility . There is a howl we are living in unprecedented times.

Maybe it’s time to take a deep breath and ask ourselves is this really true. I was born the year after WWII ended but I heard some stories that would make our problems sound like we were a marble short on the playground. The truth is the real tough time was before WWII during an unprecedented time of hunger desperation and an endless sea of hopelessness.

The Great Depression or as some refer to it as the ten lost years. My father made me aware that the things we have now in many cases were as a result of societies failures from that era. A friend complained about gas prices I sympathized but thought during the early years of the Dirty Thirties gas was a luxury for urban dwellers and a non existent necessity for rural citizens. Folks were quick to adapt. They converted the cars into horse drawn vehicles and called them Bennett Buggies.

It was a negative reflection on RB Bennett the Prime Minister of the day. My father pointed out the programs we have today did not exist during that time. No Family Allowance/Child Tax Credit. No seniors pensions no unemployment benefits for those without work. And a skeleton of a program for social welfare, I was told in order to qualify for relief as it was called, one had to physically show their ribs could be seen under their skin in some jurisdictions. Can you imagine the human rights furor that would cause today?

It should be noted that twenty-five percent of the workforce was idle and thousands of men rode atop boxcars on the rails looking for work. In nineteen thirty-two Bing Crosby had a hit song called –”Buddy Can You Spare A Dime” it summed up the desperation in men s souls. The truth is a dime was important for a darker reason.

It turns out a man without at least a dime could be arrested as a vagrant and sent to what they called a relief camp. The real intent was a metaphoric mask instituted by the federal government and administered by local governments to keep vagrants from roaming the streets. The government feared the possibility of social unrest among the poor and the unemployed.

Without social services people went to bed hungry and children were denied quality education and freedom of choice was all but a dream. Rent was in many cases five dollars a month, you could buy a weeks groceries for a dollar and cash was as scarce as hens teeth.

I want the readers to think about this one aspect when questioning the pandemic predicament COVID has caused. This crisis the governments spent money they don’t have. They spent it up front to curtail a repeat of the Great Depression.
Yes we are going to pay and pay dearly for the actions taken.

Now consider this. The only way we got out of the Great Depression was we spent our way out paying for the cost of WWII. Maybe we did learn something. Society confronted the issue and spent money on people and business instead of on a war buying weapons of death and destruction. When you think about it times are a little restrictive and hard on the human spirit but these hard times are nothing compared to the starvation, lost dreams and social chaos of our grandparents burden.

Fred Steele