The family and I headed down to the Western Development Museum today to check out the Festival of Trees. It's been a few months since I've been to the museum, and they've finally completed their work on the Depression Era exhibit.
The scope of the Depression in the 30s is almost unfathomable.
They have statistics posted, and anecdotes from the era that help to illustrate just how bad it really was.
One display mentions that out of one community of 895 families, 890 were on a government relief program. Another mentions a rural area that consisted of 300 farms. In the space of one year the federal government seized the crops of 285 of these farms for back taxes, leaving families to survive on as little as $100 per year.
People were starving...literally. Tommy Douglas tells of visiting farmers, and the shame his hosts felt, serving up 3 fried eggs to a family of four, or pancakes with sugar and water for syrup.
In a mock up of a typical depression era house, an old man turned to me and said "Do you remember any of that?" with a bright grin. He looked to me to be in his late 80s, early 90s.
I laughed and said "No, do you?"
He said yeah, and we talked for a bit. I find the depression era in the dustbowl fascinating, and he was great to talk to. He talked of families leaving everything and heading north. Modern farms where they would leave brand new houses, brand new equipment, laying around for the taking. He talked of waking up in the morning to find the fences buried in dust.
After a while I said to him "I'm a little worried that it looks like it might happen again here pretty soon."
He touched me on the shoulder and said "If it does it'll be worse than it was then. You've got water and power and heat to pay for now. Back then we all got heat burning wood and coal and we pumped our own water and didn't have electrical to worry about it. It would be a lot worse if it happened today."
Later I asked my wife if she'd heard what he'd said.
"Yes," she said, "and I saw the look on your face too. That's terrifying."
It is.
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Before I left to come to India Nick C said to me, "What happens if the bottom really falls out of the economy and you get stuck in India?" I replied, "In India, the people have been getting by on nothing forever, I think they'll be better prepared to live without a global economy than anyone. And besides, at least I won't freeze to death when the first winter hits."
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