I know things have gotten really tight over the last year, and everyone is tightening their belts, but do we have it this bad?

We don’t see many guys dressed like this anymore do we?

How many families do we see hopping freight trains in the US?

After the drought in the Midwest, thousands of families loaded up what little possessions they had left and moved west.  Entire tent cities were erected because the work that was promised in California really didn’t exist, and no one knew what to do with all of these people.  These people  were mostly educated former property owning farmers whose crops were devestated in the drought and they weren’t able to make their payments to the bank on their mortgages and the banks foreclosed, leaving the families nothing.

Life out west really wasn’t much better, and it took several generations for these families to establish themselves in their new surroundings in California.

So if you have a real roof over your head this year, and you have  at least one meal a day for your family, I think these folks of our former generations would have counted us wealthy.

We need to stop taking the things we have for granted.  Statistics say that most Americans are one pay check away from being broke.

We don’t have months of bill money stashed away for a rainy day, and millions of Americans are being foreclosed on.  Do we think that these pictures are bleaker because they are in black and white, and it won’t really look that way for us if we are ever in that position…after all we have safety nets nowadays that won’t let that happen.  If this women were found today by a Social Services representative would her children be taken from her?  Should they be taken from her?  Were they less loved because they were poor?  Or did their poverty make them into strong responsible and caring adults who vowed to never be poor again, and most were not.

Lest us never forget the story our elders told us.

posted on: Sunday, November 29th, 2009 @ 9:41 pm

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