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Arthur Miller in his autobiography 'Timebends' said that in his opinion America is utterly invested in forgetting, and nowhere is this more evident than in their forgetting of the Great Depression. He said it was so much worse than it was portrayed to be in the years following and up until he was writing the book in the eighties. Nothing has changed since then. He wrote that Americans don't want to remember how bad it really was, they want to get past it, get over it and recreate it with a Hollywood glow. But the depression left his father a ruined man who never recovered, and he said he saw those people everywhere in his childhood and growing up.
This chimes with my mother's stories of the great depression in Australia. It was so bad she has never gotten over it. Still saving string, still feeling triumphant when she denies herself what she wants in order to save another ten cents, still afraid to stick her neck out in case her head gets bitten off. Her whole life has been limited by the trauma of humiliation, near starvation and privation she went through to get an education and get out.
Get out of debt is the answer, but how America is going to do that when it's fighting a war that's already costing THREE TRILLION DOLLARS worth of borrowed money is anyone's guess ...
