For me, as for most of my contemporaries, the decade of life known as 'the twenties' has been, so far anyways, a time of examining potential. A time for going to school, trying things out, and getting to the deep 'how-tos' of 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' In other words, most of us are NOT currently working out dream jobs.
This is where The Great Depression comes in. Now, when I read The Grapes of Wrath (which I'll just state right now I hated), I was focused more upon the plot than about the experiences of one particular age group. But, thinking back on it, what did happen to all of those people who moved through their twenties during the 1930's? All those people who were just graduating from college when the stock market crashed (go right ahead and insert obvious echoes of self-interest here),what happened to them?
There was a huge shortage of jobs... and as far as the jobs that did exist, who would hand out these precious awards to young people with no experience? That would just be bad business when there were so many more qualified adults around. So did these people ever get the chance to follow through on their dreams?
Probably not. With the mass starvation of that decade, I'm sure advancing as a successful bonds-salesman (or whatever) would take a back-seat to eating. Most definitely, most of these people just took jobs doing whatever it was they could get to do, and gave up on the dreams that would have been so graspable only a decade before.
So what does that mean for us? The generation going through college, amassing gigantic student loans, and wondering if the same thing is going to happen to these loans as it did to loans in the 1930's. There is mass unemployment now, as before, who is going to hire us at a high enough salary to pay off the loans that come due 6mo following graduation? Us, rather than the 5,000-something people who got fired on our own black Friday and are now leaving New York in droves.
Is this what the media is terming the "fear" and "panic" that underlie this election? According to wikipedia, there still aren't any overwhelming schools of thought concerning either the cause or the best way to have fixed The Great Depression of eighty years ago. Some people thought the government didn't do enough, some thought the 1.2 billion they paid into banks wasn't enough. Roosevelt's chairman of the Federal Reserve during this time, Marriner S. Eccles, thought that the best plan would have been to take their own bailout money ( $6 billion) and distribute it to the public through higher wages or lower prices, and that that would have staved off the depression itself.
I know it is rather petty to worry about the dimming future of a particular sect of a generation when there are so many larger things at stake, but, as nothing horrifically major has happened yet, I think I'm allowed. Trust me, I'll shut up and help out when the time comes. Till then... would anyone mind hiring me, please?
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