rankandfile, I’m 1/2 Italian. I love to listen to my older relatives talk about what it was like during the Great Depression (my grandparents on my mother’s side were Italian immigrants who settled in Boston). Until the last 7-8 years I thought an economic depression like that could never happen again – at least in my lifetime. Anyway, everyone that I’ve talked to that experienced it said that they were poor but they didn’t know they were poor because everyone else was poor. Basically, it doesn’t seem like they were any less happy than people today. It seems like people were a lot more neighborly and down to earth. They would walk everywhere and everyone in the neighborhood knew each other. Crime really didn’t seem to be a major problem either. It wasn’t until the 50’s that the old neighborhood really started to deteriorate and all my relatives moved out to the suburbs. The old neighborhood now is the type of place where you would be afraid of getting shot if you drove through there after dark. So much for progress – it seems like progress has worked in reverse in a lot of our cities.
I think as long as you have the mentality of living within your means and making sound decisions, you’ll survive anything. The thing that does worry me now though is that the social structure of the nation seems a lot weaker. Rather than people helping each other out, I rather think a lot of people would rob and kill each other to try and maintain a faux riche lifestyle. As far as growing your own food, my grandmother did that and it seems like that was very common during the depression. Even city dwellers would grow vegetables on what little land they had. It seems, overall, that city dwellers fared better during the depression than people living in rural areas. Farmers were hit extremely hard.
My grandmother used to talk about a few men that committed suicide. They lost it all when the stock market crashed and were just not psychologically prepared for their illusion of wealth to be taken away. I think the people who fare the best during tough times are the ones who can adapt to change (and are not overly leveraged with debt and high-risk!).
