To the folks that think our days are worse than the days in the past ...

[Tx4obama]

I disagree.

I grew up with my immigrant grandparents in a factory town in Illinois (1959-1970s)

When my mother and aunt were growing up in the same house - in the 1940s the majority of folks in the neighborhood had outhouses in the backyard and bathtubs that they had to fill by hand via buckets of hot water heated on the stove, hand wringer washing machines and clothes-lines outside.

Everyone had vegetable gardens and would 'can' veggies and fruit, because they couldn't afford to buy produce at the store. They had coupons that would regulate how much butter, gasoline, etc that they could buy.

My grandmother 'made' the girls their clothes on the sewing machine/by hand because the cost of store bought clothes were out of the question due to cost.

There was a small chicken coop back by the backyard fence and my grandmother would ring the neck of a chicken every now and again for Sunday dinner.

Then when I was growing up I NEVER had any new clothes or a new coat, I always wore hand-me-downs, never had a 'new coat' from a store until I was 17 years old when I was working and living on my own.

Nowadays, it would be hard to find a 'home' that does not have a bathtub with running water, a TV, or even a cellphone.

I believe it is NOT as bad as it was in the ol' days - I think most folks don't know 'how really bad it was' in the ol' days when folks truly had nothing much at all.


Do I think that food stamps should be allowed to be used in 'fast food restaurants' NO.
Do I think that food stamps should be allowed to be used for purchases of 'soda and snack foods' NO.
I believe that it is much cheaper to buy beef, chicken, pork, rice, beans, potatoes, bread, peanut butter, etc and cook at home at a lower cost then what it costs to purchase 'prepared foods'.

I think 'we' as a society need to take care of those they are less fortunate as far as food, healthcare, etc goes, but we must be careful to not over do it, because the 'other side' will use it against us if we demand more than the 'basic needs'.

p.s. And before anyone decides to attack me for what I've said - I just want to say that I am unemployed and struggling myself ;)
Goodnight.

[cutlassmama]

1. My grandma rang chicken necks too, but the cities are different now.

The women work, they didn't back then. There is no time to cook from scratch, for every meal, unless you are unemployed. As far as chickens, not many cities allow them and then the neighbors get mad cause they make a racket. I think going back to simple times would be better for all of us, but for some of us, it's just not doable.

[Itchinjim]

2. KNR. I grew up in a factory town in Iowa in pretty much the same time frame,

with eight siblings. And thanks to Dad's union job, we weren't on food stamps or welfare and Mom was a stay at home mother. The teabaggers who want to go back to the "good old days"? Start by demanding decent living wage union jobs.

[Tx4obama]

4. By the time I was born ....

my grandfather was just just about retired from the Owens Glass Factory.
When he first came to America he lied about his age so that he could get hired (back then they blew glass bottle by hand and had mules that brought in water tanks) then (and we don't know how) he was able to get a 'different' birth certificate that said he was younger than he was so that he didn't have to retire for another five years after he reached the age of 65.

I remember when I was a little girl in the 1960s the Owens Illinois Glass Factory would let all the children/family members of the factory workers come to the downtown theater and watch a Christmas film for 'free', after the movie was over a Santa Claus would appear on the stage and hand out a Christmas bag to each child - in the bag there would be lots of fruit (apples, oranges, nuts) and some pieces of candy.
During the rest of the year we would save the tinfoil tops off of the milk bottles and when we had enough tops we could turn them in for a 'free ticket' to a movie - that was in the 1960s.

My 'great grandfather' that came from Italy had somehow purchased three small houses (that were in a row on the same side of the street) and sold the smallest one to the grandfather when he married my grandmother. It was a SHACK. My grandmother put in all the plasterboard walls with her own hands - no bathroom, one bedroom, one living area, and a small kitchen.
My aunt inherited the house and now lives there (it is VERY small and the whole house would fit into three rooms on the bottom floor of the house that I now live in) if you were to tand in the middle of the bathroom today you could touch all four walls with your arms extended!

[mmonk]

3. Since social security is under threat, it may be to anyone born since

the 1930s.

[madrchsod]

5. today isn`t as good as it should be...

[Fumesucker]

6. It certainly is cheaper to buy raw foods and cook at home..

Problem is, when your "home" is a car or under a bridge it's kind of hard to do the cooking.

How many people did you know living in their cars when you were a kid?

[Kolesar]

8. Do you live in a car? eom

[Fumesucker]

9. I have in the past...

Now I've upgraded, my home is a camper.

FWIW, Bobbolink is a DUer living in her car.

[Kolesar]

7. The "jobs market" was terrible in the 1970s

...and the 1980s. As teenagers, we couldn't even find jobs in fast food restaurants because those "entry level" jobs were still being held by people who graduated five years earlier.

[Fumesucker]

10. Now it's your grandparents taking the fast food jobs..

See, we do too have progress!

[Bragi]

11. This is a right-wing complacency-promoting meme

This meme is a companion book-end to the claim that as long as there are starving people anywhere on the planet, we should all be happy and shut the fuck up about our trivial problems like unemployment, homelessness and massive growing inequality.

[mfcorey1]

15. not true

[HughBeaumont]

17. It's the "perspective" fallacy. "Those Food Chillin' Motherfuckers!"

America's poor are being compared to Djibouti's poor and not, say, Sweden and Norway's poor; it doesn't mean squalor doesn't exist here in large amounts. Just because America's poor aren't in a mud hovel eating bugs don't mean they ain't dealing with cockroaches in a flat they can't make rent on.

When poverty is reduced to a one-downing dick-swinging contest, it helps no one while the wealthy get ever wealthier. It's more "divide and conquer" and it's even worse when our side does it.

[Major Hogwash]

18. 99% of all households in America have refrigerators.

I saw it on Faux Snooze, so it must be true.

The income gap is even greater now than it was just 10 years ago.
There are more "have nots" now than there were just 5 years ago.
1 in 6 Americans now live in desperate straits.
We just set a record for the highest number of Americans using food stamps since that program was started.

So, I'm pretty much okay with the Republicans not creating any jobs or giving President Obama any help creating jobs.
Why, just yesterday Mitch McConnell, that ol' patriot from Kentucky, said that Obama's jobs bill sucked.
And if anyone ever knew anything about sucking, McConnell would know!!

The more GOPish we get, the more GOPish we will be.
So, on with the show!
It's kabuki theater time!

Let's all get GOPish together!!

[QC]

21. They have been pushing this one for years.

I remember Charles Murray arguing at least twenty years ago that since the poor in America live better than people in the rural Thai village where he did his Peace Corps service, they're not really poor.

This "nobody's poor because microwave ovens are cheap" business has been around for a while.

[Major Hogwash]

12. You can buy soda with food stamps at a convenience store.

As long as you don't put the straw in the cup at the counter.

Guess that tells you a little something something that you didn't know about how food stamps are used.

[sammytko]

13. I'm just glad that I, as a minority, can walk around freely, that alones makes today's

world a better place. Sometimes people forget that and long for the stupid good old days. Yeah, when your mom and dad could be sold to the highest bidder - don't think so.

[mfcorey1]

14. If the repubs gain total control we will see hell on earth.

[GoCubsGo]

16. I can vouch for that.

My hell on Earth began when they last had total control. I probably won't survive the next round of that.

[Bragi]

19. We have so much to be thankful for

I'm personally delighted that, since the Magna Carta, the King can no longer arbitrarily detain me.

Oh wait, under the Patriot Act, the King can once again do that.

Nevermind.

[Uben]

20. People expect more these days

When I was a child, I had a few toys, not many, but a few. We usually played games and stuff that did not require toys because some kids just didn't have any. If someone had a baseball and a bat, we had a baseball game. Didn't need gloves. Unlike most homes, my Mom worked, so we were raised by the neighborhood moms. We respected and obeyed them just as we would our own...or else! When I was about ten, I started mowing lawns for 25-30 cents, and that grew to 50-75 cents pretty fast.
Seventy-five cents would buy a hamburger and a malt with money left over. We walked the highways picking up pop bottles to sell for 2 cents apiece. People tossed more junk out the windows in those days and litter was a much bigger problem than today.

I was lucky, Christmas usually netted me a toy and some new clothes, but I had friends who were lucky if they got anything other than some candy or a pair of shoes to replace the ones full of holes. All we needed for school was a pair of jeans and a tee shirt, which is what I wore most of the time.

Like I said, my mom worked, so we had a little more than the other neighborhood kids, and we shared what we had with them. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't change a thing about my childhood. You didn't have to lock your doors or worry about walking a mile and a half to school each day.
In fact, we had rather walk to school than ride because we picked up other kids along the way and arrived at school in a group. Ah yes, those were the days! Anyone remember Roger Ramjet?

My first real job was at age 11. I worked on a truck delivering milk on Saturday mornings. The milkman weighed about 350 lbs, so he would hire a kid to walk the product to the door. People would leave money for the milk, usually hiding it somewhere that the milkman knew about, so he would tell me where to look for it. I made 80 cents for a four hour job. I know that sounds like child slavery now, but I was darned glad to have the job, and a lot of kids coveted my getting to ride on the milk truck! When you consider an ice cream bar was a nickel, a soda was a dime, a kite and a ball of string was 15 cents, and a burger was a quarter to 35 cents, it was a pretty good wage. That's when my dad taught me how to save money, something I still do today. Learning to always save a little of what I earned helped me out a lot. I was always the one with money. My older brother would always borrow from me (and seldom payed me back). My first car cost me $150. It was a wreck, but it got me where I wanted to go....most of the time. I sold it for $35 six months later to the wrecking yard.
I could go on forever, but you get the gist. Life wasn't so much about what you had. All you needed were family and friends and everyone helped everyone else. What happened to that?

[Bragi]

22. Here's what I remember from the 50's

My best friend's mother stayed at home while his father worked full time.

The family had a small house; the 4 kids did fine, played sports, etc; they went to a rented cottage every year for a two-week holiday; 3 kids went to university; the father eventually retired with a small but adequate pension.

And do you know what the father did for a living? He worked in a grocery store.

If that doesn't demonstrate how far down the economic ladder working class people have fallen since then, then I don't know what would.

[raccoon]

23. Also, in the past, worst of all...

NO AIR CONDITIONING!!!

If you've lived through a summer in the Sunbelt with no AC, you know what I mean.

"When you long for the old days, just turn off the air conditioning."
---seen on a church marquee

[LWolf]

24. I am 51 years old.

During my lifetime, I have lived more than once in "homes" that had no running water, tv, cell phone, etc.

Oh, they had bathtubs, faucets, toilets, and electrical outlets. There was no power or water going to that "home," though, because we couldn't pay to turn on the utilities.

I lived, when my first son was born, in a home with his great-grandmother. She had a washing machine; no dryer. Her washing machine was very old, though, and she was determined that it last for the rest of her life. She didn't want to replace it. So...I could do one load of laundry a week for the baby and myself, as long as it fit with the one load for bedding, towels, etc..

That did not include diapers. For the diapers, she hauled out a washtub, and actual old washboard, and put me to work with it in the back yard.

I have owned a car for most of my adult life. Still, when that first baby was a baby, to get to work I walked the 3 miles to the nearest bus stop every morning, carrying baby and diaper bag, took a bus for 30 minutes one way to drop him off at the sitters, and then a different bus 30 minutes in the opposite direction to get to work. I did the same in reverse to get home. I had a car. I didn't have enough $$$ to pay to keep it running, or to keep tires with any tread on it.

The point? Indoor plumbing, electricity, and technology were widely available. Old junker cars were, too.

But they still weren't available if you couldn't pay for them, or pay to run them, repair them, etc..

Not then, and not now.

[Bluenorthwest]

25. When you say:

"They had coupons that would regulate how much butter, gasoline, etc that they could buy." I find that to be an odd way to frame the WW2 era rationing program, which lasted just 5 years, not for 'the 40's' and went on during a time when most people were a tad more concerned about the World War and the thousands of troops in battles across the globe. I mean to say 'it was bad because they had rationing' is interesting, because 'it was bad because of a world war and millions were dying' is a stronger argument than 'my Gran could not buy as much gas as she wanted, and now I can'.
Your entire post focuses on stuff, material things. Things that are better now include the state of Civil Rights and equality in this nation, segregated in every way at that time, better in terms of medicine and technologies, both of my Grandmothers died very young from things that today would probably not kill them. In the 40's being gay meant going to jail, not now. There are many ways in which the current times are better, some in which they are worse, none have much to do with how much house I have compared to Grandpa, or rationing or any of that.
In my family, all the men were overseas, and when we asked our elders about rationing, they really put little emphasis on it, and kept saying things like 'well, with both our husbands in the Army, we didn't need all that much gas, and the sugar we were missing wasn't the kind from the store'.
The rationing was because of the war, and the war was many kinds of awful that make rationing look like nothing.

[Javaman]

26. History Rhymes, it doesn't repeat...

the things my parents faced back in the depression were very bad, but the US still had capital.

now we are effectively broke and living on a fiat currency based on a vanishing commodity.

While they had to do without for many years, our situation is a slow degradation of our society.

They had something to recovery to as a society, what will we recover to? I'll tell you.

we will become a third world power with a first world power military. The gap between the rich and poor is only going to expand (far beyond the gap that was occurring during the depression).

So, it rhymes but not repeats.

[Romulox]

27. I've heard people LIKE being poor these days--what with the video games and the facebook.

Color TV!

:rofl:

[QC]

28. Yep, they got their jalopies and their colf doos and teevee machines.

Damn whippersnappers!