The Not-So-Great Depression

I fought for this country, and this is how they repay me?  Beaten like a lowly dog in the streets.  Is it too much to ask for enough money to feed my family, to get what I have earned?  I rallied with my comrades in an attempt to collect our bonus early, but instead we were pushed away.  They had our money, so I can’t understand why they wouldn’t give it to us.  The big pigs are sitting pretty while us plebeians are forced to squabble about in the streets.  I’ve done more for this country than they ever have, I’d love to see one of them get a rifle shoved in their hands and sent off to face the horrors of war.

I’ve never felt such white hot rage before in my life.  I might say that I felt it in the war, but what I felt their was concise, unadulterated fear.  I lived through hell itself, surviving grenades, bombshells, and gunfire.  Now I’m expected to just die of starvation I suppose.  What an outright slap in the face to the military it was to forcibly beat us into submission.  Things didn’t have to result to violence, we just wanted our money.

If there’s one thing this God forsaken dirt is good for, it’s burying the dead.  The crops didn’t get to grow, and neither will my daughter.  The storm took them both.  Dust pneumonia hit Cindy hard, and I guess she just couldn’t take it.  Day after day I would wake up and go beat the dirt out of her sheets, and brush the dirt out of her hair.  Being a single father out in the Great Plains used to be fun.  No nagging wife to tell me what to do, an abundance of wealth from my crops.  I loved Cindy with my heart and soul, and a profound agony overcame me when she was taken.  Even now the dust mocks me, having covered her grave marker.

I buried her in a cheap little casket out in the barren filed.  I figured such a wonderfully, horribly crafted area of desolation was the perfect place to lay misery to rest.  I think I may have dust pneumonia myself, but I’m cursed with the strength to tolerate it.  There’s not too much to live for out here in the wasteland.  Perhaps tonight I’ll have a meeting with the rope.

If I were asked to name the greatest man I’ve ever heard of, I would say it was Franklin Roosevelt.  If you’ve ever heard the phrasing ‘the man with the plan’ this man is who it refers to.  I was able to get a job through the New Deal program, and now my family is being fed.  I can safely say that I owe my life to this angel in disguise.  Surely his presence is divine intervention, the rainbow in the flood.  Franklin Roosevelt provided America was the revitalization it needed.

Many a night, my family and I would sit eagerly by the radio to hear his Fireside Chats, in which we were blissfully reassured that we would face a better tomorrow.  I even hear that preparation are being made to solve the problem out in the Great Plains.  I admire that he has managed to lift us up out of Hoover’s hole and shine a light through the murky darkness of the Depression.

Times have been really tough lately.  I don’t really have any close family, so I don’t really have a reliable source of food in my belly.  A friend of mine introduced me to the idea of becoming a hobo, a sort of chap who rides the rails in search of a job.  Of course riding a train without paying a fare is illegal, so the whole thing is a bit risky.  I got into it and pretty soon I had a happy little system of finding odd jobs that paid just enough to keep me fed.  I also made pretty good friends withe people in a similar situation.

Lately I’ve been hearing about these new guards who will savagely beat our kind, so I’ve become a bit wary of staying in a train car overnight.  It’s a hard life, but hey, life is well worth living.  My philosophy is that no matter how bad it gets, it could always get worse.  I’m just very thankful that I’m alive at all.