Times are hard but are we in Hard Times?

It was easy to answer in 1929. The stock market collapsed and the fat cats dove out skyscraper windows. Nobody had it figured but they could see the zombie hordes massing. Then, like a mustard gas creeping across no man’s land, the bad shit just kind of spread over everybody…bank closures…Hooverville’s growing like boom towns…long lines at soup kitchens. As crops failed across the Midwest, dust clouds the size of Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle laid waste to all those homesteader farms that settled the wild west…

A ten year span of rancid karma.

The Economy didn’t fully recover until we entered WW2.

This was The Great Depression. Everybody knew it. Everybody accepted it. Nobody disputed the plain fact of it. Hard Times was the face you put on in the morning. The line where you hung your dreams. Sometimes Hope defeated Reality…but it was never a solid victory. More like a skirmish you won before falling back on your entrenchments.

Today nobody’s sure we’ve fallen on Hard Times.

Rather, everybody’s sure but nobody’s willing to admit it. Back in the Roaring Twenties “the experts” were not so prevalent, nor celebrated. Those who spoke for the rest of us were plain spoken and said what they believed to a degree not seen today. Nobody on the radio debated, “are we in a depression?” To do so would laugh the fool off the air.

Nobody back then found the words decline and depression a matter of partisan politics. The Economy was a friend or enemy to all. LIES were not seen as ALTERNATIVE FACTS. People were less inclined to pretend they understood the ways of a vengeful god. They accepted his punishments as well as his rewards.

Those were not simpler times…they were clearer times. People saw what they saw. And they believed the truth when it looked them in the eye. Today there are too many “experts” and too much political science practiced by amateurs and rat shits.

It should be clear to anybody with a clear head that we are in a serious recession. Inflation eats away at our dollars like gleeful squirrels. The Fed Chief continues to raise interest rates–with negligible results. The Real Estate market is stagnant. The Stock Market is climbing a mud hill with it’s little feet spinning on roulette wheels.

Hucksters are are selling one pound bags of Buffalo Nickels on the radio!

Those “experts” with their heads on the block will counter that the JOB MARKET IS STRONG! How can we be in Hard Times with so many people working. I would say that a ten dollar an hour job is to a real job what Confederate dollars are to Franklin Greenbacks.

I keep my hunskies stuffed in a coffee can.

The night is livened by Coyote howls and the dome tents shiver in the pungent winds.

I’ll go with a fortune cookie:

Welcome to Hard Times.