COMMENTARY
Charity Vogel: Hard times can teach life lessons
We all had one. A person in our lives who lived through the Depression and was, ever after, its living reminder.
The grandma who saved egg cartons and cottage cheese containers. The grandpa who used to tinker with an alarm clock for days, to get it back in working order, rather than buy another. An aunt or uncle who saved for months to make a sizable purchase—a dinette set, a new car—rather than do it on credit.
God bless ’em, we’ve known these types. Maybe we’ve even, in our less glorious moments, snickered over their ways.
But here’s what I’m wondering: Will we become like them, at least a little bit, after this deep recession fades? More importantly, will our children?
Think about this. For tweens, teens and twentysomethings, this is the first economic downturn of any substance they’ve lived through. They’ve been forced to pay attention: by Dad’s layoff notice, Mom’s hunt for a second job. Even kids who live in financially secure homes are seeing peers deal with reduced circumstances. And those in their early 20s just entering the job market are dealing with an unemployment rate of 14 percent—almost double that of the general population. That hurts, and it’s disillusioning.
And so, younger citizens are watching the current crisis with a kind of double vision. They are witnessing the mess, and also how their elders—parents, primarily— respond to it.
In other words, there are lots of life lessons being learned. Because what history teaches us is this: Live through a depression or significant recession once, and you learn patterns of coping that last a lifetime.
Victoria Onorato, 88, knows about that. As a young girl in Buffalo, Onorato watched her parents cope with the Depression. Her family didn’t suffer as badly as many others, since her father was a doctor, but she saw lots of people in pain. Poor men walking through the East Side looking for work, poor women lined up to see if her father would treat their sick children in exchange for bartered goods.
Today, Onorato looks at her life— blessed with education, good jobs, a wonderful family—and sees a personality still tinged in unmistakable ways by its early brush with desperation.
“The Depression put a fear in me,” she said. “I never wanted to be poor.”
And so the Niagara Falls Boulevard resident goes about her life in ways subtly different from many of us, saving the plastic bags her newspapers are delivered in, using inherited furniture rather than new and salvaging items—like a child’s wagon that her neighbor was throwing away, which she nabbed and used for errands for years.
“To this day,” she said, “I don’t throw out anything I can still use. And I don’t get anything unless I need it.”
Lives are shaped slowly, by the deposits history makes upon them. Onorato’s was, and so were the lives of many who lived through the 1930s. Now, we have a downturn of our own to grapple with. A study by the Pew Research Center shows that more than half of Americans have cut back on spending and that half of us think people “should learn to live with less.”
We must focus, in the day to day, on how we can get by. But it pays to think, even briefly, about the bigger picture, about the deep lessons this year will be impressing on many in our midst, especially our younger friends and relations.
Those lessons, if they create a rising generation that echoes the Greatest in the ability to sacrifice self, might just be the upside to the current state of our nation. We can, in these dark times, hope.
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