+15 more
posted on Apr, 25 2008 @ 01:55 PM
Everywhere on ATS I see worried people who believe that we're in the worst time in our country's history, bankruptcies, poverty, hunger, war, gas
shortages, etc, etc, etc, are all being pointed to and Americans supposedly are facing their biggest challenges ever. I will admit that compared to
the booming 90's, we're in a downturn and possibly even a full blown recession, but is it really as bad as we're lead to believe? I say "no, not
even close."
Ask anyone who's 30 or older and grew up in a low middle income household in the 80's if anything they're currently seeing is even close to as
difficult as they remember it being back then. I watched my parents deal with true gas shortages, in which there wasn't enough gas at the pump, what
was there was rationed, and there were lines around the block of people paying $1.50 a gallon (and that was if you could find a station that wasn't
price gouging). The energy crisis of the 70's, which resulted in almost 11% national unemployment and far, far higher levels in the poorer states
(of which I was a resident). Complete stagfaltion of the economy, the likes of which we're not even close to seeing today. The collapse of the
savings & loan banks, which resulted in a nationwide shutdown of new home construction worse than what we're now experiencing. The constant threat
of nuclear war brought right up to the fall of communism in the USSR and the end of the Cold War. A complete powder keg of war and terror coming out
of the Middle East (well, maybe not everything has changed...)
These were the issues my generation grew up with. I think alot of people either grew up after these had resolved themselves or have forgotten about
them entirely. Yes, I agree it's not the most desirable scenario to have to decide between paying your cable/internet bill & paying your electricity
bill for a month. But for most low to mid middle class families in the 80's that was basically a good way to describe the whole decade, niot just a
couple months out of the year. We didn't have cable until 1994 because we couldn't afford it. We ate out once a week, on Sundays after church. My
parents drove beaters... a concept in automobiles that seems to have been entirely forgotten wherein a family car is driven until it suffers a major
mechanical failure and is replaced by a car a couple years young and a with (hopefully) a couple dozen thousand miles fewer. This was the rule, not
the exception. When someone in the neighborhood bought a "new to them" used car everybody would stop by their house to look at it "Ooh, you have a
cassette player instead of an 8-track, lucky dog!"
During the summer I'd go over to friends' places and we'd have sandwiches made from government cheese cut from a 5 lb brick. We frequently went to
yard sales & Goodwill to do some shopping, while we were there we'd say hello to plenty of other "middle class" families we knew who were there
doing the same thing. It wasn't middle class back then, it was "working class" and as such we lived from paycheck to paycheck and any extra money
my dad made through overtime or such went into a savings account (another concept that seems to be dead.) I didn't have a brand new Nintendo within
days of it being released in the store like so many "middle class" kids enjoy today. Instead I had an old Atari, bought from a yard sale, and I
used it to play 6 year old games. Things like the newest fashions, electronics, and the newest toys were for rich kids, not middle class kids and
certainly not poor kids.
It seems like today's middle class have forgotten what it has always meant to be middle class. It never meant you could buy all the new gadgetry you
wanted, drive new cars, or even own a big house. It simply meant that with some wise budgeting your family didn't go hungry, you could buy
some clothes, save some money for hard times, and have some money for reasonable entertainment and passtimes. Poverty back then meant you were paying
for all your groceries with food stamps AND you didn't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. It seems like being expected to budget
your expenses today automatically makes people believe they're no longer middle class, since they could buy everything on credit and live well above
their means in the late 90's suddenly the definition of middle class and prosparity has dramatically change while the underlying descriptors of it
have remained the same. Simillarly, we had people who weren't even middle class buying expensive houses and brand new vehicles in the 90's and now
that the time has come to pay for them they want us to believe it's a sign of pending doom that they can't afford their smoke & mirrors
lifestyle.
The American Dream didn't change... it's just a case of far too many Americans are daydreaming instead of remembering who we are and what we came
from. The roaring 90's were the exception years, not the rule. We had a brief fling with unrestrained overconsumption and lived way above and
beyond our means thanks to a lacksidaisical attitude by banks & lenders and a completely make believe prosparity level invented alongside the .com
bubble. People had wealth on paper and suddenly believed they were above middle class when in reality their wealth never translated off the paper and
they were in about the same boat as they started out in.
So I don't believe for a moment that this country is in any worse shape than what we were in in the 80's and early 90's. In fact I think we're
still head and shoulders above those days when people were living within their means, had trimmed all of the fat from their budgets, and still
couldn't make ends meet. We all survived the 80's and, looking back, I really can't ever recall a time when I sat around feeling sorry for myself
because life was still pretty darn good.