Ninety-six years ago today, and over the following three days, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped a total of 25 percent, from 305.85 to 230.07 points, ushering in the decade of the Great Depression. Thousands of major investors lost billions of dollars, due — in the simplest of terms — to a combination of rampant speculation, excessive debt, and an overvalued market. (If they thought that was overvalued, I wonder what their reaction would be to today’s numbers!)

The Depression lasted for ten years, from 1929 to 1939. In what we would today call a perfect storm, it coincided with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s — a disastrous, prolonged drought in America’s agricultural heartland that wiped out thousands of farms and farm families.

The U.S. economy was finally revived by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, and by the industrial upsurge necessitated by the onset of World War II.

One of the few memorable things to come out of that era was a popular song called “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” For those who have never heard of it, here is just the first verse:

Once I built a railroad, made it run,
Made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad, now it’s done.
Brother, can you spare a dime?

There are a lot of Americans scrounging for coins now, nearly a century later . . . but for different reasons. And it’s not the wealthy who have lost their fortunes. The stock market is high; individual industry and business leaders are raking in billions; and the White House is getting a new 300 million dollar ballroom and a “free” Qatari Boeing 747-8 jet plane that will cost an estimated 500 million to a billion dollars to retrofit for use as Air Force One.

Rather, it is this century’s everyman who is suffering: losing jobs, insurance benefits, educational opportunities, access to proper health care — all of the basic necessities of life that have always been the reward for years of honest work and paying their fair share of taxes.

There is no Depression to blame today. There is, instead, an oligarchy; a theft on a scale so monumental it defies description; a redistribution of the wealth from the millions of honest workers into the hands of the greedy few . . . the “Robber Barons” of today.

People are angry, frightened . . . and depressed. And this depression is different from the Great Depression. In the 1930s, people pulled through the difficult times by working together and helping each other. But our 21st-century society is already so divided, so fragmented, so distrustful, and so politically contentious that it’s impossible to envision our ever replicating the sort of unity that brought this country out of those earlier times of trouble. And there is no Franklin Delano Roosevelt to pull us out of this one.

To top things off, just when we could all use the services of a good psychiatrist to help us deal with the pain, we can’t afford one because our insurance — if we still have insurance — won’t cover it.

I was not alive during the Great Depression. But from what I’ve read, and stories that I heard from my parents, I think — given a choice — I would prefer that one to what we are seeing now. Because our country was united then, and it was still a democracy — led by a man who, though himself wealthy, cared more about his country and its people than himself.

FDR led us out of the Great Depression, and safely through the horrors of World War II. Who is there to guide us through this one?

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
10/24/25