Dear Editor
I was born in 1931, just as the Great Depression was getting underway. Most of my infancy and early childhood was spent on my grandparents' farm, where my mother had taken me and my younger brother to live because my dad's delivery business in Duluth, Minn. had gone belly-up. It didn't seem like it then, but I believe I was born at the most fortunate time in history to be beginning my life.
The 1920s had been a time, much like our present period, when corporations were merging and getting more and more able to control the markets, when market regulation was a dirty word, and when the emphasis was on achieving one's own wealth, and “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” We all know how that turned out.
It took awhile: Really miserable conditions everywhere, Franklin Delano Roosevelt becoming President of the United States and then a real world war. By that time it seemed that a lesson had been learned, that government should not only be of the people and by the people, but also for the people.
I was just beginning high school when the Second World War ended. Unemployment was no longer the monster it had been. Workers were beginning to join the ranks of the middle class and that middle class was getting bigger. New highway systems were being built, more funding was going into the educational systems and when I started to go to university, my total yearly expenses (including some beer now and then) amounted to only $900, thanks in large part to government support for higher education. Employment prospects were everywhere. It was a good time to be starting out.
My problem after university was not to find a job, but to decide on what kind of job I wanted. I was definitely going to have a somewhat less precarious career than my parents had, but that was not considered especially fortunate: it was accepted as a fact of life then. Today, in retirement, I feel as though I'm in the proverbial “cat-bird's seat,” with the possible prospect of being among the last generation to have this kind of decent retirement life.
What happened? I think too many people forgot (or never learned) the lessons of the1920s.
Russell Lahti
Battleford
