In an American History course I took in college, the professor stated in a lecture that economic depressions, like the so called “Great Depression” of the 1930s, have happened regularly during the course of the history of the United States.  And to make her point, she rattled off several and the years in which they occurred.  In other words—and this she emphasized—economic depressions in the US are not anomalies and ought to be expected.

My paternal grandfather was a carpenter and farmer and the Great Depression pushed him and his family off his farm in Kansas and into the migrant river that rushed to the Pacific Ocean and California—like that described in John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath”.

But California was not the Promised Land that so many migrant families expected.  Gainful employment was not easy to find.  But my grandfather, being a master carpenter, found work in the shipyards of Long Beach and things might have gone well for him and his family if he had not gotten hit by a drunken driver while crossing a busy street at a crosswalk.

My grandfather’s death left a wife and four children with no social safety net.  My father was the youngest of those four children.  He and his twin brother took any jobs available to them and worked from grade school through high school to help support their mother and then joined the US Navy as soon as they were old enough.  Luckily, they had older siblings who were married and working and who also helped support their mother and those still at home as much as possible during those intervening years after my grandfather’s death.  But my family has known a little about poverty.

The dream that I had of “the Yard” which I described in Part 1, I think was my own psychological response to some rather distressing financial news, happening at about that time—after the banking crisis and near economic crash of 2008.  So my interpretation of this dystopian dream setting was:  that we in the United States might be headed into another Great Depression very soon.  Well, that has not happened, yet, but it still can.  And my intuition says that the next “Grand Depression” in this country might last a very long time.

And it was this thought which began my exploration into how that Grand Depression might look to the average American in the not too distant future.

I’ll expand on this further in Part 3.  Until then—See you around the block.