Spend a buck today. End the recession tomorrow. Beverly and Benton Way, circa 1993
The old school way of trying to solve an economic crisis, through billboards!
With the bank bailouts, mortgage and housing predicaments and thousands of folks seeing their life savings reduced to half their value, perhaps another round of billboards is needed.
Yes. It is sort of shocking to hear of people lining up at the bank in Pasadena—Pasadena!– to get their money out yesterday. It’s like one of those movies on the 1930s depression. I was recently talking to a graduate student who is researching Califonia history and she found that we never were impacted by the depression of the 1930’s because of the film industry—people still wanted to escape and see a movie. My family oral history has informed me that agriculture was also good in California at that time. It attracted many people coming to work the fields from across the nation and Mexico. My father as a boy during the depression witnessed a poor family on their last wind, drive up to a gas station in Elsinore, and give the gas station owner one of their kids for a tank of gas. That story will always stick with me.
some possible billboards for the next round:
THERE IS NO ESCAPE NOW!
ALL YOUR DEBT ARE BELONG TO US
WE *OWN* YOU!
MY ELITE OWNERS WENT ON VACATION AND ALL THEY BROUGHT ME BACK WAS THIS LOUSY LIFETIME OF INSURMOUNTABLE DEBT
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE:
-If you choose to work away the rest of your life in a debt labor camp in east San Diego County, go to page 37.
-If you’d rather starve, go to page 42.
-If you choose to take a chance at earning a living in the underground economy, go to page 67.
-If you choose to emigrate to China in search of a job…buena suerte.
You know in 1993 there was all this talk about us being the first generation to do worse than their parents, and then the internet came. 21 year old college drop outs were millionaires and people were having b-day parties on yachts (this was when I was dating a computer guy) and then the party ended.
I truly thought things were bad in the early 90s, I was a moody high schooler, but still I thought this is the worse it could ever get…wow I was so wrong. I’m actually debating moving to another country. I don’t want to be that person in a country going to hell just standing there waiting, waiting for what? Waiting so you won’t even have clothes on your back when you get to the next destination. I guess I’m unloyal, but no why. I always wondered about that person, why don’t you leave, maybe looking back retrospectively makes it more clear. But I don’t want to be the person who left too late or got stuck. I was thinking about taking at least some money out the bank and hiding it, but then I thought about Germany in WW2 and how their money became worthless so they just burned it to stay warm and I look at Zimbabwe, I mean money really isn’t worth anything if things truly get bad enough that it’s not safe enough in a bank. IndyMac what the hell is that? It’s 2008, what’s the point of America if you can’t put your money in the bank and have it still be there.
Browne
kualyque, brilliant!
To Victoria’s comment about her graduate student friend researching the Great Depression’s supposed non-impact on the California economy: complete and utter bullshit! You should tell your friend that she had better dig a little bit deeper. To come to such a ludicrous conclusion indicates a startling lack of either hard research, a complete ignorance of one side of the story, an agenda or all of the above. Both my parents and both sets of grandparents all went thru that time right here in sunny Southern California (the land of milk and honey where the streets are paved with gold) and it DID affect them. Maybe this grad student only talked to victors: the land owners and film industry titans. Great times for them, but hardly a representative experience for the general populace. To say that the film industry and agriculture insulated the local economy is laughable at best and tragic at worst. And all the people from across the country migrating to California because they heard there were jobs out here, does the word “mirage” mean anything to you? My already low regard for college graduates has dropped even further.