My mom told me a few years back that she feared hunger. I felt like I’d been kicked some place soft – with a lot of nerve endings.

I asked her if it was a recent thing. She said she’d felt that way since she was a child. I asked if it was because of growing up in The Depression (that would be Depression 1.0 to distinguish it from our depression, which is Depression 2.0.)

She said she wasn’t sure, she just knew she’d feared hunger as long as she could remember.

I poked her and prodded her, I needed to know why MY mother was afraid of hunger. I needed to talk her out of it somehow. I needed for the rest of her life not to contain a fear of hunger, right here in America, in a prosperous city, in a nice home.

The back of my head was screaming, “No, mother! It’s okay now. It’s been okay since you were what – nine or ten years old?”

My brain began retrieving helpful information:

The pictures of her with her Buster Brown bob and the Roman sandals that she hated so. She and her little sister dressed alike in dresses that I knew my grandmother had made. She and her little sister playing “Lady Dress Up” in grown women’s tattered finery. She and my aunt in high school portraits that hung in my grandmother’s bedroom. The picture of her and daddy and my grandparents, with my aunt as the bridesmaid. The picture of her laughing in the boat. The pictures of family picnics.

The stories about her childhood.

And never a mention of hunger. Oh sure, I could read between the lines and tell that times had been harder than anything I’d ever known personally. Now, fifty-some years later, hunger had entered the picture. Not like hunger in my life, where you just decide what sounds good and go fix it or buy it. Hunger like a Biblical plague. Horrifying hunger. Hunger that might never stop. Hunger that might kill.

And she couldn’t describe it to me. She wouldn’t. I got a strong sense that she was ashamed of ever having been hungry. How do you spend a lifetime fighting daily for a life that knows no hunger, yet retain the gut gnawing fear that your gut will gnaw you to death. I had no idea. I wanted to understand how that works. But, apparently, she wasn’t the one to explain it to me.

I wondered if she regretted telling me. Had she not seen in advance that I’d want to be her mommy and make it stop by talking her out of it? I guess not.

So, I faded out of the fear of hunger conversation, and we moved on to things that didn’t make either of us hurt.

You want to know something? I don’t think anyone who grew up in the fifties, when there was a recession, and The Depression was a recent event in all adults’ memories, got away without a profound curiosity about what exactly happened to our parents and grandparents. My friends and I certainly discussed it.

Were we a generation of talismans that could be pushed and prodded by formerly hungry parents into the front of their defense line against deprivation? Were we the outward proof that they had conquered the ahor – the ancient horror?

Why had my mother spent my entire childhood telling me about how fat I was, only for me to find out (quite accidentally at the age of eleven) that the family pediatrician considered me even more underweight and malnourished than my little brother? I got out the family pictures and looked. Yes, my brother was as skinny as I remembered, but I was too.

I promise you my brother and I were never hungry. But, she told me, when I was old enough to understand, about the fear of hunger, not enough for me to understand, but enough for me want to ease her suffering.

Once upon a time in America people who didn’t have enough to eat were ashamed of that fact. As if they were the ones who had ground the US economy down into dust and misery. That’s wrong. That a child should carry for a lifetime, not just the fear of what a depression causes, but a sense of responsibility for one’s own powerlessness to stop it, that’s wrong in so many ways that I can’t even name them.

America is in a depression right now. Only butterflies and earthworms are seeing green shoots. You and I can’t live in earthworm houses and feed ourselves on butterfly food.

Generic American greed didn’t cause Depression 2.0. Big Macs and Detroit cars didn’t cause this. The American people did not have and do not have the economic power to crash the American economy.

The American citizens, living now in Depression 2.0, never had any economic power that wasn’t contained in a credit card, home mortgage or car loan. And they didn’t OWN that power. Those were simply the shackles that kept us chained to several low-paying jobs per family.

The OWNERS of those credit cards, home mortgages and car loans have sucked the American citizens dry, and now they move on to do the same thing to the “global economy.”

The Chinese and Indians are chomping at the bit to get in on the shackles and chains, because they come with such pretty accoutrements — Big Macs, cars, houses, clothes, electronic equipment, a furniture suite for every room, chubby babies, beautifully dressed children, hot and cold running MRI machines and health-building pharmaceuticals.

I’ve written elsewhere that Depression 1.0 didn’t let up its grip until the 1960s. Then it was 40 relatively good years, with lots of recessions, and the purchasing power of the American dollar steadily declining since the 70s. The workers’ wages declined even more sharply, starting in the 70s. But, most of us were doing what we considered to be “okay.”

There were 10-15 pretty good years, and then the slide began. In the 80s, the manufacturing base was dismantled and moved overseas, and the infrastructure and natural resources started being sold off. In the 90s, Social Security was looted to prop up the declining American economy, so WE wouldn’t notice the downhill slide of the US into its “proper” place as a (banana republic) third world country.

Right there, in that period when Reagan was confusing ketchup with food and demonizing welfare recipients, Bush The Elder was selling off American assets, and Clinton was siphoning off the national savings (Social Security) while trying to get a computer and health insurance in every American home, that’s when the raping and pillaging of Americans’ wealth took place. Then, when Bush The Younger came along, we were primed for the kind of straight-jacketing and perpetual wars and corporate control that typify banana republics.

I guess everyone alive to read this now understands that Americans cannot compete in the global job market with Haitians who will work for less than $.30 @hour. And even the Haitians lost out when they asked for $.27 @hour. Disney said “No!” and moved its factory to China.

Then America bailed out the banks. Yes, it started on Bush’s watch, but Obama didn’t deviate even a single degree from the map. We have our computers in “every” home now, but we still don’t have health insurance in every home -yet-, do we?

You and I, with our diminished paychecks and lifestyles bailed out the people who OWNED our credit cards, home mortgages and car loans, and were busy selling them to suckers.

We now “owe” for bailing out the people we already owed! It’s a tax burden none of us can ever hope to repay. And those bailed out greedsters call in our credit cards, foreclose on our homes and repossess our cars, and anything else we were silly enough to let them put a lien against.

Am I the only one who thinks, “Danger to him/herself and society,” when I hear some useful idiot say that they shouldn’t have to pay for anything for anyone but themselves, but “we” need to pay for corporations to get breaks and bailouts and bonuses so that “we” can reap the benefits?

Yeah, wouldn’t it just be tragic if we fed and housed the poor in this country instead of propping up the corporations who are doing what? Providing us with employment? Providing us with credit to expand the economy? Providing us with the sky high taxes they pay, which support social welfare so that the have-nots contribute to the economy too ? Cleaning up the pollution they’ve caused? Providing scholarships for your kids to go to college? Providing internships so your kids can start careers? Operating food kitchens? Building genuinely low cost housing? Providing comprehensive health insurance – with no deductibles or co-pays?

I was one of the lucky ones. I lived almost 60 years between depressions. If I told you what it was like, you’d think I made it all up. But, it has enabled me to see more clearly than younger people that “we” didn’t create this depression. All that amazing stuff I mentioned above that corporations are NOT doing today? I remember when they did. I lived in that world. Believe me: you’d have liked it a lot more than the world we’re in today.

And, oddly, the same greedsters who paid those high taxes managed to provide wages, benefits and pensions, for single (one) wage-earner families, without going under. All the “government restrictions” and “high taxes” didn’t wipe them out. Their profits continued to increase. They’re still operating today.

Whatever happens to you and your loved ones during this depression, please teach your children that no deprivation they suffer is a cause for them to feel shame. And, do something nice for yourself: find out who caused Depression 2.0.

WE, the American people, don’t have the power to create a depression, any more than the Haitian people have the power to create an earthquake.