So last night I saw The Grapes of Wrath (1939 PG) at the Royal Alberta Museum. I actually found the movie, though very very slow to be very well filmed. Most of the musings that follow deal with the fact that though we might be in a recession it is not nearly as bad as that portrayed (you know from the great depression) in this film:
— Firstly we are not starving to death. I'm not sure that an obesity epidemic is much better, of course, but we're definitely not starving… we could all use better nutrition but that's another story entirely.
— We have roofs over our heads (generally). Yes there is a lot of homeless, but subsidized housing is generally not as bad as what was shown in the movie… we at least know what toilets and running water showers and whatnot LOOK like (Even if certain well-meaning aid agencies might have forgotten/neglected to pay water bills etc.)… Also, generally the so-called authorities don't outright kill you for living in a tent city or otherwise out of the bounds of that which is expected.
— While I'm not a huge fan of cars and whatnot, generally our jalopies don't happen to be nearly as ramshackle as the vehicle that the Joad family uses to travel from Oklahoma to California.
Now that said, we do have a lot of problems in 2010, and we could do a lot to mitigate them/solve them/otherwise improve society. But while it may be the worst recession since the great depression, somehow I don't think that the extremism expressed in the movie The Grapes of Wrath is quite what the majority of people are experiencing right at this moment.