Reading the accounts of this mother and son made me realize how many of my posessions I take for granted. I am fortunate to be in a situation where I know that I will always be warm if I want to and will always have enough food to eat. Jane Yoder, having lived through the Great Depression, will most likely never again take anything for granted. At the time of the Depression, her family was barely able to afford anything, let alone stay warm. She was grateful just for a coat that would keep her warm through the harsh winter, boots that would keep her feet dry. Jane even recalls having such a strong desire for food that she would look forward to the day she was sick so that her mother would feed her oranges and bananas to allow her to recover. Jane has memories of overhearing her fellow classmates talk poorly of her family, calling them lazy, and Jane simply thought, "You don't know what it's like" (129). I feel that she was directly speaking to her readers that, like her classmates, don't know what it's like, and perhaps never will. So is the case with her son, Tom, who grows up in a world that is very different from the one his mother grew up in. He says how he's never gone to bed hungry, something that his mother must have experienced quite too often during the Great Depression. However, after listening to his mother's story, Tom begins to understand where his mother came from and starts to become grateful for what he has. He displays a great aspect of what it means to be an American: learning from the past, understanding what it means in the present, and planning accordingly for the future.
Peggy Terry along with her mother, Mary Owsley, lived and experienced poverty in a more extreme way than perhaps Jane Yoder did. Mary and her husband lived in Oklahoma for a decent part of their lives together, from 1929 to 1936. The Depression hit them, and it hit them hard. Mary recalls a family she knew in Oklahoma City that had to resort to living in a hole in a ground. I can barely believe living in a world where the people I knew would have to resort to living so desperately. And perhaps more sad than this is the suicides that came about as a result of a life so full of hardship. Mary describes the reasoning behind these suicides, saying, "...they couldn't see any hope for a better tomorrow" (139). This starkly contrasts with the ideas brought up earlier by the Yoders, a family that has relied, and continues to rely on hope for a better tomorrow. Another important topic brought up by the account of both Mary and Peggy is the idea of shame. Mary explains how people that were more well off than others felt ashamed because they were able to eat while their peers weren't. Peggy describes a different sort of shame, shame that came about from not being well off enough to procure one's own food. Peggy was able to use the ignorance of a child to combat shame, seeing the trip to the soup line as a game to play with friends as opposed to a declaration of poverty. However, as she grew older, she began to recognize the shamefulness that came about with her status as being poor. One situation where she must have felt this the most was when she received food from an African-American family, as she looked down on African-Americans and saw them as inferior. Peggy displayed qualities that really don't fit what it means to be an American. She looked down on others in order to make herself feel better about her situation, and that is not the way to succeed in life. Being an American is accepting yourself for who you are and not looking down on others and inferior, nor should you be looking up to others as superior. As it is written in the Declaration of Independence and is upheld as the framework of our country, "All men are created equal." They should be treated as such.
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