-By Frank Hyland
No, I’m not referring to Crow’s feet around eyes, concealed by the latest in skin creams. If you’re somehow in the mood for a really depressing time, go to Google Images and take a look at photos from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Among them you’ll see the long lines of people gathered to get a bowl of soup or some bread. No such lines today, you say. At present, you’re told that the U.S. Unemployment rate is 9.1%. Multiply that by two and you’ll be nearing the actual unemployment rate. To be blunt, the Federal Government cooks the books on the unemployment rate just as it does in other cases, like what they claim is the rate of inflation. So why don’t we see the long lines forming again, given a true unemployment rate approaching 20% — one in five of our neighbors, our family members?
Another way that governments – federal, state, and municipal – have cooked the books is to find ways of disguising the scale and scope of the problem, concealing it from the cameras of the 24-hour cable TV networks. I would be so fearful, ashamed and embarrassed to be seen in a food line by someone I knew that I would wear a disguise and/or go hungry to avoid being spotted. Few today need to even anticipate that fear, much less actually experience it. Why? Today, someone can sit at home and not have to join a line and be seen at a soup kitchen. Lose your job and you have 99 weeks of unemployment checks queueing up to enter your mailbox. For those who, like me, were not Math majors, that is only five weeks short of two entire years! To add to that, almost 20% of Americans now receive food stamps. The goal, and this has largely been achieved, is for you to be in line at the grocery store behind someone spending his or her unemployment check and/or food stamps and you don’t even recognize it.
So don’t think that just because you don’t see lengthy lines forming for a bowl of soup, that there aren’t very large and growing numbers of needy Americans out there. They’re out there, all right, but Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Golfer in Chief want you to think otherwise. They want to prevent any photos of evidence of this Great Depression from appearing on the evening news, at least prior to the 2012 elections. That they concentrate on appearances instead of reality, though, tells you that they hold you in low esteem, and that they firmly believe that they can fool you long enough to be reelected. At every opportunity, the long lines need to form at polling places so that the number of those on unemployment and food stamps can begin to shrink.
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Frank Hyland is a long-time Writer/Editor who has written for The New Media Alliance, and also for The Reality Check and has appeared weekly on Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Conservatism on Sunday evenings on Blog Talk Radio, along with Babe Huggett and Warner Todd Huston.