Americans spoiled despite our sour economy

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This is destined to be a grim Memorial Day weekend in the region, what with the price of a gallon of gasoline climbing to $4 a gallon and food costs surging beyond the financial means of consumers.

In response to the assault on our wallets, many of us may be forced to scale back our barbecue menu to beans, bread and water.

With unemployment moving toward Great Depression-like numbers, businesses being shuttered across the region and many homes in the foreclosure process, more Americans than ever are pessimistic about the future and think our best days are behind us.

They say this with thousands of dollars" worth of high-tech equipment in their possession. They make this grim prognosis before driving away in a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle.

It is true that much of the economic news in the local and national media is negative. It also is true good news rarely sells newspapers, spurs Internet traffic or captures television ratings.

And there is a generation of voting-age Americans who have no idea what austere economic times truly are; have no idea what even modest times are. You motor around the city or suburbs and see two or three automobiles parked in a driveway. You walk into the home of a neighbor, and it is not unusual to see three or four flat-screen televisions.

Not too many decades ago, in the so-called turbulent '60s, the dream of the average American family was to leave the tiny apartment in the city and move to that wonderful home in the suburbs. That wonderful home would be termed modest by today"s standards, given it often was a three-bedroom, two-bath rambler.

That was the upward mobility of the typical middle-class family of four in the '60s. The family usually had only one car and one television set that decorated the living room. Believe it or not, it often was a black-and-white television set, because programming did not come in color en masse until the mid- and late '60s.

These homes did not have walk-in closets, as quaint as that may seem today. Nobody owned 20 pairs of shoes or clothes galore. These homes did not come with two-car garages, decks and media rooms.

Middle-class families sometimes built meals around Spam and thought nothing of it. If a family could afford to eat out on occasion, that was considered pretty special. And it was special, because the elders in the families could regale you with the unsettling anecdotes of the Great Depression and the rationing that occurred during World War II.

That is what material life was like in the '60s and '70s. Times were not difficult in the sense of the Great Depression. But they surely would be considered threadbare by the self-indulgent thinking today.

It is amusing to read the stories that inevitably portray the economy as being dire, if not in a recession, though we hardly are in a recession. And, of course, that negativity is eventually picked up by the masses, especially those too young to recall the Jimmy Carter-inspired gas lines of the '70s.

The economy undoubtedly has experienced a downturn, and some Americans are feeling the financial pinch. But that is true in any economy at any point in history. As tough as it may be to believe, we Americans live in materially rich times. We are spoiled on so many levels.

Of course, it is a presidential election year, and it behooves candidates to pitch themselves as saviors to all that is bad. And certain voices in the media go along with it because of their political bias and interest in seeing their candidate reach the White House.

But the media spiel is intellectually dishonest, at odds with the recent economic history of our nation.

Why, it is so tough out there that millions from around the planet want to come to our nation each year, legally or otherwise.