Are you descended from “Okies”?

When I wa# a kid and learned about the depression and rheDust Bowl, I knew it was history we’d never repeat. Didn’t we learn from our mistakes? Didn’t we revamp our economic laws and regulations? Didn’t we plant trees in the dust bowl to prevent erosion?

Now I realize it’s all going to happen again. The ranchers and farmers cut down the trees in the dust bowl and the bankers paid off the politicians to drop regulations that were put in place to prevent another catastrophe. Right now we’re overfishing and polluting the oceans and nobody will stop it. We’re destroying the ground and destroying water by fracking. We’re letting corporations run the government. We do NOTHING about the most corrupt administration in US history. Noth8ng but tweet, that is. Big fucking deal. Pols, businesses and media know that people blow off steam by signing e-petitions and writing snappy tweets. But we don’t get up and get off our asses.

The person who wrote the article on Russia is correct. South Koreans took to the streets when their president was accused of bribery AND THEY DIDNT LEAVE UNTIL THE PRESIDENT WAS OUSTED.

In Russia, they demonstrate for a few hours, go home and everything stays the same. And that’s what Americans do, too. Mitch McConnell can STEAL a SCOTUS seat, prevent the senate from looking into any kind of allegations, shut down any bipartisan legislation and not only do Americans allow this, they yawn when McConnell calls the opposition “obstructionist.”

The rich are planning on destroying us again and we sit around watching Kim Kardashian & vaping.

Sort of, OP. My grandparents rode it out on small family ranch in North Texas. They were only able to hang on because of a spring on their land and a few other geographic features. Other relatives were less fortunate and lost their properties, and some cousins (further south) also held on through the thirties but ended up losing their ranches in the legendary drought of the 1950s which was really just as bad. None of them ever really wanted to talk about it. They were the children and grandchildren of dirt poor Irish immigrants and land was everything to them, but the stress of it probably shaved at least a decade off their lives--neither of them made it to 70, and in the few pictures of them from that time, they look like they're in their fifties at least, when in fact they were in their twenties. Most of my dad's siblings left home to find work and the three oldest boys fought in WW2. One sister did make it out to California through marriage, worked for Douglas Aircraft through the war and stayed on after and retired out there in the 1970s so technically she was the only one who joined the California diaspora. All of them are on the short side and have dental problems probably due to their childhood nutritional deprivation. My dad says they never went to bed on empty stomachs but the food was often meagre and they often didn't have meat--he was sure his parents often went without so they could eat.

Terrible times that people just wanted to forget once they wrte past.

What R1 said is correct but a bit of an oversimplification. The Plains states went through an unusually rainy period in the 1910s and people thought it would last forever. They were convinced that plowing up the prairies for agriculture was the way to go and the science of the time supported it. People left the cities to get on the agricultural bandwagon, and banks were giving out loans like Halloween candy.

For about ten years, it worked, but then the market was glutted, prices dropped, farmers plowed up more land to make up the shortfall, etc., all of it amplified by Wall Street speculation. Then a period of drought came and wirhout the prairie grasses to hold the soil and water, the winds of the Plains stirred up massive dust storms. The natural cycle amped way up by human shortsightedness.

I feel like they used to have more of a presence in the Southern California area up until maybe the early '90s. Only older adults of a certain age would use 'Okie' to describe certain people. I associate drive-in dairies and '70s clunker cars with them.

I never understood the desire some men have to masturbate with one another. If I plan a sexual encounter, then I'm expecting a dick to fill some orifice.

R5, Okie men? lol

They are still all over California, r4.

How can you tell, R7?

Well said, r1.

R2 My parents are all Texas natives (remarried) and all remember the 50s drought like it was yesterday.

Good nutrition gave them some length of bone, R8.

Hell no.

Unfortunately, yes. I’m embarrassed by it and I hate most of them.