The Depression and the War were as real for me as if I had lived through them myself. They were times of constant household reminiscince, and even the Roaring Twenties that preceded them were not totally unfamiliar to me. Tampa in the 1920s was a boom time for the Cuban immigrant community. We were cultured, highly skilled industrial workers from a cosmopolitan urban background living in a small, desperately poor rural southern backwater, sheltered by our numbers and our (relative) affluence from the worst of Jim Crow.

I've always thought it amusing that we always felt about the "Crackers" the same way they felt about the blacks: we felt they were uncouth, uneducated, violent, lazy, ignorant, criminal drunks who didn't bathe very often. Differences in culture and socioeconomic class are often perceived as genetic, differences in race. It was one of the most important lessons I've ever learned.

I grew up with the constant reminder that the normal condition was hard times, and that the feeling that things were getting better all the time could end in a heartbeat. All through my youth, I had the nagging feeling "this can't go on forever, we're redlining this country right into the 21st century". Although for me, it was not welfare spending and debt that loomed as the enemy, it was poverty, war, consumerism, waste, resource shortage and environmental degradation. That nagging feeling that the other shoe was about to drop played a major role in how I planned and lived my life, and I think it affected me in the same way it did many (but not all, or even most) of my contemporaries.

Looking back now, what stands out is not how bad things got or how quickly, but how long we kept it together as well as we did, and that things are still nowhere near as bad as as they could have been. In fact, we've still got time, and there is still a future, if we don't do something really stupid.