Enough with comparisons to the Great Depression.

Family lore has it that some time during the Great Depression -- family lore is seldom precise -- my unemployed grandfather heard there was work in a little town in northeastern Ontario. He was in Toronto but even a rumour of work far away was an enticing thing, so he and a friend hopped a boxcar north.

It was winter. When the train finally pulled into that distant town, the two men were hungry and half-frozen. They jumped down and made their way to a mill where sawdust was burned in an outdoor furnace. Warming their aching bodies, they asked the locals about work.

Work? There is no work.

But if you go to that house over there, one man suggested, a woman has some firewood she needs split. She'll give you a meal for that.

So my grandfather and his friend split the wood and ate the meal and got on the next boxcar headed south.

Decades later, my grandfather had a good laugh when my father told him he had landed a job in a certain town in north-eastern Ontario. Oh yes, he told my dad. I know the place.

That coincidence is the only reason this little tale entered family lore. Otherwise, it wasn't unusual in the slightest. Desperation and disappointment like that experienced by my grandfather was the stuff of daily life for millions during the Depression.

Those truly were tough times. And it would be nice if we remembered that as we go through our own troubles.

Economies the world over may be slumping in the current financial crisis but the production of hyperbole is booming. "Times are tough," Maclean's magazine declared last week. This is "the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression," Barack Obama says at every campaign stop.

"Mr. Harper's response to the crisis in the banking system is to say that everything is fine, nothing needs to change, and there are no problems," NDP leader Jack Layton thundered during the election campaign. "R.B. Bennett couldn't have said it better himself in 1930."
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It's hard to know where to begin with this stuff.

For one thing, R.B. Bennett did not say "everything is fine" in 1930. Quite the opposite. Bennett, a Conservative, won the election of 1930 by attacking the complacency of Liberal prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and promising dramatic action -- specifically, big increases to tariffs and spending.

But simple ignorance aside, it is the failure to appreciate the scale of suffering in the Depression that makes these comparisons annoying.

In the Great Depression, more than half the production of the United States vanished. Thousands of banks collapsed. Prices for farm products plummeted. One in four workers was unemployed and two million Americans were homeless.

And Canada? If anything, it was worse here. Fuelled by desperation, extremist movements grew rapidly. On Dec. 2, 1934, Maple Leaf Gardens was packed to the rafters not for a Leafs game but a Communist Party rally complete with speeches praising the inspired leadership of Comrade Stalin.

Just as we belittle the victims of Naziism by making glib comparisons between some political party we don't like and brownshirts, so do we belittle the suffering of those who lived through the Depression when we compare today to that era.

And please, let's not defend this rhetoric with lawyerly parsing. Yes, in a sense Barack Obama is technically correct in saying the U.S. is going through "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression" because that statement specifically refers only to the crisis in banks and other financial institutions. But these references come in the context of jobs and income and the travails of ordinary people. The implication -- that these are hard times the like of which we haven't seen since the Depression -- is unmistakable. And deliberate.
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As for that "tough times" label that's being tossed around so casually, yes, it is less offensive than references to the Depression. "Tough" is relative, after all, and these are indeed tough times compared to, say, 2006.

But broaden your historical perspective just a little and "tough" is not a word you will use to describe this moment.

Consider the early 1950s. It's a time when everyone in the world considers the United States the land of milk and honey because the economy is booming and average people are enjoying prosperity unlike anything ever experienced before. Life magazine highlights the good times with a picture of the Czekalinski family of Cleveland standing beside the food they will consume in one year.

Mr. Czekalinski, his wife and two kids are beaming. Look at this marvellous bounty! And it is all thanks to the good job Mr. Czekalinski has at a DuPont factory. He's a shipping clerk. He makes $1.96 an hour.

"No wonder people were happy. Suddenly they were able to have things they had never dreamed of having, and they couldn't believe their luck," writes Bill Bryson in his wonderful memoir of growing up in 1950s America. "It was the last time people would be thrilled to own a toaster or waffle iron."

Look, losing a job is hell on anyone, in good times or bad, so anyone in that position today is entitled to complain. And because I never underestimate the human capacity for screwing up, I would not dismiss the possibility that things will get very much worse for very many more.

But the indisputable truth is that we remain the wealthiest, best-fed, healthiest, safest, longest-lived people in the quarter-million-year history of our species and, barring something resembling total collapse, we will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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