Didn't they see the light?

The events leading up to the Great Depression have always been something that fascinated me. But what still gets me about the whole thing is the majority of the public's belief that everything was going to be ok. I just don't understand. The market dropped 9% within 24 hours, over 100,000 were unemployed within weeks, and hundreds of banks declared bankruptcy. Yet, President Hoover gave speech upon speech saying that the nation would be fine, the economy would bounce back in no time. Umm, really? I would have been a total skeptic long before any of these major events happened. I mean even today, the news and President say we are out of the recession. But I don't believe it just yet. And neither do those around me. My parents, my brother just out of school, and my family friends are still feeling the pinch and hundreds of others are still unemployed. I just don't understand why you would give your country such a false hope, and why the country would even believe a single word of it.

Book review

For my book review i read the memoir, Alicia: My Story, by Alicia Applebaum-Jurman. She was the only one to survive the Holocaust in her family and the book (being VERY long) tells every detail of her accounts from the beginning to the end. Alicia first lost her oldest brother, then her father, 3 other brothers one by one, and finally her mother; who she watched personally be shot by a firing squad. The thing that struck me most in the novel was how she described the slow Nazi arrival in her town. She described it as being very slow, and that the soldiers were very kind to her and her community. They bought things from the shops, mingled with people, and seemed very generous. It was after almost 2 months before they adruptly started to kill and take people away. I had never had this perspective before; i had just assumed that the Nazis immediately came in and started to slaughter the Jews, but apparently this wasn't so.

Is there any middle ground?

Throughout history we've seen a pattern of extremity in times of dispair, especially in the political process. The chapter reading talked about how protracted political clashes and economic crises throughout Europe forced more and more people torward the extremes of the political spectrum; specifically totalitarian governments. On the opposite end there was nations looking for government to butt the heck out. Why is this? Why is it so difficult in times like this to choose a middle ground? For me, it would seem logical after such a radical change in the world from a war that you would step back and rethink things. But, then again people weren't doing this during the war and this could possibly be just a continuation. But what specifically pushes people to such opposites ends? Is it just the desperate need for a solution ASAP?