Prioroties

"Our father taught us the culture to which we were born. American culture was Dixieland above all, Dixieland pure and simple, and next to Dixieland, jazz. It was the pioneers who went west singing "Bang Away My Lulu." When someone died on the Oregon Trail, as someone was always doing, the family scratched a shallow grave right by the trail because the wagon train couldn't wait. Everyone paced on behind the oxen across the empty desert and some families sang, "Bang Away My Lulu," that night, and some didn't.

"Our culture was the stock-market crash--the biggest and best crash a country ever had. Father explained the mechanics of the crash to young Amy and me around the dining-room table. He tried to explain why men on Wall Street had jumped from skyscrapers when the stock market crashed: "They lost everything!"--but of course I thought they lost everything when they jumped. It was the breadlines of Depression, and the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl, and the proud men begging on city streets, and families on the move seeking work--dusty women, men in black hats pulled over their eyes, haunted, hungry children: what a mystifying spectacle, this almost universal misery, city families living in cars, farm families eating insects, because--why?

"Because all the businessmen realized at once, on the same morning, that paper money is only paper. What terrible fools. What did they think it was?"

by Annie Dillard, "An American Childhood"