"Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."
-Leonardo Da Vinci
Having spent my spring break poring over two biographies of FDR, both of which contained extremely vivid and detailed descriptions of American life in 1932 and 1933, I feel very comfortable saying that there is NO comparison between then and now in terms of sheer suffering and deprivation. The Depression of the 1930s was several orders of magnitude worse than anything going on in the U.S. today. Anybody who compares our current predicament to that of the Depression simply doesn't know what they're talking about. To assert that today's problems are on par with the 1930s is not merely inaccurate. It's utterly ahistorical.
