Yesterday, in a comment on the “OWS Has No Coherent Plan. Who does?” thread, commenter Shelley, who lives in Alaska, writes:

this may not fit here in comment to the above article, but it’s an interesting look into the minds of young people. My son and his friends came over yesterday and got to talking about this OWS movement. They don’t really understand what all this is about. Their general impression is that the government is to blame. They all expressed the opinion that America was going to “fall”…their word, not mine. When I asked them if they trusted the government they all responded with an emphatic “NO!” absolutely not. They feel powerless and somewhat hopeless. One of them said they just want to go get a farm somewhere and hunker down. These kids are not under my influence, yours, any adults influence. They are 21 to 24 years old and in college. The general impression they are getting from the teeny bit of news they watch is that their future looks bleak, they will be facing a lot of problems foisted on them by the government. And they don’t think there’s much they can do about it. I found it kind of depressing and scary that these young adults look forward in hopelessness, lack of trust, and expectation of the collapse of the US.

I thought about that just now when reading Joe Nocera’s column today.  In it, Nocera talks about a history of the Great Depression written in 1940, and how much what that historian recorded parallels between America’s experience of the Great Depression, and today. Nocera careful at the outset to say that the country had it far, far worse back then, but that said, there are some interesting parallels to what we’re going through. But, says Nocera:

Still, [the historian] writes, “Despite all the miseries of the Depression and the recurrent fears of new economic decline and of war, the bulk of the American people had not yet quite lost their basic asset of hopefulness.”

He concludes: “A nation tried in a long ordeal had not yet lost heart.” When our current long ordeal finally ends, will we be able to say the same?

What do you think? I’m careful here to be suspicious of my own biases. I tend to be a doom-and-gloomer. One minor but non-negligible reason I’m glad to be moving back to my south Louisiana hometown is because I don’t have any hope that things are going to get better for us all economically before they get a lot worse, and if truly hard times are coming, I want to be closer to my extended family and to the community where I grew up, so I can help out and be helped out. I mean, I would still be making this move if we were in boom times, but it has not escaped my notice that the thought of hunkering down, in Shelley’s phrase, in the country with family and community is a comforting idea as a hedge against the Great Depression II.

But that’s me. Again, what do you think? Do you think we’re running a hope deficit, in the sense Nocera means? I’m trying to think about how we would know that, if it were true. One thought that occurs to me: popular culture now, versus popular culture of the Depression era. Some of the most beautiful and inspiring music and film in American history came out of the Depression era. Today? Filth, decadence, savagery, and nihilism are common. A culture that can produce and make a hit of “Saw” , or feature suburban high school girls merrily singing a degraded hip-hop paean to oral sex with bitches (see The Atlantic’s piece mentioning this), or make the trash-talking exhibitionism of “Jerry Springer” and “Maury” into successful TV shows, is not a culture that is likely to have similar reserves of hope and inherent respect for human dignity, solidarity, and potential to be able to weather hard times intact.

Yes, yes, the worst of pop culture doesn’t stand for it all. The point is that in the 1930s, you wouldn’t have seen this kind of stuff at all. It was inconceivable. Now it’s mainstream. That tells us something about what’s happened to our capacity for hope.

UPDATE: Some really interesting responses in the combox thread already. Don’t miss them.

UPDATE.2: Folks, please understand something before you comment. I’m not trying to say here that the 1930s were better than today overall — that’s a different discussion — but to answer the precise question of whether or not the capacity for the kind of hope that helped the American people endure the crushingly hard times of the Great Depression still exists today — and why or why not? I’m not prepared to argue that the 1930s were better (or worse) overall than the 2010s. I’m asking you to answer Nocera’s question, and to support your answer.