My parents were really old when they had me"mid-40s. Old enough that they were teenagers during The Great Depression.
They had so many insane stories about that time. Oatmeal for dinner. Kids sleeping 4 to a bed. My grandfather going out in the street at night looking for cigarette butts so he could pull out enough tobacco to roll his own cigarette. All the kids going to work in their late teens and giving all their money to my widowed grandmother so the entire family could survive.
They were poor.
One other theme that always echoed from those stories was that they "never went on relief." ("Relief" was what they called government welfare programs back then.)
They were so proud of that fact. It was shameful to go "on relief," and they never did.
What happened to that America?
CynicalPublius
The distance between throwing sandwiches and throwing bombs is not as large as you think.