This Depression

by Gregg Chadwick This Depression (Song by Song Review of Bruce Springsteen's New Album - Wrecking Ball) "Pessimism and optimism are slammed up against each other in my records, the tension between them is where it's all at, it's what lights the fire.": - Bruce Springsteen, Paris, February 2012 Margaret Bourke-White The Louisville Flood 9 11/16'" × 13 3/8" gelatin silver print mounted on board 1937 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Midway through Wrecking Ball, Bruce Springsteen's haunting song This Depression ( Listen Here ) limns the album's lowest emotional point. In contemporary America, empathy seems to be an underrated virtue. Talk radio and squawking television news channels attempt to prejudice their audience with the idea that economic victims of this latest recession have created their own reality through a lack of hard work or because of some sort of moral failing. In an unjustly weighted society split be...