The strongest oak must fall/ The sweet things in life/ To you were just loaned.

Given the current situation, I've been cheering myself up recently by reading about the Great Depression. Like us,they had self-serving idiots in power but, for the most part, everybody survived (until WWII came along and 'fixed' the economic downturn and population pressures). Two books that I especially found myself drawn to were Studs Terkel's Hard Times and James Grey's The Winter Years. Different styles and different countries but both straightforward and though provoking reads.

Terkel leads off his chapter on the high life with this classic written by Lew Brown in 1931 which is as relevant now as then.

'Life is just a bowl of cherries,
Don't take it too serious,
Life's too mysterious.
You work, you save, you worry so,
But you can't take your dough when you go-go-go,
So keep repeating it's just the berries.
The strongest oak must fall.
The sweet things in life,
To you were just loaned,
So how can you lose what you've never owned.
Life is just a bowl of cherries,
So live and laugh at it all.'