July 21, 2024

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

This is a story about America. It begins in the Great Depression that would challenge the founders’ American Experiment of democratic rule in a republic; then goes to war in heavy sacrifice; and, then, like the plants which rise anew in spring despite heavy snows and trampling brings hope that humankind has a better side.

Post-war the United States began to build its middle class, which is synonymous with opportunity, equality and reaffirming democracy, a bulwark against greed, aka, control for profit. Now it is 2024, and the story line has changed and not changed.

The great, worldwide economic calamity of the Depression began not in the stock market collapse of “Black Tuesday,” Oct. 29, 1929, but in the Roaring Twenties’ greed push in market speculation, by an iffy, non-regulated banking system that could not protect individuals and industry, and even by excess in household spending, much of it on new installment plans that could not be repaid in the crash. Buy on margin the big guys said, but “we don’t have your back.”

Almost all families of the 1930s endured years of job loss, doing without and suffering personal depression. There were calls, as in 2024, to abandon a “failing” democracy, to turn to more control by the few, such as communism or fascism. Today in America autocracy promises to make great this America. (It has never stopped being great in its moments.)

In the 1930s, Midwest farmers, their land and barns and homes seized in bank foreclosure, were abandoned. Belongings were thrown to the roadside as auctioneers pounded the gavel instead of government extending a helping hand to those who funded and built government in the first place. Trust was broken. Salt-of-the-earth people, most of recent immigrant heritage, once believing in a nation’s frontier push and the manifest destiny of opportunity, now found their harvest was “the grapes of wrath.”

Today, in 2024, how many farmers have been forced to sell to mega corporations because the profit for 24/7 hard work is not there? They require fertilizer for crops but find the market has been cornered by the big guys, and prices have gone out of sight. Their neighbors, former factory workers, lost jobs years ago as industry moved to other lands to seek greater profit. A new depression, that of the mind, has settled in, with opioid use, suicide and hand-wringing loss of hope – a present cocktail of “wrath.”

Too many politicians and government officials don’t visit these people, except in election-time hyperbole that serves special interest and, yes, say it, greed. Too many then harp on “failed government,” as in the Depression, but behind the curtain is the Wizard in falsehood. The agenda is money, and money means control. More control = more money. Putting one’s hand on a sad man’s shoulder, the fellow who once ran a tractor or worked at a factory machine, who now sits outside Walmart all day, to say in hypocrisy, “I feel your pain” while reaching into his pocket to take the last dime is the Wizard’s way.

Those who shed a tear, who are genuine in believing government can be a catalyst for re-growing a middle class, don’t look closely enough to see the disrespect, the loss of trust that is the harvest of wrath in farms, in cities, even in the suburbs of the American Experiment. They talk but don’t do the walk. No wonder a wizard seems so inviting.

(This is a story about America. It is 2024, not 1933. Put your thinking caps on and be certain about promises from any wizards.)

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

-30-