I’ve been reading The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel. I long ago read Hard Times, and I’ve got it sitting here in front of me, so I’ll probably re-read it after I’m done with The Great Divide. 
What’s interesting about The Great Divide is that it was written in 1987. When you read stuff on The Great Depression, it is easier to distance yourself from what happened then, because things were so different. We don’t really expect to see hobos knocking at our doors and asking for work (I suspect they’d be afraid of getting shot at, nowadays, or getting arrested), or hoards of people in broken down jalopies heading off for other states or the big city looking for work.
I was talking about how some bigwigs are already calling this the beginning of a Depression in a history class I was subbing for. And a student got a sort of shocked look on his face, and replied that it couldn’t be because there weren’t breadlines and people starving. I simply pointed out that we are not living in the 1920s. Nothing will look the same as it did then, but that he shouldn’t forget that food shelves and soup lines still exist. (And are reporting record demand.)
In any case, we are at the beginnings. We really have no idea what’s coming, or how bad it might get.
But reading The Great Divide is interesting to me because it could have been written right here and right now. The only difference I’m really noticing is that we aren’t reading much about the disappearing family farms and the crises in rural areas because it already happened back then in the 80s. The family farm is essentially already dead.
(When I drove by myself to L.A. about five years ago, staying strictly off the big highway system, I kept imagining I could put together a picture essay called Dead America, because so much of rural America has been abandoned.)
In the introduction, Studs quotes from a speech Galbraith gave on Dec. 5, 1987:
Markets in our time are a totem, a symbol of our secular religion. They can do no wrong. To find flaws in their behavior is both theologically and ideologically incorrect. And we could not put our rich fellow citizens at risk by saying that they and their much appreciated tax relief contributed to the debacle. The responsibility had to be removed from Wall Street.”
Are we as Americans still protecting the sanctity of Wall Street? Or are we finally seeing the thieves for what they are? Certainly no one has really objected much to the fleecing of the Treasury this time with all the bailouts. Maybe we’re too exhausted and trying to figure out how to weather the storm ourselves.
Studs also quotes Sherwood Anderson, who took a trip across the country in 1934, writing Puzzled America. “Anderson found, ‘a hunger for belief, a determination to believe in one another, in the leadership we’re likely to get out of democracy.'”
Just in the next paragraph (p.11), Studs talks about the “sanctity of the military, union-busting beyond precedent…” and how “reflective conversations concerning these matters have become suspect, or at best, the avocation of odd birds, vestigial remainders of a long-gone past.” It made me think of how often people who live like I do are called “damned hippies,” though I’ve never been all that comfortable in long hair and was born in 1967. Also how little has changed in 20 years.
He then goes on to quote an unnamed woman from Appalachia: “We’ve gotten away from our imaginations. The reason we’re image-struck is because we don’t like who we are. The more we get over this fake stuff, the more chance we’ve got to keep our sanity and self-respect.”
And he informs me that LONG LIVE IMAGINATION was a banner carried by the rebelling students in 1968 Paris.
I like that a lot. It is what we’ll need a lot of in the next couple years. And we already see it happening, of course. Freecycle is one such simple act of imagination that comes to mind. All of a sudden, the free store idea popularized in the 60s by the hippies has been embraced in an even more radically decentralized way than it was back then. And by people who are anything but hippies, from what I’ve seen.
The generosity you see on your local Freecycle board should inspire anyone. (And yes, I do encourage anyone reading this to join their local list.)
And I think that for all the apocalyptic thinking that people like to indulge in—that if the economy collapses that you’d better get a gun to protect your food stores, and form ridiculously dangerous local militias, for instance. For all that, I look forward to seeing us step up and be the kind of people we have the potential to be, ones with great imagination and a renewed sense of community that leads to a better future.
Happiness 