A Few Quotes from The Great Divide

Mary Gonzales (community organizer):

There’s another isolation: within ourselves. We feel incompetent. I lost my job at Wisconsin because I’m worthless. If I had more skills…Instead of saying, It’s Chase Manhattan that created Wisconsin Steel’s closure, it’s not you. So we turn to alcohol, drugs, and television. So we live in the world of … daytime soaps, in a world of fantasy. So we don’t have to deal with the real world.

Carolyn Nearmyer (a farmer):

Whenever the deputy came out to take our stuff away from us, I asked him, “How can you go home and face your family?” I happen to know he has an eight-year-old girl too. I said, “How can you sleep tonight, knowing that someday this could be you?”
…
He said, “If I didn’t do it, somebody else would be here. To me, it’s just a job.” Auctioneers at foreclosures say that, too: “If we don’t sell ’em out, someone else’ll get the profits. I just as well do it.” to me, that’s heartless people. I wouldn’t do that to somebody just because I needed the money. Money to me is just not that important. If we can pay the light bill and the phone bill and have food on the table, that’s it.

Rex Winship (a futures trader):

“Christ, if you can’t outsmart one little government staff, you shouldn’t get to work in the morning.”

“Unless you have losers, you cannot have winners.”

[From what again? I’ve been reading The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel. It’s an oral history documented in 1987.]