Seems a lot like the 1930s lately. Of course there's our continuing crawl out of the financial pit left to us by years of "trickle-down", bad decisions from both parties, and the outlandish spending and foolish frittering away of our surplus by George Bush. But by not attending to our planet's healthcare, we've managed to stir its ire and revisit another Depression era anomaly, the Dust Bowl.
If we were suddenly bereft of our technologies, our newspaper typesetters could leave the little characters spelling out "the worst since the 1930s" on the press without having to call in the copyeditors. This is the worst "economic downturn" or recession since that time and now the current drought has affected the most land since the Dirty Thirties.
Cue the Okies and send a reporter off to Route 66 to interview the Joads. Or just go to Texas or Louisiana where, if you make over a lofty $5,000 per year, you are too wealthy for Medicaid. Remember Romney's "self-deportation"? Seems it applies across state lines as well. They'll just smoke out those old people in nursing homes, those children with disabilities, those folks whose jobs have been outsourced and happen to think they deserve not to die from some disease; smoke 'em into a neighboring state foolish enough to think that $5,000 might be a monthly salary but certainly isn't a yearly one.
"I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards responsible for this (Great Depression)," The Grapes of Wrath author John Steinbeck famously said of his intent with one of our great American novels. I think Steinbeck would have found his way to Zuccoti Park had he been amongst us last October. I wish we'd have listened to Jimmy Carter in the 1970s--or halftime in our little timeline here--and done as much to turn down the big thermostat as we did to reset the ones in our homes. And I know that all these concerns, catastrophes even, of the 1930s and the 20nows are people-powered perils. The historical farmers did not practice crop rotation and favored the short term bounty over the long term sustainability of the land. Topsoil was just that, and it self-deported to other states faster than a single mother raising her disabled child on the oil-rich Texas-Louisiana border running off to find a better life...anywhere. Add in the Great Depression's ongoing and punishing hardships and life went from crappy to impossible.
Today our "exceptional drought" and the slow climb out of the Great Recession seem set to mimic those of the not so good old days. We can blame big oil, gas, coal and such characters as the Koch Brothers for some of our environmental woes. Monsanto can line up for a good knuckle-rapping for giving us such anathemas as genetically modified seeds, hybridized plants, and of course the great non-equalizer, Round-Up, which works on the soil kind of like meth works on an addict: It poisons you for anything else but more of it. And we sure as hell can aim our evil eyes at Wall Street AGAIN for all things screwy financially. The greedy bastards are running the show, getting away with tiny little societal "murders" we never fully understand, and still they demand more. They want to be regulation-free to carry out their unhealthy practices, they want more tax cuts, they demand to keep their investable monies on the sidelines and on the beaches of foreign shores, oh...and for all this they want The White House.
If all those poor folks of the 1930s didn't know any better--though doubtless the non-poor did--then we cannot hold their mistakes against them. They, like some of today's foreclosed families who were prodded and misled into bad sub-prime mortgages, did not have the crucial facts at their disposal. But we've seen this movie before: Rose Of Sharon's baby is stillborn and eventually the floods come. We have the facts--and the inspiration of literary fiction--to guide us this time. We still (amazingly enough) have time to heal the planet, but we're talking triage then straight to the ER now. We must take care to sew up the holes in the social safety net and the best thread we have is sitting unused in the notions stores of Switzerland and the Caymans. And we need a cool drink of Glass-Stegal again to help save the greedy bastards from their worst addictions.
If the old adage of "the cure grows next to the poison" is true, then we possess, need even, to give farmers desperate for a source of income the infrastructure needed to grow consumables for green energy: algae, hemp, and other biofuel sources. Call it seed money or, as we say in wildfire country--which has greatly expanded in case you haven't noticed--ladder fuels: green fuels lead to green cars lead to green jobs lead to green energy exploration leads to green in people's pockets.
But before we can get to that fine day on planet Earth we have one more shortfall to remedy: Lack of empathy. I hope it's just greed and not lack of caring, but some of these (mainly) GOP policies are downright cruel. Do we really want the Ryan plan and the Romney tax scheme? Do the problem (not job) creators honestly need more rope with which to hang us all? Have the greedy bastards managed to turn poor-on-poor yet again?
In short, there's no welfare queen keeping you from living in a two-story mobile home, but you may need one without healthcare, Medicare, and Medicaid. You know, for when Ma and Pa have to leave the assisted living center and all the poorer relatives come calling with their troubles...and all their worldly goods piled atop the Model T-oyota. (Except for the family dog, of course. No one's THAT heartless.)
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