politricks and other distractions

It Can Happen Here

Here's the thing. We live in a country that's forgotten the Depression. I was raised by two parents who lived through it. My father was born in 1905, so he was 24 when it started. This was after he'd survived the Influenza Epidemic of 1918. No wonder the man prayed to the Virgin Mary for help every night.

My great aunt on my mother's side, Mame Mae, kept a pot of stew perpetually simmering on the stove in her house in Minneapolis. The hobos (as they were called then) drew hieroglyphics on the fence outside the house that said, "friendly house" so that other hobos knew they could stop in for food and the chance to do chores. Hobos were people like my family - white, middle-class - whose jobs, like rugs, got pulled out from under them when the stock market crashed. Today it seems "acceptable" to think of those things happening to people of other races, or from other countries, or with mental illness or some disease - anything to make them seem like "the other" and not like us. Those things don't happen to us. Not to people with college degrees and McMansions.

Before the Depression, my mother was lucky. She was raised by her aunt, Mame, and her uncle - a man whose drinking and bad judgment made him alternately a millionaire, a pauper, a millionaire, a pauper, then a government worker in DC. Consequently, Mom was cautious of wealth, though she always had a desire to be among the wealthy, I think.

The point of all this is that I came from parents who'd lived through the unthinkable happening: jobs went away, families went broke, children raised their siblings, a nut in Germany tried to take over the world and exterminate a great race of people... and we were all tasked with being part of the solution. Whether it was cooking a meal for our starving fellow man when they came to our front door, or whether it was paying for the GI Bill to send our soldiers to college when they came back from war. We were part of something greater than ourselves. And we made things better.

It's election season. We have a chance to do something just slightly similar today. We have different boogeymen and fears, but fear itself hasn't changed - just the call to action we get from our leaders. Today, we're asked to shop. Today, fear is not the only thing we have to fear.

To many politicians today, the thing we have to fear is the truth.

Slap them with the consequences, people. Demand representation. Demand honesty and accountability. Or trust me, it has happened before and it can happen again... Our house of cards will come crashing down upon us. But this time, Mame Mae is gone and her like is not to be found again.

If we don't take care of ourselves and our country, we will all starve. We will at last all be The Other. But we can turn it all around.

To quote P.J. O'Rourke: Vote like hell!

posted by dcnative @ 9:58 PM