It IS a Wonderful Life

I agree with Jamie Lee. This is sort of what I wrote about last evening. From the HuffPo:

What this crisis is going to do is bring us into financial alignment. Families may have to live together again! What a concept. Grandparents will live with their grown children and help raise their grandchildren -- even at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Neighbors are going to meal share and carpool and child care for each other and maybe even rent out parts of homes to other families. Less meat, more beans. Might be better for you anyway. Less indoor gym workouts and more walking, more park time, more family outdoor time.

Obama promised change. Change comes from truth, Jung said, "only that which changes, remains true." but as Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, "you can't handle the truth!" Can you? Can you handle the change? You can if you understand that you are not alone, but that we can handle anything together.

In John Steinbeck's masterwork, The Grapes of Wrath, required reading for all this holiday season, during another time of great difficulty, like now, of the Powerful vs. the Powerless, where Big Business and the land companies and natural disasters created the perfect dust storm of the 1930's, people were thrown together. In the story, the Joad's, a multi-generational farming family from Oklahoma are forced, like so many others, off their land, mortgaged and foreclosed on and they head West to the promised land of California. On their first night camping by the side of the highway they meet another family.

One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pull in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. Fore here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate -- " We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first " we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: " I have a little food " plus " I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind the children listening with their souls to words they do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket-take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning-from "I" to "we."

If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we."

That is it, my fellow Americans.

I wonder what gay folks did during the Great Depression to survive. Life was totally different for us back then. Could we band together today into make-shift family units? Share what we have with others? Open our homes and hearts to those in real need? I suppose we'll find out.

Read it all HERE.

And so it goes.

*