CSotD: Don’t expect a miracle
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Today's Pat Oliphant cartoon puts me in mind of a story I've probably told here before, but am about to tell again.
In the mid-to-late 1970s sometime, my then-wife and I were visiting my grandfather, an archetypal product of the American dream who had worked his way up from the mines to the executive offices. We were just starting to make a decent living and asked him what he would do with that extra money, if he were in our place.
"Spend it," he said.
He had, among his other duties, travelled a great deal in search not simply of iron ore, which the US had in some abundance, but also to bargain for the less common ores of chrome and molydenum needed in the making of steel.
Now, some 20 years post-retirement, he looked at the steel industry in particular and American industry generally, with a reflective and more dispassionate eye, and he told us that the US had done nothing but take from the Third World in order to build itself up. But now the Third World was entering the industrial age, and we were on the brink of a backlash.
"One day, those little brown people are going to ask 'Where's mine?'" he cautioned.
And he had no answer, because there is no answer. He spoke to us of an industrial US bent upon protecting its holdings. For instance, he noted, if the steel industry had spent on cleanup what it had spent on lobbying against the Clean Air Act, the land would be pristine.
Some 40 years later, it is clear that the old man was right. We've spent more money on keeping those "little brown people" in their place than it would have cost to go into their villages and install clean water, to create good schools, to open clinics, to pay them back for two centuries of giving, giving, giving to fatten the Western World.
His observations came at a time when we had just begun doing this to our own workers, mind you, freezing wages and killing pension programs and laying off workers in order to use that money to pay off leveraging and to play on Wall Street, turning every US industry into a casino, so that our business is no longer making steel, or automobiles, or air conditioners, but turning greater and greater profits tied not to our individual expertises but to an overall ability to jack up profits in the name of driving up the Dow.
And the little people, brown and white and black and red and yellow, ask, "Where's mine?"
I've always, since I became old enough to analyze such things, believed that the miracle of the loaves and fishes came about because in that vast crowd were a lot of people who had brought food, but who, as long as free food was in the offing, kept it in their bags. But when it became clear that there was no feast in the offing, and when Jesus clearly offered all that he had, they were both shamed and inspired into sharing, too, what they had.
But that miracle occurred out in the country, not in Jerusalem, where the Pharisees and Sadducees and others co-opted by the Romans could "explain" to the crowd what was actually meant. In a more interconnected world, the miracle would not have happened.
And, even then, the miracle provided only one meal and an example.
It was the Visigoths, the Vandals and the Huns who eventually found a solution to the complex Gordian Knot of Roman governance.
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