Storm the Gates

Can't Help but think it is Coming

I wrote the other day that what we face in the US is nothing new.

During the Robber Baron days just after the railroads had been built, when banking thrived as the New York City skyline went higher, and higher from their loans and investments, the average American experienced the same repression that we see today.

As huge production plants grew up across the country to supply not just the local region to which they could deliver in horse and cart, but deliver to a national marketplace, the average American experienced the good and bad. More efficient production drove prices down on a tin of crackers and make them even more affordable, just as workers flocked to the cities and to these behemoth factories for jobs in huge numbers that meant the production plants could take their pick of labor, pay them practically nothing, and work them damn near to death. If you didn’t like it there was a line at the door with men willing to take your job.

Eventually the greed of the Oligarchy crashed our economy in 1929 and the early 1930’s were perhaps the worst time for the American people since the very first Winter at Plymouth Rock where the new Puritan settlers faced mass starvation in the Winter cold.

There is a big, big difference between the days of the depression and today. People then knew “none”. They’d been on the farms where food was scarce, when the dust bowl descended. Which is why they flocked en masse to the cities for jobs when those factories grew. They knew a life of want. They knew a life of very little choice. Many farmers were itinerant farmers, paying a rent to the actual landowner to grow crops and sell them. It was a subsistence living. People think “farmer” they think food, abundance, food you grow and eat. But farming was weather and soil dependent. Not every season was a bountiful harvest. Tonights meal was soup, laced with a few sparse chunks of meat and mostly potato, or corn, or whatever vegetable was cheap and readily available. There was no menu, there was no variety. There was soup. Tonight and probably tomorrow night as well.

And guess what?

You were damn glad to get it. Far fetched as it seems now you got a bowl of gruel and you were grateful to get it.

I’ve said it before in this space but probably the most chilling of all conversations I’ve had with my own father, a child of the depression, and the big one WWII, was when he began to tell me a story about lard. How it came with a red dot at the top center. Which was the “flavor dot”, more like a bit of margarine plopped into the lard itself. And how he and his brother would fight over scooping the dot into their sandwich as they ate a lard sandwich during the depression. Craving just a bit of flavor in the lard.

Looking at him with astonishment as I heard this story, as all I’d known was a full stomach my entire little life, I said to him naively, “I’d never eat a lard sandwich”.

I rarely had conversation with my dad, he was a quiet, quiet man. But that night telling me about the depression, and lard sandwiches, he fixed me with a look, a hard look, and said sternly “you would if you were hungry enough”, and I looked into his brown eyes and saw all the way to that day way back in the 1930’s, I saw the pain, I saw the hunger, I saw the despair, and that small conversation resonated with me all my life because in that second I got a glimpse of a world I’d never known. He transported us both back to that time of desperation and want.

He did know that world. And he knew it all too well. That had been his reality. And I could see into the depths of his soul just how unpleasant it had been. That hunger, that very real hunger. This was no “I walked uphill to school both ways” dad story, this was a history lesson on living through the darkest economic time in American history. And the sorrow and sadness in his eyes stabbed me all the way into my own soul. Made me feel ugly, made me feel ungrateful, made me feel less-than, made me feel as if he had survived it all so I didn’t have to. I felt a debt to the man that day that could never be repaid in a thousand lifetimes.

That single second exposed to me the depths of pain my father had experienced in life. And it lined up for me in succession all the stories I’d been told and made me realize the crucible of fire he’d been put through, and what a saint the man had been through my own existence. We had little but I didn’t know real want. Our lives were modest but the fridge wasn’t empty.

It is a story for another day, but during the War, the “big one”, WWII his job in the Navy was to dive on ships that had hit mines, put on one of those big Diver Dan suits, and go under the ship and weld a piece of huge steel to the hull so the ship could limp back into port. The job was extremely dangerous. The waves are shifting the big boat, the steel is heavy, and welding under those conditions was damn near impossible. Hearing those stories all I could think was, “I’d never go under that damn boat”. Whenever I’ve tried to dive with air tanks I hyper-ventilate, feel like I can’t breathe, because it is unnatural to go under water and breathe.

But he did it. He had to. They ordered him to do it, and bravery or duty, he did it. I can’t imagine the life my father led, because I’m not half the man he was. Agains the odds he faced, child of a hispanic single mother, the challenges thrown before him in his life, he persevered. Where I might have folded like a cheap Joseph A. Banks suit.

Those were different times.

And that is exactly my point of this column.

We survived the depression as a people because as a people we were used to “want”, there was no such thing as “plenty”, scarcity was normal for the average American family.

You didn’t have twenty five pairs of socks you had two, and darned and mended them until no amount of needle work could save them. You didn’t have a “rack of clothing”, that was for the wealthy city dweller. Only after the advent of the Sears catalog did the rural wealthy housewife gain a closet full of clothing. She had what she could sew from whatever reams of cloth the local merchant had in stock before Sears delivered a catalog. In fact, the Sears catalog showed the world what they didn’t have long before the advent of the television. It showed the vast majority a world of products they had no idea existed, needed, or could want. Back then you had little and were grateful.

Which is why I fear a bad experience for us all in a crash today.

We are not today a people that knows “want”. We don’t “have little”, even the poorest have a television, a laptop, cell phones, and a working washing machine and dryer.

We are not a people today who understands sacrifice. It isn’t in our vocabulary.

If the crash comes I do not think we will all take to “Hooverville”, and be content to sate our bellies with whatever can of beans is available for the night.

No, if a 1929 style crash comes this time, and people go hungry, not a “I couldn’t get veal at the market today” hungry, I’m talking a “there was no meal to be found at all” hungry, I do not think the average American is going to sit quietly in a make-shift shanty as the wealthy find their way to stave off the “depression”.

No I do not.

I don’t think there are gates big enough to keep the rabble away from deciding they deserve a share of the “plenty”. Underground prepper rooms may suffice for a while, but not the average high hedge, or gated community. Anger is one emotion. Anger and hunger combined quite another. And if you combine anger, hunger, and armed that my friend is the triple threat of leveling the field. Keep in mind, the police are almost exclusively middle class. They don’t live behind the gates. In this scenario, they’d be hungry too. They may start out being the barricade to the unwashed mass of middle class getting past those gates. But soon they’d turn and face the gates with “their kind”.

If the “Great Depression” happened today what do you think the Average American would do?

You think they are going to eat a can of beans and be sated? Grateful?

Thin threads hold our world together. Very thin threads.

Now there are other plausible scenarios.

A “storming of the gates” is not the only option.

It is quite possible that government and tech could marry to implement a large scale version of universal basic income to ensure there is subsistence. But I do also believe that particular road is the road to “1984” and complete control over the population by a tech-government overlord.

Government could decide to print money, inflation be damned, and create large scale infrastructure programs requiring high employment. Think “WPA” write large. And think real infrastructure programs, not a Democrat bill that funnels money to the solar panel industry instead of roads and bridges. Where ten to twenty percent of the money sent comes back in donations to Democrats. And where later the Solyndra style solar panel firms go bankrupt having eaten all the government subsidy and hand out, producing very little benefit to either the economy, or jobs and infrastructure.

But of one thing I am certain, the American people would not stand for “want”. We’ve had an economy my entire lifetime that got bad, but not “that bad”. Gas lines in the 1970’s were no “depression”. Nineteen percent interest rates under Carter did not take our entire economy down. Hell my first mortgage was at thirteen percent. And to me that was “normal”, since it was down from the nineteen percent a few years before.

We all got a glimpse into human behavior during Covid. Store shelves went empty as some hoarded goods. They didn’t seem to be too concerned about taking “just enough” so that their neighbor might not know “want”. Nope. They grabbed up all the toilet paper they could for themselves. As far as they were concerned you, their friendly neighbor, could use your hands to wipe. It didn’t take long for store shelves to empty and for us all to see how ugly and self-centered people can be.

And we saw how our illustrious Democratic leaders operated, they shut us down with stern rules and regulations and reveled in their new found authority. They looked absolutely in their element telling us how to live under lock down, how to wear masks or face imprisonment, the look on Governor Whitmer’s face was chilling, as was the look on the face of the Mayor of New York. The Governor of New York went so far as to kill the elderly due to complete and utter incompetence and a desire not to make the opposition party President look good. He was damn near named Time “man of the year” for his handling of Covid and mass murder of the elderly, lauded on the nightly news as a “savior”. He was a Democrat hero, despite all the nursing home deaths, he was being groomed as a future President by Dems and their handmaiden media. Until the “Me-too” movement brought him down.

The newspapers and mainstream media want to paint us all as “basically good people”, they see us all as flying those “In this house” rainbow banners. Except for the Deplorables, those MAGA people, who should all be put into internment camps for re-education. Those people are awful. But the enlightened, which of course includes all employees of the mainstream media, they have a basic good in them. As if they weren’t the very first to the stores emptying shelves. As if they didn’t hoard the toilet paper. As if they “shared” with everyone, taking just what they needed and not a roll of toilet paper more.

It is my strong contention that the American people will not countenance another “Great Depression”. We will not go quietly into “Hooverville”, nor once they shoot some of us down at the Ford plant will we retreat. Not this time. The Pinkertons are getting return fire, the plant is getting over-run, and. the most violent of the mob are heading for Ford’s home. The workers aren’t going to get shot down in the square for protesting working conditions and then slink away this time.

We are going through some tough inflationary times now, and good jobs are scarce. Jobs are available, but good jobs are hard to find, that is, good paying jobs. And yet our CVS get looted and cleaned out completely. Gangs visit the local shopping mall and storm the luxury goods stores and grab up as many handbags as they can and flee.

We see it, but not as some precursor to some future event where even the middle class join in. We see it, but not as some harbinger of things to come.

I just watched a video that prompted this missive. Where Bret Weinstein was discussing the fall of Rome, and whether or not in the future as we decline the end will be a gradual downfall, or sudden bottoming out. In the way the Soviet Union dissolved, all at once. The wall coming down, and the old Soviet Union just…gone.

He never thought to bring up that we may be witnessing the early days of the slow decline what with CVS’s being cleaned out. What with social unrest over various causes. Not too long ago “Occupy Wall Street” was protesting strongly about the greed of Corporate America. But the Oligarchs and their media henchman began using the term “racist” by the hour and minute, and refocused everyones attention on race, and took the fight from worker V corporation to worker V worker. The movement stalled. But perhaps not for long. Mr. Weinstein doesn’t quite get it, I guess he needs to add another big degree to his doctorate.

I personally think it is all going to happen the way F. Scott Fitzgerald talked about the rich going broke into the depression, gradually, then all at once. And that the homeless crisis we witness but don’t really see, combined with all the looting, is the first act in the eventual downfall. A restlessness at the lower class, that has yet to reach the middle class. A feeling of complete despair, that all hope is lost, that the game is far too rigged to beat.

As if they’ve seen first, before anyone else has seen, the hand of the carnival barker reaching back to slide up the wooden dowels that prevent the dolls from falling.

We have yet to really recognize the sleight-of-hand. here in the middle class. We still feel virtuous about ourselves. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet, thou shalt turn the other cheek.

I don’t think people turn the other “Hungry” cheek, do you? In this day and age?

And what will you do kind sir and miss, when and if the crash occurs, will you reach for the magic marker to write on the cardboard “Hungry, will work for food”, or will you reach instead for the gun I keep hearing so many Americans possess in great numbers?

One day in the 1920’s flapper girls were dancing, and dancing. Life was good. And I mean really, really good. The Babe was cranking homers, the dance halls were full of men and women ignoring prohibition completely. American industry was cranking out new and stylish fashions, cars were streaming off the production line, and every city saw growth into the suburbs, new houses on new roads, with new water lines, gas lines, electric lines, phone lines. Employment was full, pockets were full. Music poured through the speakers of the big console in the living room, and nightly the family gathered to laugh at the antics of comedians and serial story shows beamed out from the New York studios.

And then after the money-men crashed the markets the dancing stopped.

Life after wasn’t too pleasant for the flapper girls. Life wasn’t too pleasant for the middle and lower class in America.

History repeats, this we all know.

What we don’t know is how we will react.