The eternal question for historians is whether history is
one damned thing after another or the same damned thing over and over. It
appears to be the latter, except for occasional technological or intellectual
innovations. The reason is because human nature has remained unaltered since
the beginning of the human species. Or even before: a May, 2015 news report
said that there is evidence that one pre-Neanderthal Homo heidelbergensis (or H.
antecessor) murdered another and dropped the corpse into a pit now known as
Sima de los Huesos in Spain over 200,000 years ago.
I have been reading the John Dos Passos novel 1919, which is primarily about the lives
of some Americans before, during, and after World War One. Dos Passos used what
was at the time a really innovative technique: between the main passages he has
fragmented bits of insight in the form of Newsreels and “The Camera Eye.”
In one of these segments, Dos Passos described what was
happening during World War One. Sound familiar? He said the rich get richer and
the poor get poorer, small farmers are squeezed out, workingmen labor twelve
hours a day for a bare living, profits are for the rich, cops and law are for
the rich. “Was it for this that the Pilgrims had bent their heads into the
storm, filled the fleeing Indians with slugs out of their blunderbusses…”
Today, the income ratio of the richest Americans compared
to the poorest is greater than it was in 1919. Even World War One did not end
this system of oppression. It took the Great Depression to bring about changes
that allowed ordinary people to live decent lives without being crushed by the
rich. It is, I believe, reasonable to ask if our current situation can only be
remedied when we experience another Great Depression? Perhaps even this would
not do it, because in the 2008 Recession, the richest Americans and their
corporations claimed that they were Too Big To Fail and demanded (and received)
taxpayer money.
Think about this on July 4.
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