I having grown up hearing first hand accounts, know a little something about the depression. This subject relates to a concept that conservatives love to make reference to: American Exceptionalism. "American Exceptionalism" originally referred to the uniqueness of our culture and form of government but lately some conservatives have corrupted the meaning by suggesting that "exceptionalism" refers to the fact that America is a land especially blessed by God.
I concur that America is blessed. Not because we are favored by God but because we are descended from people who worked extremely hard to build a wealthy and vibrant society to give to us. It is not through miraculous intervention but by fierce physical effort that dams, ports, interstate highways, railroad lines and airports got built.
It was during the Great Depression that my father-in-law began his working career. When he was thirteen he left home because his parents could no longer afford to feed him. He "hopped a freight" along with the other hobos and went to California. He worked for the Conservation Corps at first and then worked on Shasta dam, one of the many public works projects that helped keep people from starving. A few years later he and his new wife worked as riveters in a WW2 airplane factory in the San Francisco Bay area. After the war he went to work for a lumber mill where he spent the rest of his working life performing hard physical labor. The lumber mill rewarded his nearly forty years of loyalty by laying him off just months before he became eligible to receive full retirement benefits. Very typically my father-in-law gave his all for his family, his God and his country. Just as typically the company he devoted his life to discarded him to save a few bucks.
The point of my story is to suggest that, if we are to show reverence, we ought to revere the dedication of our ancestors rather than to revere some imaginary blessing. To assert that "American Exceptionalism" is a gift bestowed upon us by God is to provide ourselves with an "out.", a reason to dismiss any need to show respect for the hard work and the sacrifices made by our parents and grandparents. If our nation has been blessed by God that blessing was wrought through the unflinching dedication of our forebears.
One of the most egregious violations unleashed by conservative economic ideology, to me, is the devastation that accompanies unbridled commercialism. The brash use and abuse of our environment, infrastructure and government that occurs during free-market free-for- alls (such as that which occurred during the Bush era) takes what we have collectively inherited for granted. It is the economic equivalent of desecrating tombstones. America is an exceptional place but it will not be exceptional for very much longer if free-market fundamentalists keep having their way.
It is time, once and for always, to renounce "supply side" economic theory and to reveal it for the sham and fraud that it is. This theory is what gets pleaded in order to justify special treatment heaped on wealthy individuals and corporations. While these special interests use their wealth and influence to wage war on labor (as in Wisconsin and elsewhere) the economy continues to spiral downward because, in actuality, it is labor and not the investor class that creates and spreads economic wealth. We have long been victimized by a propoganda campaign which asserts that we must please capitalists above all else because they are the "job creators". We've been sold a bill of goods! The very opposite is true; capitalists prosper because people who have jobs buy what they offer. In fact pleasing the capitalist is among the least important elements in an honest free market economy because sufficient demand will always provide an abundance of willing investors. Capitalists would be forced to compete for investment opportunities in an honest market economy.
It is past time for us, as a society, to adjust our moral compass. We ought to recall the simple truth that the economy is meant to serve us and not to believe that we are servants to the economy. It is time that corporations and Wall Street investors, both of whom are making record profits while the wider economy suffers, realize that their good fortune is made possible because of people who labor-- not despite them. Perhaps most important of all it is time for those who benefit mightily from the use of our infrastructure, environment and government to realize that they have an obligation to help appropriately maintain these things, things which they are so quick to exploit for their own gain. That it may be technically legal for huge corporations and the uber rich to dodge taxes and to lobby for special favors and lucrative government contracts does not make it any less morally repugnant.
If conservative philosophy simply insisted that crass commercialism be the basis for political decision making it would be an absurd but benign force but conservative philosphy has morphed into a malignant belief system which embraces ever more radical principles regardless of the failures and destructive consequences those principles produce. The result of this mania is that tax cuts for the wealthy and massive military budgets are now considered imperatives while health care, education and old age security are described as unaffordable luxuries and get put on the chopping block.
The steady drumbeat that calls for more and more tax cuts and more and more deregulation is a hypnotic rhythm that's difficult to resist; but we can resist if only we recall that zealous capitalism is what brought us slavery, robber barons, child labor, black lung disease, and a whole host of abuses. America is exceptional because those who came before us made it exceptional. Scheming to defraud the whole of society for the enrichment of a few is a desecration of our heritage and the fact that conservatives choose to refer to it as a political philosophy doesn't make it any less dispicable.
