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Why This Election Won't Solve Anything

People are madder than hell about government,
by which they mean they do not like what is happening to them.

We happen to live in the middle of a revolution.
No!  No!  Not one of those Communists under the bed
and in every Sewer Department Committee revolutions,
but in the middle of enormous changes in human life.

There have been earlier, other such revolutions:
when humans came out of the woods, and in from the savannas,
and learned how to plant seeds and tame animals was such a time.
That was called the Agricultural Revolution.

People learned how to settle down and live in one place.
They built villages, stored grains, trained oxen how to pull plows,
and built little dams across the stream, and canals for water.

All of that happened, in many places, but not all,
four or five or ten thousand years ago.
People had been hunters and gatherers for millions of years,
so the first grain and garden growers, and house builders,
must have puzzled and confounded almost everyone.

How do people learn to live together in town, anyway?
How can a hunter be happy and successful shoveling out a barn
and steering a clumsy stick of a plow down a crooked furrow?

Hunters do not make happy farmers.  Clodbusters!

* * *

Not much later, as human history goes, another revolution occurred:
the Industrial Revolution.  It began in England, about in 1800,
only a couple of hundred years ago.  Muscle power--human and animal
muscle power, gave way to steam and, later, petroleum.

Clodbusters and draft horses did not hold the Empire together:
coal did, and steam, and factories running on water power, then steam.
Iron and steel held the Empire together.  Great surpluses of human beings
lined up like cogs, coming like machine work, eating when told,
their muscle and skills coordinated like ants building something,
living close together in cities, pulled in and spit out like replaceable parts
made the Industrial Revolution run, and the Empire powerful.


People who used to plant by the seasons, wait on the weather,
tend calving cows and irrigating row crops, now got up in the dark,
came when the whistle blew, ate and peed and sped up when they were told,
and went home to do it all again tomorrow.  Huge numbers of them!
It was a far cry from springtime and new growth, dependence on weather,
water and rain.

Men who have tended familiar soil, held it in their hands, pulled up carrots
and scratched out new potatoes, ached under the sun and gone to bed tired
do not come gladly to become cogs in a great industrial machine
that wore them out like cogs and made dust of their lives.

The promise of progress and of great wealth demanded that they become cogs.

* * * 

Our revolution is newer still.  We are midst in it.  It is a Digital Revolution; 
everything that information technology can reduce to on/off switches, electrical fields, and algorithms.  Are you a master mechanic?  How do you know what to do, how to anticipate and analyze problems, and how to respond to them?  Tell the analyst!

Your job does not have to be done in Birmingham, or Detroit.  It is not just as easy, it may be easier to do it in South Korea, or India.  Labor is cheaper there, too, so what cannot be completely taken out of the Industrial Revolution can be found elsewhere:  cogs everywhere, wanting work, willing to work for less.

The farmers who make money today are large, larger!  What today are successful smaller farms are consolidations of many smaller farmsteads:  the houses are gone; the fields are bigger.  

What was supposed to be industry everywhere lifting former farmworkers up into the middle class with college scholarships for the kids, and a secure, comfortable retirement has become Detroit and Gary, Indiana.  Some of the factories are in southern states, stripped of their unions; some are in Mexico.  Fifty-year-old auto assemblers are not prime candidates for the new technology jobs, and neither are a lot of their kids:  we quit believing in schools, too.

The money seems to have magnetic poles.  It attracts itself, and consolidates in the hands of a few; a few corporate farms, a few huge industries; and lately, in Silicone Valley, in Wall Street, in Seattle, in overseas accounts.

We are seeing the decline of the Industrial Age, and the beginning of what the world is coming to, but we have done almost nothing to bridge the human cost of this revolution that is changing the way we work, where there is work, and who is qualified for the work.  

So people are angry.  Damned angry!  Angry at . . . at everybody who was supposed to be making things turn out right:  politicians, bankers, government itself.  

* * *

So here we are.  As I read recently, a Donald Trump supporter said, "Everyone wants to punch someone in the face, and he [The Donald] says it!"  Of course that is no solution, but that is how many feel.  Most of the rest of the Republican candidates for President are equally scornful of government, except that they, too, want to be part of it.  

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is doing his damnedest to point out that the situation all around us is unfair, that structurally we have to take the bull by the horns, and that the bull is on Wall Street.  Hillary Clinton--probably the most qualified to be President in terms of knowledge and temperament, is anything but an analyst of what is going on in the large sense:  she is what government is and has been.

So we should not expect the large problems thrashing about us to be solved in this election.  We are still in the "this is not right!" stage.  No one has proposed an appropriate path for a way out of the changes that are beating us down.  

Victor Hugo said, "Dream no small dreams.  They have no power to stir the hearts of man."  None of the politicians we are asked to choose between really understands how large the changes are that trouble us.  They are not dreaming large dreams.  They propose more of the same, except that, this time, they want to be in charge of it.

The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions changed the world.  The revolution we are in the midst of is changing the world.  It is changing how we do our work, who is capable of doing the work, where we can do the work, where the wealth is coming from and where it is going.  It is not less traumatic than the earlier revolutions.  It is more massive, pervasive, intensive, sudden!

I do not think we are ready to recognize, as Abraham Lincoln said in his time:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.  The occasion is piled high with difficulty. As our situation is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.  We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.”

We are still enthralled by old arguments, and old solutions.  There isn't any going back; no "again"s.  This is new.  We have to imagine what kind of a society we want to be, what we want to build, how we can pay for it, the kind of schools we want, the quality of retirement people deserve, and nearly everything else.




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