|
I had never read Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. I still have not seen the movie. I understand that the end of the movie is far different than the end of the book. If you read the book that fact won't surprise you.
I polished it off a couple of weeks ago. If you read it--and it deserves its lofty reputation as a classic--don't expect to be uplifted.
It sits right along Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle as maybe the best books commenting on America's condition in their times.
Wrath was first published in 1939 as the Great Depression was playing into extra innings and dustbowls wrecked the Midwest.
Family farms were in such drought that yields were paltry, they weren't making any money and banks were foreclosing on them.
The story is one of a family being forced off their land in Oklahoma then heading west for the promise of work in California. Didn't pan out so well.
Steinbeck was a brilliantly creative writer: "To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth," is how it begins.
Interestingly, though, weather and banks weren't the primary forces that did in the small family farm. Those certainly didn't help, but the main culprit was...the tractor.
Seriously.
Banks would foreclose on large swatches of land made up of a bunch of small farms and then hire one man who could drive a tractor. A tractor could work dozens of acres in a day, whereas the family farmer could work just a few.
As it says in Wrath, "I lost my land, a single tractor took my land."
When I read this I was dumbfounded. I have always looked at the tractor as American and farmer friendly as apple pie. I mean we celebrate them. Small town parades across the country roll through tractor after tractor as a celebration of families and agriculture.
And yet tractors once were the scourge of the family farmer. To many a tiller of the land who lost their home and their farms, these were hell on wheels. When the farmer heard the tractor coming he knew the end was near.
It's a little sad I suppose. Really sad for those who lived through it.
Yet, of course, the productivity brought on by the tractor was an enormous step forward for agriculture. Without the tractor we could not hope to feed the world.
All the different permutations of a seed that allow many more crops per acre, for example, could never be harvested in enough amounts if it weren't for the tractor.
So the tractor, like every invention, is a two edged sword. The benefit to most is clear. Unfortunately, it came at a terrible cost to others.
This has been true of every invention. The telephone, the car, the plane, the TV, the computer, cell phones all put someone out of work. They benefited most in the long-term, but severely injured some in the short.
So what do we do? Mankind will not stop innovating, nor should it. Our propulsion forward as a species will not stop. Our natural instinct is to always want to better ourselves.
What we simply have to do is find a way to advance our human condition without forgetting those who get lost because of it.
It's called empathy. We take into consideration all of the impacts of our leaps forward and do our very best to transition the workforce into the new age.
After all, resistance to change is mostly born from concern that the change may not be good for us.
If the change is not a threat, on the other hand, then stubbornness is lowered exponentially.
I mean, the tractor had to come. But why did it have be so cold when it did?
| 
