Ignoring history
Posted in Straight Shooter by R Lee Wrights on November 2nd, 2006 by Jessi Winchester, author of From Bordello to Ballot Box
“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times.”
- Machiavelli; 1469-1527 Italian Political Philosopher
History buffs can see with crystal clarity how the past repeats itself. If only we would learn from those lessons. If we compare what’s happening today to past events, the outcome is easy to predict.
The current administration in Washington turns a deaf ear to public suffering. While oil companies reap obscene profits, the gas crisis has so affected the American worker that many have had to quit jobs because they can’t afford the commute, plunging thousands into instant poverty. Others are forced to watch their children do without adequate food so they can put fuel in their vehicles just to earn a wage at all. Bush is out of touch with the every day person and just as unmoved as many past presidents. A history lesson the current administration should heed is that desperate people take desperate measures.
During the Harding and Coolidge administrations, farmers were paid precious little for their crops but charged extortion rates on mortgage and tax payments as well as bank loans for seed and equipment. By 1931, one out of every eight farms was up for forced sale causing families to be evicted from their farms by their own government. As high as one-third of Iowa farms were auctioned off during this black time in history.
Herbert Hoover presided as president during The Great Depression. The executive and legislative branches were unmoved regarding the plight of farmers; a quandary government itself created and ignored. A decade of desperation by farmers finally culminated in revolt against the elitists in Washington who cared only about protecting their cronies in big business. Hoover was a president unmoved by national starving, unwilling to take responsibility for or even look at the consequences of his inaction, and uncaring about the ‘little’ people; not unlike the deaf ear turned in Washington today regarding war, social security, run-away inflation, infringed civil liberties, and unconscionable gas gouging. The latter just may become the spark that ignites revolt as the farm issue did during the depression.
Hoover’s response to public outcry was to regard anyone who criticized him as being ‘unpatriotic;’ a declaration we have also heard from the current administration. When protesters marched on Washington, Hoover had the Army, with fixed bayonets and tear gas, run them out of the city. When the jobless stormed the Capitol, armed police herded them into temporary ‘detention camps’ and Congress began meeting behind lines of rifle carrying police who no longer allowed anyone to approach the Capitol steps. Today is no different; war protesters are routinely removed from Bush’s view so he’s insulated from its reality.
Once Americans realized their government was going to give them no help, they came out of the corners they had been backed into - with a vengeance. A rebellion began in the heartland of rural America. Iowa farmers refused to deliver their harvest and blocked all roads to the cities, isolating them. They disarmed police, stormed jails to free protesters, intimidated prospective farm bidders until they left, dragged a judge who signed mortgage foreclosures from his bench and beat him, and even killed a lawyer that was involved in foreclosure proceedings. Chaos reined because the people no longer trusted their government or felt it cared. Just as today’s Minutemen feel they must take it upon themselves to patrol our southern border because the government won’t - the farmers felt they had to isolate the cities from the products they needed and take aggressive action in order to get the attention of a government that wouldn’t help and didn’t care.
The writing’s on the wall. Just as the farmers did with Hoover, will we be pushed down the road to revolt by conduct in Washington? We could be if the current administration doesn’t learn from history.
Copyright © Jessi Winchester 2006 All Rights Reserved
