The Greatest Generation
Great speeches were made this week, important speeches, and necessary speeches from powerful men and women. They offered not lies and vague platitudes, but reality. They offered, not the abandonment of the American dream, but its resurgence. They offered hope.
And yet, none of this is worth anything if we don’t understand what is at stake, and where our own power resides. The answer doesn’t lie merely in putting all our trust in these speechmakers. It lies in the fact that the 99% is 99%. The overwhelming majority.
No elected official is going to be perfect. No politician is going to embody or embrace every belief, every opinion, every ideal we have. They are human beings as we are human beings. And no, perfection can’t be found in a crowd either. Crowds can be deluded into acting against their own interests. They can chase mirages, break apart from selfishness and bigotry. They can become monsters.
But when a crowd embraces true solidarity, when it manages to look beyond race, class, religion, and gender, great things can happen. When people band together and pursue something beyond the hope of individual riches, they can create a society where, yes individuals can achieve wealth if they want it - but they can also live comfortably and safely if they want to pursue other dreams. We don’t have to live in a society where there is little or nothing between poverty and wealth, where the loss of a job can mean the loss of your health or even your life.
Graphic novels have been around longer than many of us know. They enjoyed a vogue in the early 20th century, with "wordless novels," sequences of often beautiful and highly skilled woodcuts that told a story, minus captions or word balloons. I remember discovering them back in college in the 1980s, when I scoured the local libraries for anything by Lynd Ward, Laurence Hyde, or Giacomo Patri.
The other day, just after hearing President Obama’s acceptance speech, I found an online edition of Giacomo Patri's masterpiece, White Collar originally published in 1939. The woodcuts have just enough detail to tell a complex and heartfelt story of a man knocked off the middle-class ladder during the Great Depression. It may have been published over 70 years ago, but it remains relevant. Healthcare, the power of corporations, homelessness, even abortion are all touched on in this novel.
Here's a link. You can choose autoplay for a moving slideshow, or just click on the arrows to turn the pages manually.
It's a call from the past.
The Greatest Generation didn't just fight World War II.
Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes