Hope to See You Again
Hope is what’s left when your purse is empty, but it’s the most valuable asset you have.
We have gotten through the peaceful transition of power. Not counting the mudslinging recently playing in U.S. Senate confirmation hearings. Nor the irate MSNBC wringing of hands and outrage or the coronation speech. Still, it would seem that the obvious is not yet seen by Democrats and liberals. Or not at least, by the cottage industry grown around making fun of a man of advanced age in an obvious state of mental decline — take your pick, depending on your party affiliation.
Perhaps Dems, liberals, and Never Trumpers should stop throwing mud because the divide-and-conquer outreach of the billionaire class seems to have won the day. Americans, especially those who slept through history class, may need to reconsider the Robber Barrons (point 1.0) of American Capitalism. By the early 1900s, they were in control of this country. Those practices included unfettered consumption and destruction of natural resources, influencing high levels of government, wage slavery, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors to create monopolies and/or trusts that control the market. Laissez-faire economics is the term applied by some historians for unregulated Capitalism, bordering on avarice. This brings us toward the present when in pre-pandemic 2019 three men, Bezos, Gates, and Buffet held more wealth than the bottom 50% of U.S. households. Now, Musk alone holds that much. A wise (?) investor, he spent $277 million helping elect Donald Trump and saw his net worth surge by $111 billion since the election. Not chump change.
If you showed a list of those historically called Robber Barons, I’d guess most people, say three out of five, would not recognize more than a couple names and the source of their wealth from this list: Henry Morrison Flagler (Standard Oil, railroads), Henry Clay Frick (steel), John Warne Gates (barbed wire, oil), Jay Gould (railroads), E. H. Harriman(railroads), James J. Hill (fuel, coal, steamboats, railroads), Collis Potter Huntington (railroads), Andrew Mellon (finance, oil), J. P. Morgan (finance, industrial consolidation), John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil).
But the majority won’t revisit that past. History isn’t in vogue right now. Re-writing or erasing it, however, is a raging dumpster fire. But if Democracy truly dies in the darkness, that’s probably the wrong metaphor. The people elected Donald Trump and rejected the Democratic candidate(s), policies. And like the President-elect, they supposedly aren’t much for reading anyway.
The Party in the Big Tent needs to do some soul-searching because while they were inviting everybody in, there was a significant exit out the back gate. No shortage of essays, expert panels, and verbiage has been pushed forth to explain this, but the best insight I’ve acquired comes from a couple of fictional novels and the uncommon common sense of a friend who teaches high school. Bear with me.
My friend recently drove his parent to attend a funeral in a small town in central Oklahoma. Although he was “kin” to the deceased uncle, it was a relationship of blood, not familiarity. As a child growing up he had occasional memories of cousins, aunts, and uncles during visits and vacations, holidays, and homecomings. In the small town of a thousand or so souls, a local Christian Church is the center of the local universe. It has a commercial kitchen, a gymnasium, meeting rooms, and the requisite chapel.
As my friend looked around at the full spectrum of generations, usually sitting together in sprawling groups, in the chapel he was struck by the uniformity. Elderly grandparents were gently escorted in by their children in their mid-fifties. Their children walk in holding the hands of young grandchildren and occasionally carrying an infant. Four generations, smiling and hugging, their acquaintances, cousins, brothers, uncles, and more. It struck him that these people were happy with small-town, rural life. They neither wanted nor needed anything more. Those wanderers or black sheep of the family had moved on in search of something else, but these people were the settlers.
My friend’s family had roots there going back to the mid-1850s. His parents settled in Colorado in about the same era. Our small rural Colorado town still has some of this flavor, but Colorado Front Range populations exploded by 130% in the last three decades. Oklahoma’s population increased only 26% in that same period.
This being a couple of months before the election he knew that this, like most small rural towns, had conservative majorities. He wondered how all the diversity of America is supposed to fit into one system. In a short time, these good salt-of-the-earth folks would be voting in a system that included young people from East L.A. who might have grown up without a father, perhaps with a mother suffering from drug addiction. And hipsters from Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, and Bedford Park, NYC, would cast their votes based on their life experiences and beliefs. All of them voting, along with more recent immigrants who hailed from Ireland, Africa, the Caribean, Mexico, and Asia, and some 46 million other legal immigrants including the 1.3 million Cuban who hold special status.
Dems needed a much bigger tent indeed, but maybe too big for one party.
In his presidential farewell address, U.S. President Joe Biden invoked the term "robber baron" (RB) to caution against the growing influence of concentrated wealth and power in American society. He warned that these developments could signal a shift toward oligarchy, drawing parallels to the economic and social inequalities of the Gilded Age. Nearly everyone knows the names of those who might be included on a contemporary list of RBs. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
This leads me to the first of a trio of books, this one won a Pulitzer Prize for literature. 2023, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. A contemporary re-write of Charles Dicken’s examination of English poverty class struggles, and child labor (David Copperfield). Kingsolver artfully weaves in the abuses of foster care and the opioid crisis in Appalachia. Both are epic stories of survival through the eyes of a young boy.
I thought I knew the opioid crisis. Working with specialists in Pain Management, I wrote thousands of prescriptions for pain relievers and monitored patients carefully. But, Kingsolver taught me some things and changed some of my beliefs. More than anything, she dramatically increased my understanding of the people of the Southern United States who voted for Trump in block. I thought I knew them too, but I was wrong again.
My first wife of nearly fifty years hailed from NW Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene territory. I met her in Atlanta in the late 1960s. She grew up poor enough to not have an indoor toilet until she left to go to college in Atlanta. She remembered the Klan burning crosses by the road on Saturday nights. Klan billboards warned away those they despised. Her people weren’t any part of that.
Sweet, gentle, kind, and loving, they welcomed me, a refugee from New Jersey. I learned many things in Georgia. How to eat stewed squirrel with biscuits and a “mess a’ greens.” I learned where to buy moonshine (dry county then), how to bail someone out of jail for poaching, and a different kind of “churchin;” Pastors were liberally scattered in the family. I was cut from a different cloth, but they taught me about unconditional love too. And I thought I knew them too, but Demon Copperhead showed me important things I’d missed.
Kate Quinn’s historical fiction, The Briar Club, returns us to another anxious time in America. Post WW II in Washington D.C. when Senator Joseph McCarthy bullied anyone he didn’t like (spoiler alert: a long list). In particular, he didn’t like artists, Hollywood entertainers, union leaders, writers, progressive politicians, LGBTQ individuals, academics, and liberals which he branded as Communists. He also went after Government officials, particularly in the State Department calling them the C-word as well. Raise your hand if any of this sounds familiar.
A great read, a murder mystery of sorts, The Briar Club reminds us of a scary time in America when some neighbors reported others as communist sympathizers. Also, a time when women didn’t have access to good jobs, reproductive healthcare, financial access to credit, or equal rights (no, wait … but, oh never mind). Quinn paints the picture with humor but doesn’t pull any punches. It wasn’t the good old days if you were a woman; certainly not one you would want to go back to.
Or maybe some do. Texas, Idaho, and Oklahoma have passed laws that offer bounties to private citizens who sue people who help others get abortions. These laws are known as "bounty hunter" or "vigilante abortion laws." President Trump has called Democrats “evil and dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick. They should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military.”
So where are we headed, what’s next? I ask you to consider the political stew from an ecosystem perspective. If you add a toxin to a river, it may affect some organisms, but not others. Over time, the population changes as some thrive, some die, and others may adapt. If you introduce a new predator, one isolated from the food chain, those organisms lower in the food pyramid will be affected and populations will change, a little or a lot.
And that brings us to our third novel, a fictional view of West Palm Beach, Florida, and a place like the President’s Mar-A-Lago ecosystem. Author Carl Hiaasen’s Squeeze Me uses the wacky real-time happenings of his home state as inspiration for his outrageous brand of fiction. I wager Hiaasen doesn’t get invited to many social events at the President's,enclave. The story revolves around the disappearance of a very rich elderly socialite, a petite widow to several fortunes. While a serious police search ensues, a wildlife control service is summoned to discretely capture and dispose of a very large Burmese Python from a tree at the resort. Eighteen feet large.
When said snake is noted to have a prominent bulge from a recent meal by the female wildlife agent, well … the rest is hard to digest, but hilarious, if you can get past the obvious whereabout of the petite socialite. True to form, Hiaasen knew of several well-known female Python huntresses in the news. They were taking advantage of the Florida Bounty program for these invasive serpents known to reach 18 feet and more.
Sadly, Pythons have decimated the Everglades National Park and estuary; there has been a 90-95% reduction in fur-bearing animals in the Everglades National Park since the pythons appeared in the late 1990s. One study found a 99% decrease in raccoons, a 99% decrease in opossums, and a complete absence of rabbits. Twenty years ago, the place was teeming with wildlife. Now it’s a challenge to find a single deer, possum, or squirrel.
So far, no one knows of a person being eaten by a Python. However, they can unhinge their jaws and have been known to consume small deer and, occasionally, alligators. And truth can be stranger than fiction. Ask Carl Hiassen.
The toxins and predators shaping today’s political ecosystem feel oddly familiar, like echoes from a past we’ve conveniently forgotten. The Gilded Age’s Robber Barons exploited the system for profit at the expense of the common good, much like today’s tech billionaires and oligarchs. But history isn’t in vogue—it’s rewritten or ignored altogether. And while democracy doesn’t die in the darkness, it certainly suffers when we close our eyes to what is happening.
The novels I’ve mentioned—Demon Copperhead, The Briar Club, and Squeeze Me—each explore social systems under strain and the human choices that sustain or destroy them. Whether it’s the opioid crisis in Appalachia, the paranoia of McCarthyism, or the absurdities of modern Florida, these stories remind us that the world is messy and complicated. People are, too.
The challenge before us is not merely to survive but to evolve. To build a tent wide enough to shelter diversity without tearing apart at its seams. To resist pitting neighbor against neighbor and rekindle a commitment to justice, equity, and shared humanity.
Democracy, like any ecosystem, can be resilient—but only if we nurture it. The question is: will we learn from the past or repeat its mistakes? The answer, as the poet Dylan sang, is “blowin’ in the wind.” It depends on whether we can embrace the moral courage to act, even when the odds seem insurmountable. Hope is not just a feeling but a choice—and perhaps the most important one we’ll ever make.
Hope. For the USA? Not much. Actually, it’s probably all I got. Certainly not much faith.