Being of Lowland Scots descent, I often think with amazement of my ancestors who survived the stone age, the dark ages, serfdom, bubonic plague, and immigration to the New World. They suffered through all those horrors and I am one of their results. I was really fortunate to be born when the middle class reached its peak of political and economic power, but the future for us today is not so bright.
Most likely, my forebears were serfs, trapped in a society where knights of yore were not chivalrous or heroic but thugs, sent out from the castle to bully the peasants into submission, taxing them and using them for cannon fodder. In Dickens’ time, when debtors were kept in prison until their families could put up enough ransom to pay their debts, the law of the land included a MAXIMUM salary. Employers were happily prevented from paying their workers more than the law allowed, producing poverty and economic serfdom. After the Industrial Revolution, wage labor was viewed as slavery, the only difference being that it was voluntary.
There has always been a struggle in our democracy between the rule of the fortunate few and the rule of the people. In the olden days, it was possible to control the masses with force. Today it is not so easy, so we are managed much more insidiously. We actually vote to accept our servitude. They keep us poor, frightened and obedient by preventing us from earning decent salaries. We spend most of our days at work or recovering to return to work. How much democracy do you experience at the workplace where you spend most of your lives? Any free speech there? Do you realize that the average individual income in today’s dollar has really not improved since Reagan?
They keep us distracted and panicky with boogie men...those immigrants who are not like us, those educated latte drinking liberals, those countries we need to spend billions bombing. If we are tribally busy despising our fellow citizens and other countries, we will probably not notice the destruction of Social Security and Medicare. They keep us anxious and helpless by making medicine and drugs exorbitant so that most bankruptcies in the US are due to medical costs. They keep us voiceless and powerless through gerrymandering, the electoral college, and ‘protecting’ us from voter fraud. They keep us ignorant through a media that is only corporate managed entertainment. And they take our hope away by chaining our children to debt…much like our great grandparents who owed their soul to the company store. Our children should be attending college to discover the wonderful potential lying within each one, but instead we have another sorting system; the children of the rich easily go to cloistered Ivy-league universities, while the meddlesome lower classes who presume to attend college are harnessed to debt. We were a much poorer country in the 50s when college tuition was almost free, so why can’t we afford it now? Ah, to be in Europe where students receive subsidies and free tuition.
Unless we do something about our feudal chiefs, we will be serfs again. With our corporate overlords denying climate change, all we can look forward to is massive immigration pressures, famine, disease and possible nuclear war. With the corporate lords’ and their political lackeys’ undermining our institutions and regulations, all we can look forward to is environmental degradation, unleashed predatory corporations, and a broken social contract.
Our overlords think they can just raise the drawbridge and sit in comfy security behind their castle walls protected by their army of thuggish knights and political pawns. They may be right. Unless we are willing to become very active, pay attention to what’s really going on and get out in the streets to challenge our feudal chiefs, serfdom awaits. They are counting on us to remain apathetic hopeless dullards.
Carolyn J. Crawford Davis
Lee Vining, CA
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