Waste

Enjoyed my usual Friday lunch with my parents yesterday. At some point in conversation with my father, talk turned toward combines (the humongous machines used to harvest grain, not NFL scouting combines, etc.). He’s in the market for a new one (well, new to him--he doesn’t have a quarter to half a million dollars or more for a brand-new, state-of-the-art machine with a $15,000 seat, etc.). He is also not sure what to do with his old one. He was talking to a neighbor who had a couple of old combines, or parts of them, stored in sheds and barns, who told Dad that he had once asked a combine repair guy what the old motors, which were still in practically mint condition, might be worth. “Surprisingly, nothing,” the man said. “These old motors will run forever, so nobody ever has to replace one.” So there are hundreds, maybe thousands of perfectly good combine motors rusting away in barns and sheds and salvage yards all over the country, partly because nobody has stepped forward with a potential use for them (trust me, I would step forward, if I had any brilliant ideas).

I was thinking about that during this morning’s perambulations with assorted critters in the bean field to the south of me. The beans were harvested weeks ago, but for some reason I started noticing a lot (relatively speaking) of beans that were left behind by the combine, mostly because they were too close to a weed-overrun fence line, or in corners outside the turning arc of the machine, or in wrinkles of terrain that the combine’s head, because of its sheer size, simply passed over. In the general scheme of soybean farming, what was left behind didn’t amount to much, but multiply that field by hundreds or thousands of others and you would probably have a pretty impressive pile of beans.

It would be too easy, and in fact to some degree inaccurate, to call those left-behind beans--which did their job, they grew and matured as best they could in conditions this past summer that were, well, “suboptimal” in terms of rain, etc.--and rusting combine motors a metaphor for the American middle and working classes, but the temptation is there. In the case of neither the combine motors nor the beans was their ultimate waste due to deliberate intent of the farmer, however. The farmer did not profit from refusal to maximize their potential.

Contrast that to what corporations, in concert with the federal government, have done to American workers over the three decades since Reagan and his “trickle-down” economics entered the picture. Essentially they maximized their own immediate profits by ensuring that nothing “trickled down;” in fact, an argument could be made that they reversed the “trickle”--dollars they did not pay us enhanced their profits.

Unfortunately, with their slow but relentless destruction of the middle and working classes, they’ve laid waste to unfathomable amounts of human potential. Instead of reinvesting in the workers who helped build their companies, they’ve basically done the opposite.

These same “job creators” who are crying that the relative pennies spent on social programs are “mortgaging our children’s futures!” are the people who have ensured that many of our children HAVE no real future.

At some time in the future--and probably not the distant future--when historians conduct an autopsy on the corpse of the United States of America, they’ll probably find that the source of the fatal cancer was rooted in the 1980s, with the overt shift from a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” to a government “of the few, by the few, and for the few”--the 1%; when "what's good for General Motors is good for America" became "what's good for General Motors is good for, um, General Motors management and stockholders, and if something happens that is NOT good for same, taxpayers will fix it for them."

Imagine the possibilities if they truly HAD let some of the profit "trickle down," if they had invested in the potential of American workers rather than simply exploited it?

If there ever is an epitaph for this country, maybe we should just borrow the one Herman Wouk used for Youngblood Hawke, from the novel of that name:  "Death is only a sadness.  Tragedy lies in waste."