Last Friday, as that rain arrived, I saw a man walking down the sidewalk pushing a bicycle with his left hand and pulling a shopping cart with his right. His cart was full to overflowing, covered with a blue tarp that flapped mightily in the wind. His head was bent forward against the pelting rain. He was headed somewhere, but from all appearances it was not to be under a roof.
Our word for such people now is
“homeless.” Years ago we used another
word for people who carried all their worldly possessions with them, wandering,
looking for a place to perch, and that was “landless.” Back in the thirties, when dust and drought
and the misplaced hopes of government programs drove people from their farms
and sharecrop shacks, from their places in the economy as well as their
communities, we called them “landless Dust Bowl refugees.” Sometimes we called them other things,
especially we in the receiving regions where their in-migration stretched
county welfare budgets past breaking, where their tenuous camps trampled the
ground, where their pitiful existence ripped at our hearts and made them hard.
Even then we did not know that it
was having land, even just a little piece of it, that made us suspicious of
those who didn’t. We did not know that
it was having a warm place to lay our heads that made us fear these unsheltered
ones. We didn’t know that it was having
a place in the economy and in our communities that made us want to drive off
these displaced people, send them somewhere else. Get them out of our sight.
“Land is the source of all wealth,”
wrote Henry George, a philosopher and economist from California’s Gold Rush
days. His first book, Progress and Poverty (1879,) noted the
connection between advancing capitalism and increasing poverty, understanding
how wealthy people tied up land and made it less available to those who work on
it. Have you ever been in an audience
and heard a speaker point out the terrible contradiction that this part of the
Valley produces the most food and yet has the most hungry people? That’s Henry George’s insight written into
our economic landscape 150 years later.
The book I have been editing is a
collection of writings about this divide between the landed and the
landless. For years, fear has kept me
from finishing it, and not just fear of the largest landed interests. It is fear of you, the ones with the smallest
holdings who have the most to lose, those of us who sit so close to the margin between landed and landless that
the very thought of being pushed there makes us push back.
The question is where to push. I hope this book will help us ask it and find
some answers. In the meantime, plant
your gardens, treasure your neighbors, and keep your powder dry. There’s work to do.
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Trudy
Wischemann writes in Lindsay. Gratitude
to Manuel Mesa for leading the way in personhood.
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