John Steinbeck On Yesterday’s Election Results: From “I” To “We”

Posted on | November 4, 2009 | Comments Off on John Steinbeck On Yesterday’s Election Results: From “I” To “We”

Yesterday we had a few elections – mixed results. Leave it to cable and cable listeners to sift through it, interpret it. Choose your channel, and it’ll give you the answer you’re looking for. But if you want an eye opener, some critical analysis, I suggest Steinbeck, who in reflecting on the great westward migration in the middle of the Depression, with “a half a million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness”, had this to say:

“One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here “I lost my land” is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate – ‘We lost our land.’ The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first ‘we” there grows a still more dangerous thing: ‘I have a little food’ plus ‘I have none.’ If from this problem the sum is ‘We have a little food,’ the thing is on its way, the movement has direction…..This is the beginning – from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ ”

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath (1939) p148