Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

And the Big Fool Said to Push On

(Pete Seeger, 1967)

Don't Follow Leaders, Watch the Parking Meters

(Bob Dylan, 1965)

Once again it seems like the country is getting ready to run off a cliff. There's a lot going on right now, but I'm thinking particularly of the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, and wondering how we change course on gun control.

One hard lesson I learned in the 1960s is that there is no magic light switch that can make everything all right. I wish there were. Just flip the switch, and we're okay. It's a nice dream.

The world is different. Lyndon Johnson busted his pick in Vietnam, and he knew it, and he quit. And many people, including me, thought the war would soon be over. In fact, the war went on for seven more years. And we lost. We got kicked out of the country after eleven years of fighting. Our experience in Afghanistan pales in comparison. Thank you, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (the latter still alive, and still offering advice to the powerful).

Our army came home, exhausted and demoralized. Just like the rest of the country. 

I stopped trusting the government in 1968. There is a long-term cost for misgovernment.

Meanwhile, the gun people really do think they can keep going right along. They have the example before them of the car industry, which early in the last century created a transportation system focused on the private car. This system has inevitably, because of its design, destroyed thousands of people every year.

More than half a century after the introduction of the Model T Ford in 1908, the government finally stepped in to try to improve the situation. And things are now measurably better.

However, roads are still designed to encourage cars to go fast. Without speed, the whole design fails, leaving you with nothing but traffic jams. The problem is insoluble with a system so reliant on the private automobile. Time for a balanced, multimodal transportation system? Dream on.

The rich are reluctant to give up their lucrative gigs. But it's not just about power and congressmen for sale. And it's not just about elite manipulation of the rest of us. We live in a rich society, and many of us are quite comfortable with the way things are. Until something happens to us.

By and large, people who have cars like them. They may not like the commute, but they like their cars. People who own guns seem to like them, and even sometimes fetishize them. Smokers appear to like their cigarettes, and it is hard to quit. I know.  

The rich need their superyachts. And they don't care if the "little people" die. The little people are you and me.

I'll close with the title of a 1932 novel by the German writer Hans Fallada: 

Little Man, What Now?

See also Angry and Ridiculous, What a Cold Civil War Feels Like, Hans Fallada and the White-Collar Proletariat, Do You Want to Be President the Day the Country Falls Apart?