Planting Seeds

I got out my old copy of The Grapes of Wrath this morning.  Something I heard on an early national newscast used the phrase "I to We." That's Steinbeck's phrase, I thought, and then later I opened my battle-scarred copy of the text to Chapter 14 and re-read the little 3-page essay that is one of the most powerful inter-chapters of this epic novel.  I say battle-scarred because my copy looks as if it survived a war.  I purposely chose an old, beat-p copy of the novel when I first began to teach it on a regular basis.  That's because I intended to mark it up, write all over it, riddle it with Post-it notes and bend every page...often.

What Steinbeck was writing about during the Great Depression of the 1930s is happening again, right now as our country grapples with the Coronavirus pandemic. This public health crisis was always political.  Just as a worker's wages, hours, and conditions have always been.  But we are experiencing a very large dose of kindness and empathy in a strange time and in a time when the country has been the most polarized.
It's Karma, some shout.  The guy that gained the oval office by dividing is watching all his numbers erode because the people are uniting.  E Pluribus Unum.  Out of many, one.  You can feel it in the air just as Steinbeck wrote over 70 years ago.  The Grapes of Wrath was banned, you know.  What better motivation for a person to read a book than to read a book someone doesn't want you to read.
So I re-read the chapter and applied it to today.  Of course, it's not a perfect fit, but like Mark Twain once said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."
I remember the class discussions about this chapter.  How it relates to the concept of Chapter 3 where a turtle slowly moves across the dry landscape and unintentionally plants a seed.  The dry castoff from some wild oat gets caught inside the turtle's shell, rides for a while, and then drops off naturally after moving from one place to another.   The "anlage of movement," Steinbeck calls it.  The potential for movement, the potential for change.

So here is something hopeful.  That we may or will never be the same after this pandemic is a good thing.  Sure it is fraught with fear and longing, but we move on, as we always have done. 
And what might that mean?  Perhaps this renewed feeling of unity might work as a deterrent for those who would still believe the ramblings of a narcissistic President who has done more to divide the country than any other before him.  Perhaps it might re-ignite the thought process that dimmed with the thinking that we are not all Americans, only the chosen few.  What was it that so threatened the power structure 75 years ago that they would have a book banned?  If people feel united then they can accomplish any goal.  Take a good look at priorities that have recently surfaced.  The people shall judge.