Platteville

     I stood by the second floor window of the motel room just outside Platteville, WI looking across the highway at the WalMart and the Menards nestled side by side.  It would be difficult to name two other corporations that have been more destructive of small town America, this by destroying the respect for labor, among other things.  I could imagine the hopelessness of the public meetings before these buildings were built, similar to the uselessness of the public hearings ahead of the imposition of Big Milk within two miles of my farm. 
     I don't mean to argue against hearings and public meetings, for they are important institutions in our democracy.  It just seems increasingly evident that much of the change in us that makes these huge concerns possible has already been done before the meeting.  We have decided against supporting each other and putting our shoulders together to demand what we need, and rather, in favor of an individual and differentiated "success".  Now it seems we shall have neither and what is left to us is a kind of curdled hopeless individualism, the kind that puts a Trump in the White House.
     We chose not to superintend the government and keep it from curtailing rights of labor, we chose to move away from our urban problems rather than solve them, we chose to focus on size rather than quality in agriculture.  Even today we choose to not worry much about our erosion of voting rights or our rapidly eroding and desertifying soil or our exploding prison population or our denatured food. 
     After all, we have instead retained the right to criticize a WalMart or Menard's worker using food stamps in the grocery store in the nastiest terms available, while wondering what is the matter with our local downtowns and lumberyards.  When we look at a WalMart or a Menards or a Home Depot or any of the rest of them, or Big Milk, for that matter, there is a sense in which we are looking at our own mental furniture, acquired and installed since FDR.  Poor stuff.  Hardly fit to sit on.  Fit for serfs, not free men and women.