Rain without thunder and lightning

Chris Hedges' & Joe Sacco's Days of Destruction, Days of Rage will stay with me.  I'm thumbing through the multitude of notes, highlights, & exclamations I've added to these pages.  When profiling Camden as a city gutted by un-checked capitalism, Hedges wrote, "Economic segregation is the new, acceptable form of segregation."  This assertion is embedded in a history of self-sufficient Black farmers in Mount Laurel, who were pushed out when the New Jersey Turnpike extended south and created a Mount Laurel exit.  Developers knew the land would be valuable so they used the weapon of code enforcement to cite farmers who had never concerned them before.  Simultaneously, Camden was being gutted of factory jobs & experiencing white flight.  The Black farmers were enticed to Camden, where there were no jobs, while the developers colonized Mount Laurel.

These histories are so crucial in understanding the rich histories & capacities of all people.  Only one or two generations ago Camden was a vital city.  It's current inhabitants also lead productive lives.  Growth, unchecked by any sense of human nor environmental well-being, displaced all but the most economically elite.

Hedges goes on to interview at length Father Doyle of Sacred Heart Church.  He said, "The immigrants who came with a shovel on their shoulder, could dig a canal.  You could walk till you turn blue with a shovel on your shoulder, and there's now job [now]."  I appreciate this reminder.  I hear a general nostalgia for a lost work ethic-- which I agree with in certain respects-- but it would be well-paired with a nostalgia for lost opportunities.

The theme among many survivors of these economic sacrifice zones is that a generation or two ago, many who were poor didn't realize it, because they weren't surrounded by what they didn't have.  Father Doyle explains that many poor today are compounded with added feelings of rage and deprivation due to the onslaught of consumerist culture.  When investigating West Virginia, anti-mountain top removal activist Larry Gibson echoes this sentiment by stating, "I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world, with nature."  It wasn't until he moved to Cincinnati that he became aware of what his family didn't have.  He still would have rathered his rural life, and the richness of access to the natural world.

From one of our many trips to the annual Woodstock Martin Luther King Day Event

The parallel looting of the natural landscape in West Virginia show the patterns of unchecked corporatism.  Hedges includes a quote from Frederick Douglass, "If there is no struggle there is no progress.  Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.  They want rain without thunder and lightning.  They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.  The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle."

I remain inspired by those who continue to struggle & those who tell their stories.