While American people are being put on a historical test, and Wall Street nimbly makes adjustments to its bet on the final answer, the nation’s capital looks quiet: there are few people on the streets in residential neighborhoods, and even George Washington University’s hospital is boarded up. The results all anxiously await however should not be read as binary – the numbers themselves are more revealing about where the nation stands today.
I fully understand and don’t blame people who are poor and have to assume a narrow focus on money in their bitter struggling for survival, but I cannot say the same for others who do so. After all, common decency is a key measure for human progress; America has come a long way since European settlers first came to this land, and the progress it has made is mostly associated with the rise of a progressive professional class.
For a postmodernism account of how things were like, you may read John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, a satirical epic of the colonization of Maryland and perhaps the best American novel. Mr. Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland and had done tremendous research for his book. If you don’t trust novels, you can take a trip to St. Mary’s City, Maryland’s first colonial settlement and capital, to gain a real perspective. White Trash, a historian’s meticulous study on the 400-year untold history of class in America, would tell you how some had been behind from the very beginning, with their lives essentially unchanged for a hundred years, but have always been an important part of national politics. And you can easily find YouTube videos showing how hillbillies fix their broken things with broken things; you’d not know how you should feel: really sad about their living conditions but also so impressed by their creativities and could not help laughing.