Buongiorno, Tristezza—Good Morning, Sadness

[Photo: Snow on Jasmine by Marc Banks.]

Gaither Stewart

Editor's Note

This short story by Gaither Stewart seems to fit these times. As our energies swell with the coming spring a bleak winter of the soul seems to strike. Cold winter threatens the tender shoots with wild storms and sudden reversals. Forced back inside – by the pandemic and chaotic weather- we are forced to reflect on many things, and some are as ill-prepared for self-reflection as the world has been for the current pandemic … or the coming collapse of our climate. These reversals at the margins highlight the instability and uncertainty of change and shine a klieg light on our personal turmoils as well. Instability leaves us shaken from our moorings and we must find a new equilibrium before we once again venture into the world, venture into our lives. For clearly we are ill-prepared at this point for the transformed terrain before us.

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9 January 2016

The Wages of Whiteness is Early Death

By Paul Street

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he white working class has never had it easy in American history. It’s been viciously exploited, disrespected, deceived, divided, repressed, and otherwise and generally abused from the United States’ colonial origins through the present day. If you want to glimpse some of what I mean, read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or Harriet Arnow’s stunningly beautiful and tragic novel The Dollmaker – a harrowing tale of an Appalachian family’s migration from Kentucky to Detroit during World War II. And listen to the following passage from the great U.S. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs’ statement to a federal judge readying to sentence him for violating the Sedition Act in 1918:

“At fourteen I went to work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier day…I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.”

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Buongiorno, Tristezza—Good Morning, Sadness