Havemann, in the Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1983: "The percentage of households that own their own homes fell from 65.6 percent in 1980 to 64.5 at the end of 1982." Those percentages are too low in a country devoted to the defense of private ownership, and the decline is ominous. Those of us who can remember as far back as World War II do not need statistics to tell us that in the last 40 years the once plentiful small, privately-owned neighborhood groceries, pharmacies, restaurants, and other small shops and busines.ses have become an endangered species, in many places extinct. When inflation and interest rates are high, young people starting out in small businesses or on small farms must pay a good livng every year for the privilege of earning a poor one. People who are working are paying an exorbitant tribute to people who are, as they say, "letting their money work for them." The abstract value of money is preying upon and destroying the particular values that inhere in the lives of the land and of its human communities. For many years now, our officials have been bragging about the immensity of our gross national product and of the growth of our national economy, apparently without recognizing the possibility that the i:iational economy as a whole can grow. (up to a point) by depleting or destroying the small local economies within it. The displacements of millions of people over the last 40 or 50 years have, of course, been costly.· The costs aren't much talked about by apologists for our economy, and they have not been deducted from national or corporate incomes, but the costs exist nevertheless and they are not to be dismissed as intangible; to a considerable extent they have to do with the destruction and degradation of property. The decay of the "inner" parts of our cities is one of the c0sts; another is soil erosion, and other forms of land loss and land destruction; Summer 1986 RAIN Page 7 another is pollution. It may be, also, that people who do not care well for their land will not care enough about it to defend it well. It seems certain that any people who hope to be capable of national defense in the true sense--not by invading foreign lands, but by driving off invaders of its own land-must love their country with the particularizing passion with which deeply settled people have always loved, not their nation, but their homes, their daily lives and daily bread. Our great danger at present is that we have no defensive alternative to a sort of hollow patriotic passion and its The present version ofnational defense is destroying its own supports in the land and in human communities. ·inevitable expression in nuclear warheads; this is both because our people are too "mobile" to have developed strong local loyalties and strong local economies, and because the nation is thus made everywhere locally vulnerable-indefen- , sible except as a whole. Our life no longer rests broadly·. upon our land, but has become an inverted pyramid resting upon the pinpoint of a tiny, dwindling agricultural minority critically dependent upon manufactured supplies and upon credit. l · . Morever, the population as a whole is now dependent upon goods and services that are not and often cannot be produced -locally, but must be transported, often across the entire width of the continent, or from the other side of the world. Our
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz