Now and Then

It’s a trite truism that those who refuse to learn history are doomed to repeat it. We are witnessing history repeat itself right now, a century later, with it shifted a lot.
The 1920s came a couple of years after “the war to end all wars”. A twenty year war ended in 2020.
There was a deadly influenza pandemic at the beginning of the 1920s, and again in the 2020s there was another deadly pandemic from a different pathogen. During both pandemics, people wore masks.
1920 saw the corrupt Republican Harding administration. 2016 saw the Trump presidency, which would result in two impeachments and an attempted coup, worse than the Teapot Dome or other Harding scandals.
As now, after the pandemic was terrible inflation and a booming economy... for some. Harding either committed suicide, was murdered by his wife, or died of food poisoning; history is unclear. That’s a big difference, had Harding lived, the next President would have been a Democrat like it was after Trump.
Perhaps Harding’s suicide caused the great depression? Lets hope so, but in the book Saving Capitalism by Robert Reich, he points out that in all of American history, when there were huge wealth disparities like the 1920s and now, there was always a depression. Let’s hope we dodge the bullet this time and Congress comes to its senses and repairs the minimum wage, thereby repairing America. Because almost all of America’s internal problems are caused by the wealth disparity.
In 1965 when the minimum wage bought ten McDonald’s hamburgers that now cost $24.90 for the same ten burgers, one paycheck was enough to raise a small family. Only single parents needed child care.
Could the teen mental illnesses, suicides, and school shootings have been caused by two full generations brought up not by loving parents, but soulless corporate child care?
Homelessness is certainly caused by the fact that your employer is now allowed to legally steal your labor, paying you as little as $7.50 for an hour’s work. That’s robbery!
Oh, I knew of no billionaires in 1965, either. Wake up and stop voting for politicians who represent Musk and Bezos and ignore the working class. We are the 99%, it’s time to assert our numbers at the polls. If your representative has voted against raising the minimum wage, vote him out of office! It’s time for “our” representatives to represent US!