cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/54239937
During the Great Depression, when banks foreclosed on farms, neighbors often showed up at the auctions together.
They’d bid only a few cents, and return the land to the family that lost it. Sometimes a noose hung nearby as a warning to outsiders not to profit from someone else’s ruin.
It was rough, but it worked, communities protected each other when the system wouldn’t.
If a collapse like that happened today, do you think people would still stand together or has that kind of solidarity disappeared? Could it happen again?
No, because farmers knew each other back then and it was a society transitioning from agrarian to fully industrial. Different values.
They also had a connection to reality that we don’t have, they used their hands directly on physical objects, we all think we’re Johnny Mnemonic (ever see those stupid SAS vaiya or whatever ads?).