The Sacred Ideal Of A Perfect Economy

The sacred ideal of a perfect economy is one of the greatest misconceptions of the current world. Everyone is taught and led to believe that if they work hard enough that they will receive what they are aiming for. Sadfully, this isn’t usually the case. Just as Thomas Carlyle said “A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.” A person can dream for something with the greatest desires known in the world yet the power to make it happen is not always in the hands of those that plan to help the world. Even those who succeed sometimes come to the conclusion that their previous desires were futile in the relatively insignificant essence that is society as a whole.

They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so.”(41) A similar situation arises in California created by the greed of the landowners. They are able to control not only the economy but also an entire way of life for millions of poor living in that beautiful state. Out of the millions that live in California, only a relative few own the land and thus control everything. It is through their wealth that they are capable of protecting and increasing their wealth and similarly their power. “If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we."(194) These landowners own millions of acres yet retain little satisfaction for the beautiful land. Contrarily millions of farmers are left with nothing to survive on. These farmers who actually love the land don’t desire to use it to get rich, but are still forced to give up the only thing they care about to wealth obsessed

There is a combination of these two forces, where there is an understanding and care for one another, but a fear of what others will do for themselves and the goal of wealth. And that is the case of Al and Mae at their diner. Al is quiet yet comes across as generous based off his initial response to the man asking for ten cents of bread off a fifteen cent loaf. Mae was giving the man a hard time for only buying their bread. But Al steps in and says “Goddamn it, Mae. Give ‘em the loaf.” (205) Though his kindness for others is not generic. He gets his money back by keeping tabs on his slot machine and plays it each time it gets close to winning, thus, always winning his own jackpot. This does not necessarily make him the bad guy, he understands that only the wealthy will play machine and therefore is not stealing any possible wealth from the poor. Mae on the other hand is visibly distrustful of the travelers but instinctively wants to care for them. She hounds the guy for trying to buy cheap bread. But when she sees his boys it’s different. “They went immediately to the candy case and stared in-not with craving or with hope or even with desire, but just with a kind of wonder that such things could be.” (205) She sees what these boys are missing out on and goes out of her way to charge almost nothing for the candy. It’s insignificant scenes like this that can help others so