Harry Truman Reminds and Exhorts

In Dexter, Iowa, on the campaign trail Truman had this to say:

You remember the big boom and the great crash of 1929.  You remember that in 1932 the position of the farmer had become so desperate that there was actual violence in many farming communities.  You remember that insurance companies and banks took over much of the land of small, independent farmers -- 220,000 farmers lost their farms....
I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head before you find out who's hitting you?
The Democratic Party represents the people.  It is pledged to work for agriculture....The Democratic Party puts human rights and human welfare first....These Republican gluttons of privilege are cold men.  They are cunning men....They want a return of the Wall Street economic dictatorship.   

There is much to be said by way of commenting on this excerpt.  But who can deny that our situation in 2014, though different, certainly, in technological and other respects, is not so different in the basics?  We have had actual racial violence in Benton Harbor and Ferguson.   We have had banks and insurance companies putting families out of their homes.  And there has been much more -- an increase in hunger, stagnation of wages, jobs moved over-seas, corporate inversions whereby these outfits refuse to pay taxes to America.  The list goes on and on.

How long, indeed, do we need to be hit over the head before we do the right thing and rise up in mass to vote out the Republican gluttons of privilege and their Congressional henchmen?

Let's make next Tuesday and the days leading up to it, the beginning of a new arousal of conscience.  Let's make this a new period of moral activism, combining the personal ethics of Theodore Roosevelt with the social ethics of Harry Truman. Let's get out there and get the job  done.