Whose Names Are Unknown

I've been thinking about this book off and on since I read it - it's the first book I've read in a very long time that made me WANT to write a paper about it. The themes are still very relevant, and parallels and contrasts to society's problems today would make for an interesting topic for a Lit Class. I had to return the book since it was an interlibrary loan, so I won't be able to go into as much detail as I would like, but I need to write about how this book affected me.

I learned about this book watching Ken Burns' documentary "The Dust Bowl" (which is also excellent, of course). It was written about the same time as Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, but since he got his book published first, Sanora Babb's book was put on the shelf because "there wasn't enough room in the market for two books on the same subject (paraphrased)." It wasn't published until 2004, which is a great tragedy, because it is a much more readable novel. Babb had first-hand experience growing up in Oklahoma and subsequently followed the exodus of farmers to California and migratory farm work there.

The first thing that struck me was the optimism of farmers. Growing up on a farm myself, I know a little bit about placing your livelihood on the whims of the weather. So many things have to go right to get a good crop, and so many things can go wrong. Even when things went wrong year after year, "next year things will be better" was the inevitable response. You hear sometimes about "connection to the land" and thinking about the way I grew up and the way I live now, I know the difference. There's just something *satisfying* about doing for yourself, and I didn't realize how much I had missed that until we did some canning this last summer. Eating something you grew and harvested and stored yourself is so much different from something you bought in the store.

This book also made me think about the social safety nets that were created in this era and why. Before social security, if you had not been able to put anything aside for old age, you had nothing. There was no such thing as retirement. If you had several bad years in a row, the bank took your farm and you had nothing to live on, no subsidized housing, no welfare, no unemployment. We as a society are so far removed from the consequences of not having these programs, I think we've taken for granted the good they do. I believe that those that want to roll back the New Deal sometimes forget that there are human beings behind these programs, much of the time through no fault of their own.

Today's problems are the same problems as yesterday's, only in a different form. People want to do for themselves - we are hard wired to want to be self-sufficient and successful. Sometimes our mistakes catch up with us, and the only way we overcome them is with other people's help. Stronger together. That hasn't changed, either.