jzim707's blog

The exclusiveness of Gramercy Park both today and in the 1930’s remains, to me, a conventional absurdity.  It struck me while reading the “New York City Guide” from the Federal Writers Project that over time, what with modernization and the shifts in ideals, a lot of different rules, laws, and “normalities” change.  However, the privacy and exclusivity of Gramercy Park has not changed in the least.  It still remains locked to the public and open only to those who receive “golden keys” (at once these keys were really golden).  This seems to me a form of small corruption, that such a nice space of oasis would be withheld from the public.  After learning about the park’s history, my belief was reaffirmed.
 
 “Gramercy Park was a marsh in 1831 when [Samuel] Ruggles drained it, laid out the green and the streets on the model of an English square and offered sixty-six lots for sale…he caught the fancy of the rich by guaranteeing with a selected group – those who bought his property – the exclusive use of a private park as a permanent privilege” (191).  To me, this has crooked motives.  I understand that it is a luxury that the rich and famous would be attracted to, but why put this luxury, so beautiful in nature, in the middle of the square for all of the city to see, only to see “a forbidding eight-foot iron fence” (191)? 
 
This still remains an issue today.  Aldon James has led over 40 people in a protest against the exclusiveness of the park, Manhattan’s only private park.  James, like the rest of us “envisions a village square, where the gates could be opened to the public for concerts and Shakespeare” (Molloy).  Why not spread the wealth?  The shady beginnings of such a desirable park can easily be reversed.  A man, Ruggles, was looking for a special opportunity to get ahead in this world, but in the process ripped off the rest of the city.  His decision has lasted 180 years.  I believe it is time for the golden keys to be redistributed.

Throughout history, we have seen ideals, lifestyles, and inventions end up as a common commodity and part of mainstream culture.  To get to this endpoint, though, these ideals, etc. must have started somewhere.  That place is called “The Subculture.”  Every way of life, whether it is a Hipster or a Goth, started as a tiny seed sown by one person who, essentially, started a revolution in culture. 
 
James Agee touches upon this concept in his work entitled “The American Roadside.”  After talking about the five characters of America (the continent, the people, the automobile, the Great American Road, and the Great American Roadside), he delves into the beginnings of each and how they evolved into mainstream culture.  He believes the automobile became “the opium of the American people” (Agee 44).  People caught on, and soon the car was part of mainstream culture and nobody questioned its validity.  He goes on to describe the same pattern happening to the tourist cabin camp, the motel, the hot dog, ice cream, and roadside stands.  Each of these started out small, and eventually became “a cash crop for America” (Agee 48).
 
This transition from nothingness and unpopularity to fame and fortune is all part of a process by which a subculture becomes incorporated into mainstream culture.  Obviously, as people traveled during the 30’s, the new inventions and lifestyles they had seen became topics of conversations amongst new friends or strangers.  To travel by word of mouth is a powerful feat, yet it happens so quickly.  The World’s Fair is a perfect example.  Things like zippers, the Ferris wheel, and Pabst Blue Ribbon all originated at the Chicago World’s Fair in the late 1800’s.  They started out as miniscule inventions, or seeds planted, and soon grew to become embraced as normalcy throughout American culture. 
 
Author Dick Hebdige touches on this concept.  He believes that subcultures are “an interference in orderly sequence that leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in media” (Hebdige, “Subculture: The Meaning of Style” page 130).  Once the ideal at hand has been sucked up by mainstream culture, Hebdige argues that that ideal has then become “frozen,” in other words, figured out by someone else: the masses of America. 
 
Agee too talks about how certain inventions have become frozen throughout history, especially in the Great Depression.  The automobile and the tourist cabin camp are both perfect examples of what Hebdige would call subcultures that have since become entirely frozen.  Frozen in time, history, and in culture.

“Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden...” -Phaedrus
 
 
Throughout “A Cool Million,” as well as much of our own personal lives today, everyday and orderly sequences are not always as they seem. 
 
In this particular novel, Nathanael West creates façades and veneers to develop his plot, and then quickly disrupts the aforementioned orderly sequence of the protagonist’s (Lem’s) life to reveal tragedy and misfortune.  For example, upon learning that his house was to be foreclosed, Lem immediately sought out Mr. “Shagpoke” Whipple, the town’s most prominent citizen and the country’s former president.  After first glance, this meeting between the two gentlemen seems to have gone smoothly: an older, shrewd man instructed a young, lost boy on how to find his fortune: “Go out into the world and win your way” (73).  Lem buys into this “fact” of Mr. Whipple’s and decides to travel to New York City to earn $1500 earnestly and honestly in order to save his home.  But what at once seemed a great option and opportunity in conversation turned into a literal nightmare once put into application.  By the end of what seems like months, Lem shamefully admits to “[leaving] Ottsville to make [his] fortune and so far [he’s] been to jail twice and lost all [his] teeth and one eye” (138).  By now, the mask has been taken off of the story, and everything has collapsed.  All because things were not as they seemed.  Fortune, indeed, turned out to be a slippery thing to ascertain.
 
This theme of life seeming to wear a mask is prevalent today, especially in politics.  I believe the movie “The Ides of March” captures this concept almost perfectly.  I do not want to spoil the film due to its recent release date, but in most basic, non-giveaway form, Ryan Gosling’s character puts on his angel wings and is Mike Morris’, the democratic candidate for the presidential election, right hand man.  Steven (Gosling’s character) is all about loyalty…until the plot unfolds.  Becoming mixed up in some dirty business, he finds himself in a position so fragile and tempest-like that earlier on in the film he could not have dreamt of such business.  This parallels Lem’s story, as his initial commencement to his saga is one of fortune, family, and dreams coming true (rainbows and butterflies, basically).  But, as his “fortune” unfolds, he comes to realize at one point in the story that New York City may appear as the land of opportunity, but it is just as corrupt as politics (no pun intended). 

To me, the entire Great Depression seems to embody the concept of false hope.  Whether it be the Joads moving to California in search of the land of milk and honey, and abruptly realizing that California had no milk and no honey, or Cass’s experiences in The American Writer and the Great Depression, false hope found its way into the lives of transients, hoboes, and bums.
 
Cass runs into one unfortunate event after another.  The problem is, though, that he cannot control each situation; they are random and happen to pick him as a victim.  For example, Cass proceeds to the “Jesus-Feeds-All” mission to get something to eat, which contained rank meat in “a yellow swill, a kind of diarrheal brown gravy” (324).  Still, it is something for his belly and he gets two cups of coffee out of it.  However, “at the door he learned that to pay for his meal he would have to chop wood in the yard for awhile” (325).  This supposed “Jesus-Feeds-All” mission wears a façade of being a Mother Teresa figure, when in fact these mission people end up making you work for your food.  Where is the fairness in that? Anyone of that time period would know that these men were malnourished; it is a shame that they had to eat just to have their hunger return after chopping wood (325).
 
The second, more blatant example of false hope occurs when Cass is running from “the bulls” in a field, and he flung himself down a reefer pit, “grabbed cold iron as he dropped, and let go with both hands.  His fall was broken.  Feet first he smashed down onto a softness” (331).  After this first part, the reader is full of a sense of relief, as Cass has escaped the corrupt cops.  But as one reads on, they will soon realize that Cass had landed on a pregnant woman, “apparently [killing] two poor reefer-bums, a woman and the child she carried” (332).  This part is gut wrenching.  The abrupt scene change from the chaos of an escape from the cop chase to a soft landing is relieving, yet then soon the reader finds out about the false hope Cass experienced; he had indeed killed two human beings. 
 
Where is the justice in all of this? Why were bums and hoboes so susceptible to tragic events out of their control?  In reality, there lays nothing but a “false dawn” on the horizon (322).  This is seen in the movie In Bruges, where Colin Farrell commits a murder, and goes to Belgium to hide in hopes of starting a new life.  But what follows is nothing but tragedy after tragedy.

“We see [the train] belch round the bend.  She is not going to stop here, that is sure. ‘She is coming round the bend,’ this kid yells.  ‘Ain’t you stiffs goin’ to nail her?’  We shake our heads. Too fast.  We know.  We can tell by the puff, and the sparks that fly from her stacks” (Kromer 120).
 
After reading “Waiting For Nothing” by Tom Kromer, what struck me most was how intelligent of a “stiff” he was.  He was a smart man: logical, always kept his head low, and practical when it came to acquiring food.  He never talked back to the police, and was smart enough to hide his money underneath his arm bandage so as not to get robbed.  In the instance mentioned above, he was smart enough not to try and catch a train while it was moving too fast, something a youngster learned the hard way.  He lived his life as a stiff for two years, and by that time he was an “old timer” on the road.  He knew the ropes. 
 
It fascinated me to learn that while on the road in the 1930’s, these men had strategies for obtaining what they wanted (e.g. food).  For example, Kromer meets a man on the road who carries nothing but chicken wire.  He explains to Kromer that by doing this, the “coppers” don’t bother him because he looks like any ordinary citizen.  This man Kromer meets also shows him a first-hand demonstration of how to ascertain money: by buying two donuts and setting one up on the sidewalk and later scrounging after it as if it were not his but just a source of food, pity befalls a group of women bystanders who all reach into their pocketbooks for this hungry stiff.  This strategy, the man said, seemed to work every time.
 
With no job, money, or place to sleep, these homeless men had to use their heads in order to survive.  “A stiff is always doing funny things…we can’t act as other people act.  We have got to do what we can” (Kromer 84).  After all, these stiffs had no purpose; they were just that: stiffs.  They traveled from place to place in search of food and “a flop,” nothing more besides work.  With this lack of purpose, a stiff was no good dead or alive.  This idea recurs throughout the book: religion (and little else besides food and a flop) does not matter to them, as they have heard it too many times in the missions and it had no effect on their lives.  Indeed, Kromer comments, “These stiffs are in this joint because they have no place to get in out of the cold, and this bastard asks them to stand up and tell what God has done for them.  I can tell him what God has done for them.  He hasn’t done a damn thing for them.  I don’t know.  It is warm in here.  It is cold outside” (Kromer 39).  Everything is about finding a warm place to rest. Whether it be an empty cellar raided by police, or a mission with a chapel that no one pays attention to, these homeless men, Kromer included, have no choice but to follow the warmth by using their heads.

What I found most captivating about Sister of the Road was the usage and reference to the term “wanderlust.” 
 
What, exactly does wanderlust mean?  I believe it is the plight of the women of the Great Depression era who wanted nothing but freedom.  To obtain this, they not only were protected on the road by local relief efforts, but they did little else but agitate on the road: “now and then one of them seemed to be just hoboing without purpose…having no place in view except some city they had heard about or liked on a previous trip” (13).  These women were literally “married to the boxcars” (198), and were always under the trance of wanderlust: the innate, inherent sense to travel and see the country.  In them “something constantly [itched] in their soul that only the road and boxcars could satisfy” (196). 
 
But why were these transient women under this trance?  Why do they leave home and go on the road? “The most frequent reason they leave is [for] economic [reasons] and that they usually come from broken or from poverty-stricken homes.”  Other reasons included their want to escape reality, to escape misery and “unpleasant surroundings” at home (13).  This want to escape reality explains the itching in their souls mentioned above and later on in the text.  The boxcars symbolized freedom: from parenting, from families, from the dullness of home.  Wanderlust took over these women, who had an advantage because “men invariably pick up a woman alone on the road” (181).  While this may seem scary to present-day hitchhikers, it was viewed, I believe, as an advantage over male hitchhikers. 
 
But why did these women shy away from their duties as a parent, a wife, or a head of a family?  I believe they needed to witness the reality of traveling, and how living on the road is a polar opposite way of living than staying rooted in one place.  Perhaps this is why wanderlust was somewhat of an epidemic amongst some transient women of the time.
 
In days where chaos brought about “the rich growing richer and more powerful and more arrogant and the bulk of the poor growing more submissive and adapting themselves by force to a lower scale of living” (182), the ironic thing is that these transient boxcar women, these fleeting souls across the country with dozens of various but inevitably similar stories, had the most freedom out of anyone.  They refused what was given to them at home; they shied away from responsibility.  In this way, the boxcar women “[were] the only ones left with a real sense of freedom in America” (182).

After reading "You Have Seen Their Faces" by Erksine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, I was amazed at how they explained (both textually and pictorially) the detriments that the sharecropping system brought about.  They precede it by talking about how the plantation system faded away, and "out of their desperation grew a new system" (4).  In short, "The plantation system was traded for the sharecropping system, and the South to its sorrow was the victim of the deal" (4).  Wealth had been turned over to the hands of the few, giving the "absentee landlord" an enormous advantage over the sharecroppers themselves. 
 
What I found particularly interesting about this photo-essay was how sharecroppers deprived millions of persons from education, a nice home, food; all of this leading into a vicious downward cycle that eventually "wrings dry the bodies and souls of men" (6).  With this type of living, I firmly agree with Caldwell when he writes "But all men, women, and children who work on tenant farms have the right to demand adequate pay for the work performed" (46).  In the meantime, as stated in the song "Holding Ground:" "Yes, the oil fields will take their place and welath will surely flow, but all those yet born will wonder where did the old life go."

 
However, there seemed to be no way out.  Everyone was dog-tired from his or her work, as well as worn down emotionally.  The only group of people that could potentially provide hope, it seemed, were the young.  Their bodies were stronger, their minds still wild in that early or middle stage of adulthood.  They were not afraid to push around people, and even more so, were fully prepared to get their way no matter how hard they may have had to fight.  "They can stand up without fear...they can look their landlords squarely in the eyes and say they will not be intimidated by threats.  They have the courage to refuse work for a landlord who cheats them" (48).  But where does this come from, this courage?  It comes from person experience.  These adults were once children, who grew up and grew to learn that the sharecropping system was inadequate, unfair, and unjust.  Seeing their mothers and fathers fail ignited a flame inside their bellies, so that they may be able to "change a hell into a living paradise" (48). 
 
Caldwell concludes his essay by once again mentioning self-respect and fear among the sharecroppers.  The Great Depression was filled with people who were down on themselves, unmotivated, depressed due to the lack of work, and furthermore, the lack of "The American Dream."  They had failed, and there was nothing they could do about it.  However, their children, ever-watching their parents being miserable, seem to be the only hope America has to "wake up and find that America has a new region to take pride in" (48), if the government decides not to step in, which clearly turned into a massive failure as well.

During the 1930’s in America, I believe that pride was a necessary characteristic to harness, especially if you were the head or part of a family.  To be prideful in such harsh times really relays one’s sense of courageousness.  However, the sad fact of the matter is that during the Great Depression, the unemployed man or woman’s pride was brushed to the side. 
 
Lorena Hickock talks about such matters in her reports on The Great Depression in “One Third of a Nation.”  In New York City in 1933, Home Relief offices were just about the only reserve you had after “you have used up all your resources and have strained the generosity of your relatives and your friends to the breaking point. Your credit is gone. You couldn’t charge a nickel’s worth at the grocery store” (Hickock 47).  At this point, it would be understandable to say that one would have experienced a lack of pride or courage.  To be consistently beaten down by uncontrollable forces that are doing nothing but working against you must do nothing but take a toll upon you.   But on top of this breaking point, Hickock talks about that awful process of actually going to the Home Relief Office in 1933.  After exhausting all resources and feeling pretty down on oneself for not being able to find work, one must join the thousands of others at this place of “Relief” and “have to tell some man at the door what you’re there for.  If you’ve got any pride, it hurts” (Hickock 47).  She then goes on to explain how tough it would be if one’s children went to the school in which the Home Relief Office was stationed: “If your children happen to attend the school where you must go to apply for relief, it just makes it that much tougher.  It’s true…you don’t use the same entrance, that the chances are against your running into them…but you don’t know that” (Hickock 47).  These overwhelming encounters with people, even though they are all in the same boat as the person going for Relief, pick away at the sense of self-respect, pride, and courage one must harness to have any faith in oneself.
 
This pattern continues today.  As Arthur Delaney explains in his article, “Long-Term Unemployment: Lost Income, Lost Friends, Loss of Self Respect,” the new Pew Research Center Survey says that “43 percent of the long-term unemployed said they lost contact with close friends, and 38 percent said they lost some self-respect” (Delaney).  When faced with hardships that are impossible to overcome, and that continue to batter one day after day, it is completely understandable and undeniable that one with any emotion would feel a nag at their courage, and overall sense of choix de vivre. 

After finishing the final chapter of “The Grapes of Wrath,” my head was swimming with ideas about the final phase of the Joads’ journey.  Particularly though, I was struck but how many similarities there are between the saga of the Joads and the homeless people of modern society.  These comparisons are more than general; I see them down to the nitty-gritty core, the very basic ones such as basic life sustainment.  The necessary lengths that homeless people go to escape the curse of homelessness have not changed from the 1930’s to 2011. 
 
As I was walking down 3rd Avenue yesterday during the afternoon, I passed a homeless man.  We’ve all seen them in the city; there are plenty of them.  But as I read his sign, “hungry & hurting, please help,” it started to dawn on me what homelessness really means.  It means you are not sure of where you are sleeping that night; it means you will probably be outside; it means you spend your days collecting change in any way possible; it means not being sure of when you are going to be eating next.  If you take the dates out of context (the early 20th century vs. the early 21st century), these activities (eating, sleeping, etc.) remain same both for a Joad family member and a homeless man on 3rd Avenue and 20th Street.  This uncertainty must be so unsettling, and more draining than I could ever imagine.  If you saw a man in the 1930’s who was HOMELESS, he would not look much different than our FRIEND from down the block yesterday.  Swap out the dog and bag for a cardboard sign and a Starbucks cup, and they are the same thing: the shear fatigue of always being on the move or not having a place to sleep is shown on both figures’ faces.  The defeat is perfectly portrayed on their faces and in their body postures.  You can see the uncertainty through this defeat, and the toll it has taken on the person in each picture.
 
As you watch the video I have included below, I would like you to reflect not only on the Joads’ journey across the United States with hundreds of thousands of other migrants, but also to focus on the similarities of the gritty homelessness that lurked about the land during the Great Depression, and how you see that about the streets of New York City, Chicago, or wherever you may be today. 

During the Joad’s journey from Oklahoma to California, the roles in the family become distinguished in terms of who gathers the necessary staples, illustrated through the example of Winfield and Ruthie always gathering water together (244).  However, from chapters 17-20, Ma emerges as an essential character that takes control of the family.
 
The first change in roles between the older men and Ma came once the family had been on the road awhile: the men “were not farm men any more, but migrant men. And the thought, the planning, the long staring silence that had gone out to the fields, went now to the roads, to the distance, to the West” (196).  Although the men established control over the car, Ma constantly held the family together.  When Granma became sick, she took to caring for her while simultaneously giving a motherly advice about living and dying to Rose of Sharon, who is preparing to have a child (210). 
 
Her strength and courage is also shown through her actions toward the policeman that visited the Joad’s tent; she advanced on him with an iron skillet while even talking some trash (214).  The uneasy feeling Ma gets sleeping next to Granma on the mattress, even after she died, corroborates this seen strength and courage.  Not many people would tolerate this, but Ma could, demonstrating her ability to be the glue that held the large makeshift family together; all other family members are amazed at her love: “John, there’s a woman so great with love – she scares me” (229).  Ma demonstrates this love by taking the reigns of the group at the agricultural security stop.  She physically demonstrates her strength, which helps us understand that this woman has a mind made of Teflon and a body made of steel.
 
Her motherly instincts come back into play when she and Tom are in the front of the car and are stopped by a policeman who prohibits the Joads from going South.  She physically restrains her son from grabbing a jack handle.  Afterwards, she praises him, like a good mother, but then proceeds to give Tom appreciation: “ ‘you done good,’ Ma said tenderly.  ‘You done jus’ good.’”  She then talks to Tom about how calm he must be with policeman, giving him advice just as she had done with Rose of Sharon.  And her control of the family is best portrayed through her knowledge of the future: “You got to have patience…Why, Tom we’re the people that live. They ain’t gonna wipe us out. Why, we’re the people – we go on” (280).
 
Ma’s overall patience, strength, courage, and love ultimately define the perfect mother during such turbulent times.  These characteristics of hers also support Robert Briffault’s theory that “all familial feeling, all group-sympathy, the essential foundation…of a social organization, is the direct product of prolonged maternal care, and does not exist apart from it,” as Warren Motley describes in his article “From Patriarchy to Matriarchy: Ma Joad’s Role in The Grapes of Wrath” (Motley 399).  Robert Briffault published a multi-volume book called Mothers in 1927.
 
In contrast to all of her strengths and movement from “mother” to “Mother In Charge,” we never actually learn Ma’s real name throughout the novel.  She represents an archetype: the “motherly mother.” 

 
 
“This you may say of man – when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes” (Steinbeck 150).  The time of the Great Depression damaged lives inconceivably.  Most people felt so far from normalcy that the ground underneath them seemed to be unreliable.  These people were “hungry for security and yet sens[ed] its disappearance from the earth” (Steinbeck 155).  What ultimately left the nation during the 1930’s was faith: faith in the land, faith within the people, and most importantly, faith within the church. 
 
The whole country was a mess.  Inevitably, the church went into the gutter with the people.  “The sperit [wasn’t] in the people much” (Steinbeck 20).  But not only that, everything seemed to have its own kind of spirit drained out of it. Cars were literally “limping along 66 like wounded things, panting and struggling” (Steinbeck 122).  Faith in life diminished.  People’s cars started to simply fall apart, piece-by-piece, and finding a new part became a nightmare with the cars salesmen who had lost all faith in their businesses, too.  Houses became deserted and dilapidated, due to the “monster” that was ordered to shove them onto their sides. It became hard to believe in anything.
 
But the flame was still ignited in some people.  Churches may have been small, even by today’s standards, but there were definitely people out there who “had the Sperit in  ‘em.” Reverend Casy, a crucial character in the book, is one of these people.  Upon meeting him, Casy seemed to be a lost preacher, who didn’t “have the call no more” (Steinbeck 20).  But by saying “no more,” he implies that he had the call at one point in time, before the devastation fell upon the country.  He corroborates this fact by reminiscing about Tom Joad’s baptism in the irrigation ditch, and how he was “fightin’ an’ yellin’” during the whole ceremony (Steinbeck 20).  You can also tell that there was once a flame of religion lit in the people of Joad’s area once we are introduced to his grandmother.  She insists on “grace fust” (before breakfast) once Joad and Reverend Casy get to Uncle John’s house in the early morning-time (Steinbeck 80).  For this reason, Casy knows that people will need him: He had a feeling that these people were going to need help no other preacher could give them.  “Hope of heaven when their lives ain’t lived? Holy Sperit when their own sperit is downcast an’ sad? They gonna need help.  They got to live before they can afford to die” (Steinbeck 52).  And thus, Reverend Casy transformed into a kind, compassionate, and soft man that became part of the Joad family from that point onward.
 
But we still see signs of the apocalypse of religious trust.  People do not count on bread at service stations; they have no faith.  The particular lack of reliance on God is shown twice; first when Ma cannot account for her life in California; when she refuses to believe in anything positive.  It also happens toward the end of chapter 16, when a stranger tells the Joads and Wilsons that his wife and two children died on their journey to California.  Immediately, Tom and Pa demand if that will be the case for them.  But Reverend Casy, the spark and hope, the positive force behind this traveling family, and ultimately the fighting cause against the death of faith, replies simply “That was the truth for him (the stranger), and encourages the pack to keep moving onward, that they may have a different experience than this particular stranger did” (Steinbeck 191).  But to move on, “where does the courage come from? Where does the terrible faith come from” (Steinbeck 122)?

The Great Depression was exactly what it looks like: Depression. For instance, the purely medical definition for Clinical Depression is precisely how the people of that era lived.  Utter loss of energy, fatigued, and just 'not being able to get out of bed in the morning' were the symptoms they felt throughout their daily lives.  Things were miserable. They were Depressing.  Consequently, it was tough to put some pep in your step when things around you were so despondent and dejected. 
 
But the American people found a way around this Depression, this disease. They had found a cure: the “anti-depressant,” if you will, and that cure lay in the land.  What surrounded them, what they lived on -this Earth- offered too much excellence and potential, that they had no choice but to believe. This was a foundation, a concrete square that was to build a tower so strong, that it could bear the most vicious of hurricanes.  If all of nature were combined, it would be too overwhelming for the naked eye.  The environment became the stimulant that would slowly rouse America from her sleep, to erase the “constant puzzle," as Anderson so eloquently stated. Nature gives us a reason, a principle, in which to believe and to have faith in. It is always there and always beckoning for hope, positive feelings, confidence, and ultimately endorphins. 
 
After all, aren’t we all the same people? Won’t this antidote to the Great Depression work on some but not on others? No. We are all connected. We have different lifestyles, sure. Ways of living differ amongst everyone: the man “pawing through trash cans downtown” or the "extravagant ones, the money-spenders." Yet we are one people and one nation that after looking in the mirror at itself, has realized that you must have a little belief.  Because by recognizing the fact that there is a collective way to say “we can,” connectivity and a sense of unity will (without difficulty) emanate from one person to the next, soon having the Earth shining like the sun.  Essentially, we are one throbbing planet with movement twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year.  How can we not be similar? And furthermore, how can nature NOT relate to this sense of unity with mankind? They are intertwined, as is everything on this planet.