Those who waited hours in line for gasoline during the energy crisis of the 1970s may recall that close behind the annoyance one felt, there was also a sense of disbelief, even betrayal, as if some fu
ndamental law of the universe had been violated.Substitute Ore-Ida Golden fries for unleaded, and this moment feels much the same.
There’s a scene in Robin Williams’ 1984 film, ”Moscow on the Hudson,” where a group of Soviet performers visiting New York are allowed by their KGB handlers half an hour to shop at Bloomingdale’s. These citizens of dull, gray Moscow surge into the shiny temple of American capitalism — Clinique! Jordache! Calvin Klein! — like children set loose in Santa’s workshop, swarming over a rack of blue jeans the way hungry teenagers do pizza. Not even the KGB man is immune.
That scene opened in me a primal, patriotic pride. It seemed to validate every lesson I had ever learned about the exceptionalism of my country. America was a land of plenty and, therefore, a land of good.America remains a land of plenty, of course, but the present shortages are a poke in the eye to any sense of sacred national entitlement. It turns out this ability to have whatever, whenever, is fragile enough to be undone by idling trucks or an unruly virus.
Meantime, ocean levels are rising, the planet faces hundred-year floods and thousand-year droughts and, as is so often the case, the poor bear the brunt first and worst.
Maybe we should ask the good folks in Flint. Or Jackson. One suspects their responses would provide pungent commentary on the idea that being a land of plenty makes us a land of good.Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
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