Chapters 19 and 20 – Dave’s Responses to Some of
Your Observations and Insights
There is no way to reply to every one of your posts on an individual
basis. I sort of thought there was before I taught an online class, but
when I projected the time involved, and then I multiplied that times
three (the number of classes I’ll be teaching online this fall), I realized
it sounded like a recipe for a mental breakdown, not to mention
rampant carpal tunnel syndrome from clicking my fool head o,…yeah,
meaning no, NO, not happening.
So instead, I’m going to close out every few chapters with a sort of
summing up of your comments, thoughts, insights, observations, and
etcs, and then, if you think there was something interesting in what I
had to say, you can perhaps bring it to bear on one of your future
posts. I covered this is the Syllabus, but just reminding you of it. This
allows me to /ex my intellectual muscles a bit, and also lets me
channel the energy that usually /ows through me on The Stage of
History in the classroom into these hallowed halls of cyber-academe.
Free /owing, relaxed, conversational, more bloggy (hey, did I just
conjugate a new word?), and less lecturey (no, this one will never catch
on).
* * * * *
You all seem to be fairly shocked by the information on the living
conditions in the cities of this era. Pretty grim stu,, huh? Let me make
it more grim for you. In big cities like Chicago, New York, Boston,
Cleveland, etc, there were entrepreneurial cats that would go to the
garbage dumps to make some easy money. Old garbage dumps were
always started in areas where there was a natural depression in the
ground, a big hole, or low area, and always on the outskirts of town.
The garbage would pile up and pile up into what were quite literally
hills of ten, :fteen, twenty feet in height, and then in the rainy season,
they would become islands of trash in Lake Toxic Waste, and
neighborhood kids would make rafts and paddle around and search for
treasures…not so strange as they always played in the dumps,
anyway, now they just got wet and cold doing it. The aforementioned
entrepreneurs would go with a wagon full of sawdust when the water
had frozen over, and they would cut blocks of ice out of it, and drag it
across town and sell it to folks for use in their iceboxes. Ice, filled with
the curdled and microbial essences of not just “trash,” per se, but all
human waste products (translation: all of the stu, that comes out of
your bodily ori:ces and usually goes into the sink or toilet, went to the
garbage dumps, out of buckets people kept in their rooms because the
community toilets in the tenements usually didn’t work too well), as
well as the decaying corpses of dead cats, rats, dogs, lots and lots of
insects, and even horses…and OK, so the ice was a little
yellow/brown…it was ice, you couldn’t be picky, and people wanted ice
at times. And so they bought it. And made lemonade and iced tea and
cocktails, maybe even fruit smoothies (a little too much texture, maybe
but OK) drank ‘em right down, and…yeah.
OK, you back from being sick yet? I always say, scratch an American
and you’ll :nd an entrepreneur just waiting to happen – Americans
know how to make a buck, and lots of the time they’re not shy about
how they do it.
Happily, the Progressives came along and helped to bring an end to
these sorts of public health hazards. Or did they – ?
* * * * *
In the late 1990s, American businesses operating in Mexico began to
build maquiladoras in Mexico’s northern states, snuggled right up to
the U.S. border. Maquiladoras, for those of you who don’t know, are
factories that operate in Mexico in order to take advantage of cheap
labor and a near-total lack of regulations of all sorts of things that,
when unregulated, make businesses more pro:table. It’s great to do
business in a country where you don’t have strong unions, can pay
