The Trackers

by Charles Frazier

Some days those past few years, I felt a sliver of hope that the country could scrabble its way out of the hole we’d found ourselves in, hope that if we actually tried to make life better for folks who’d been ignored or trampled on for so long, we might even come out better than we’d been before.

After all, the ultimate expression of capitalism is not Democracy. It’s a dictatorship not of individual men but of corporations with interchangeable leaders. I wasn’t sure if the Depression was straining the structural limits of our Constitution or simply revealing that its fundamental ideas were faulty. Those revolutionaries of old had left so much space in their documents, so much fog and vagueness. Like scribing a draft and getting a laugh imagining people in the future trying to figure out what in hell they meant.

According to the wealthy, if we let those dreams become reality, we’d end up with some nightmare of egalitarianism that would drag the handful who run the country down to some frightening level of mediocrity, which was not what they believe our founders in their gray wigs had in mind.

After all, the nation’s big, beautiful strength had always been dreaming forward against the brutal, ugly undertow of reality, the violence in the heart of the human animal, the gluttony and greed.

Seems like about every system we’ve thought up contains enough loopholes for greed and self-interest to sneak in and spread like weeds.