BY BRUCE MACEWEN
GUEST OPINION
As I read with interest the piece by Shelley Glen on the Irving's holding the government and farmers of P.E.I. hostage, capitalizing on our government's fears and because they (Irving) believe they are indispensable, I'm reminded of the words of John Steinbeck in his 1939 masterpiece "The Grapes of Wrath" and how chillingly prophetic his words were and are.
And I quote "And the farmers arose no more in the dark to hear the sleepy birds first chittering and the morning wind around the house while they waited for the first light to go out to the dear acres. These things were lost and crops were reckoned in dollars and land was valued by principal plus interest and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought and flood were no longer little deaths within life but simple losses of money.
“And their love was thinned by money until they were no longer farmers at all, but shopkeepers of crops, manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers, no matter how clever and loving they might be with the earth and growing things; those who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. And the farms grew larger and the owners fewer and there were few farmers on the land anymore."
And it came about that owners of these large farms no longer worked on them. They farmed on paper and they forgot the smell and the feel of the land and remembered only that they owned it and what they gained and lost by it. Then such a farmer became a storekeeper and kept a store. He paid the men and sold them food and supplies and took the money back. A man might work and feed himself and when the work was done, he might find he owed money to the company. And the owners not only did not work the farms anymore, many of them had never seen the farms they owned."
Is it any different now?
- Bruce MacEwen, Charlottetown, is son of a farming family