Summary - Chapter 5

Another filler chapter. Oh how I love them.

This one was actually about the eviction of the tenant farmers, when the bank owners had to start sending people in to tell them that the land was being repossessed. It was kind of really sad. The farmers argued that their ancestors had died making this land theirs, and that generation after generation had been born, worked, and died on the land. The farmers made an insightful point - that things like that, putting your whole life into something - makes ownership, not papers and money.

Unfortunately, we know how this works. The bank needs money to "live", and it costs less if one tractor replaces fifteen or twenty families of sharecroppers. Of course, then, how will those families survive? I see it almost as being murder. Murder for profit. Let's destory one hundred peoples' lives so that we can give people who are already prosperous more money. That's pure genius.

... I was joking about the genius thing, if you couldn't tell. In this chapter, it also said something else insightful, though. The people - tenant, spokesperson, and tractor operator - described the bank/company as a monster created by man, but a monster which man cannot control. I'll talk more about that in the next post, but it was nice to see some unity of thought for once.

Naturally, the farmers get angry at the tractor men and the spokespeople, but I don't think they can really be blamed. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right? Still, I think there's some choice in the matter, but it's a tough decision, and not for the weak-willed. Also, this section affirmed the point that the bank wasn't men, it was a monster. The farmers wanted to kill the man doing this to them, but they realized that there was no one man to shoot. It was nobody's fault. It was the bank who was to blame, but you can't kill a bank, can you?

So, the tenant farmers' houses get torn down by tractors controlled by a man-made monster called the bank, and the farmers and their families have no where to go. This chapter was really depression, but then again, this whole book is like that. Maybe because it takes place during the Great Depression. I guess that's why they it that.