Exploring Our Duties as Citizens of Earth; Happy Anniversary to Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”

When I hit the “publish” button in a few moments, this short piece will be our 4922th post, of which I’ve written just over 4400 personally.  Roughly three-quarters pertain to some aspect of renewable energy, whether it’s a comment on some aspect of the science, the economics, or perhaps the politics that govern our energy policy and our related efforts in the direction of sustainability here on planet Earth.

The remaining one-fourth, however, offer thoughts on a wider variety of subjects—often an exploration of the duties and responsibilities we all face in our dealings with one another.  Of course, this subject is not unrelated to the one above; if we don’t care about one another, there’s really no reason to get too excited about the fact that our air is beginning to look like this.

I bring this up because today marks a milestone in terms of articulating the concept of human compassion.  According to The Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1939 that John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath was published.  Between 1936 and 1938, Steinbeck drove an old bakery truck around California’s Central Valley, visiting migrant camps and writing articles about their terrible conditions for The San Francisco News. In his first article, he wrote: ‘They are never allowed to feel at home in the communities that demand their services.’ ….

He decided that all this material was worthy of a longer book, so he furiously went to work.  (But at the end) he wrote to his agent: “This will not be a popular book,” and he tried to convince his publisher to do a smaller print run than they intended. The Grapes of Wrath was the best-selling book of 1939 and won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

In my humble opinion, there will never be a finer statement of what it’s like to be fully human.