I’m reading this sub Reddit and the discussion is from the American traveler commenting that everything there, in Costa Rica, is so outrageously expensive and how do the locals afford it.

The first guy to comment says, “Rice and beans and eggs and Salsa Lizano. That’s what the poor people live on, and everyone is poor…”

The second guy says, “Salsa Lizano is sooooo good!”

The third guy says “I just ordered some on Amazon. It will be here tomorrow!”

Reading this I’m immediately taken to Dickens, and those characters from A Christmas Carol.

“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.

Then I flash to times with old Jake when I was just a young man. Jake was a twenty-year-old boy when the US entered World War One. I remember he’d sit off at the far and darkened corner of the bar. His table sat beneath a big beer sign that stuck to the window with small suction cups. No matter the season, summer or fall, if that window dripped the humid sweat or froze over with crystals of ice, Jake kept his station: day after day, month after month, and year after year.

Every so often, for reasons unknown, he’d lift his head from deep in his glass of Scotch, take an ice cube into his mouth, suck on it, spit it back in his glass and sneer at the young men trying to score. If you looked closely, you’d see the hint of a smile as he watched the young girls systematically whipsaw those young boys down to size. Jake was always an outlier. This was never his place. He had a look and an air about him that he belonged somewhere else. Not a better place or a worse place, just another place.

The songs of Southern Rock, about sweet homes in Alabama and free birds and cowboy hats, took no place in his world and were not welcome at his table. I was allowed to sit court Jakes table at times, and no particular time.

One night on his eightieth birthday, a snowy and dark evening in 1978, with his back to the bar, Jake raised a hundred-dollar bill in the air and said it was for anyone for a ride to Florida.

I had ‘67 Chevy Nova with a 283 small block, that ran pretty good, and didn’t burn too much oil and I was half sure could make the trip. Quite drunk, I took him up on the offer, thinking a hundred dollars quite a fortune at the time, not realizing I’d be paying for the gas.

It was sunrise, somewhere in the state of Virginia before I remembered I had a job I had to get back to. Jake reminded me—and he didn’t speak much—as he took a long and thoughtful sip out of a quart of Clan MacGregor we were splitting for breakfast, that some things matter more than your job.

He told me how he’d been a shitty father to all his kids, and back during the depression when he’d shovel snow for twenty cents a night, he’d come home in the morning smelling of the cold street and sweat and sitting in his stink he’d look at his hungry and shivering kids and have to tell them today wasn’t going to be eating day, but maybe tomorrow would be better, because the dollar he’d made this week had to pay for the heat.

He looked at me with the most sincere Scotch blurred eyes I’d ever seen and said “It was then, that moment, looking in my boy’s eyes, the son we are driving to bury now, that I knew I’d do anything to never see that look of hunger and despair again, even kill a man…” and he went silent and back to the bottle. I drove on to the funeral in Daytona. Jake and I were never buddies. I don’t think Jake was ever anyone’s buddy.

Later, almost into Florida, he told me, “I was in the first big war, you know. Saw some shit in France no man should ever see. That shit still wakes me at night. I think that’s why I drink so much. But I came back and got married and was doing alright until the crash came in ‘28. Then by 1930, I couldn’t even feed my fucking kids. Security and prosperity are fleeting at best, and some of us get to scratch and claw and hang onto it and some of us hang on until the nails rip out of our fingers and we fall off the cliff and never come back.

“It’s the luck of the draw, boy. That’s all it is. A warm meal, a place to wash your smell off your ass, some fresh clothes, some shoes what ain’t got a hole in the sole, it’s all the luck of the draw and it can go as quick as it comes. It ain’t because you are good or bad or blessed. It’s because you got lucky.”

I don’t know why the oblivious kids salivating over and ordering the salsa on Amazon took me back to that road trip with Jake, but it was a glaring reminder of how many people do not know how close we all live to the slippery edge Jake knew so well.

I’m pretty fortunate, I don’t recall many missed meals in my time, that fortune, largely the work of others as I have often shucked and jived my way through this life, but I’m always aware that wolf ain’t far from my door. The image of the eyes of old Jake’s kids being told “today isn’t an eating day” will never leave me.

(I cannot find who owns the rights to this photo, but I had to use it.)

I’ve always kind of had an odd thing with Rachel Maddow. Not love hate, I just can’t decide how I feel about out her. She’s very smart, but she also has a book to sell. She’s a “liberal pundit” so, sadly, no one who really needs to hear her warning words will listen. I’m more a Woody Guthrie guy. Maybe that’s just a function of age.

Rachel has her flag planted firmly in the camp on the left-hand side, and while I often lean that way myself I think this message, her message, would be better received from someone closer to the hearts of those who seem to allow the coming storm, like Nikki Haley. I’m finding myself suddenly listening to Nikki a lot these days, but I choke on her GOP Credentials, but at the same time a part of me believes we need to hear from legitimate voices from both the centrist Democrats and the moderate Republicans, then I remember I don’t trust any of them. I believe to the helixes of my DNA politicians are flat out, no damn good. Rachel isn’t a politician, at least not yet, so that is a plus for me.

If I could trust Ms. Haley on her word, I could see myself voting for her. But I don’t trust anyone running for any office on their word anymore.

I do believe the situation is dour. Rachel’s words about reaching out to friends and neighbors and estranged family didn’t paint a picture for me of ‘rise up and stand up,’ but more gathering your loved ones as the tsunami approaches, knowing we will surely all die in the wake.

I hate this. I’m old enough to have known the guys who went to fight the fascists. They went to war because they knew there wasn’t any other choice. I had an uncle who had a big American flag tattooed all across his chest. In later life, when he needed open heart surgery, he refused because it would require cutting into the flag, no lie! I’ve known and lived with guys who had a deep grasp of freedom and democracy—at least as it was sold to them. I often wonder and wish these guys were here today. I can promise you none of them would take this talk of authoritarianism lightly.

I fear if Ms Maddows’ words come to fruition, we will find ourselves soon at war. This time it may be civil war. This time we won’t have those dust bowl, depression era farm boys, with balls of steel fighting for home and hearth and mom and apple pie on our side. This time, if it happens, I fear will be an army of the easily led and mislead and a very, very different outcome.

I’ve struggled all my life with my almost genetic love of Fords. From the ‘32 Deuce, to the Shoebox ‘49–‘51 my dad loved, to standing on a sidewalk in Branchville NJ on a sunny day in April 1964 and drooling over my Uncle Harry’s ‘64 1/2 Mustang. A gorgeous deep blue, white interior convertible, four on the floor and a 289 V8 under the hood, to my own Mustang today, a twenty something year old car that I love in ways that make me question my grasp on reality. In the back of my mind, I always hear the nagging reality that Henry Ford was a fascist and an antisemite. In many ways, his Ford is no better than a Hitlermobile, but I somehow find a way to rationalize all this.

Lindbergh was a fascist and a Nazi sympathizer and an antisemite, something else we seemed to miss in school. Someway, somehow, we didn’t learn these things, or if we did, we somehow allowed it, as we cheered Lucky Lindy soaring over the Atlantic… just like we somehow allow this deadly rhetoric today.

There is nothing new or unique to our time about fascists or their beliefs.

I can’t get past the fact that Woody wrote a song about his landlord, Fred Trump. That’s a level of irony that I can’t even begin to explain.

To wrap up this mess, I think we are lucky to have people like Rachel speaking out. We need a lot more people focused on the very real and present danger of fascism. I hope her podcast and TV discussions spawn a very real and urgently needed discussion on this subject, with more Republican voices speaking up and speaking out. We need to have these discussions and we are running out of time to change the hearts and minds of those who could stop this. I know this isn’t a uniquely American issue. A lot of my readers, a majority in fact, live in other nations and they are witnessing the same madness. This spreading disease of populism and autocracy terrifies me.

Last night, I think I finally decided how I feel about Ms. Maddow. We need many, many more like her to initiate and to join in this discussion. This isn’t about conservativism vs liberalism. I’ve spent my entire life bitching about the American system and the government. I fear in the very near future I’ll learn as bad as it is and has been, something much, much worse is looming on the horizon.

We’ve got less than a year to decide if we want to live under a system of freedom, however flawed and unequal and twisted that freedom may be, or something much uglier and darker and deadly.

I’m spending some time today thinking about Woody and Ol’ Tom Joad. Like Ms. Maddow said last night, this threat doesn’t come for every generation, but it is here now for our generation to deal with. I hope we are as smart and strong as those farmers of the greatest generation…

I get it, I really do. I’ve always been working class; I’ll always be working class. If one of my books was turned into a movie or I won the lottery (both equally unlikely) I’d still work on cars and enjoy digging holes on the hottest summer day, welding stuff, banging nails. I love fixing things, improving on a design, manual labor will always satisfy something deep inside me. It’s generational. It’s defining.

I recently flew to Florida to visit my daughter and her family. I miss my daughter, and her girls and her husband. But I have to confess one of the high spots for me is always working on my son-in-law’s 1966 Ford F-100 pickup with him. This time we figured out a weird, hard running, excess fuel consumption, and low power issue. Now, according to my son-in-law, it’s never run better.

The family time and making chili for my granddaughters and reconnecting with my baby girl, and the gorgeous beaches of Florida are some reasons I need to go there, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t equally love my time with my son-in-law, and our time under the hood of that old truck.

I’m dyed in the wool working class. That truth matters to me deeply, but it’s equally part of my struggle with the world I live in. I know guys, some I consider friends, who work hard at physical labor that rivals any chain-gang. These guys can barely afford health care for themselves or their kids. Their old cars and trucks are always falling apart. They feed their kids cheap junk, and a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle would be a step up. Truthfully, the paycheck on Friday doesn’t quite make it to the following Tuesday. They always live in a hole, a deficit. I get it. Some are in their fifties and the body is betraying them. I hope they can somehow limp into retirement. Most doubt they can afford to, I doubt they can either.

I understand their anger when they see people getting food stamps and welfare and free phones. I get it when their anger rages about someone who crossed the border into Texas getting better healthcare than their shit job offers them and their kids. I get it all…

What I don’t get, what I’ll never understand or even grasp, is how these guys, eating their bologna sandwiches and drinking their discount store beer, somehow see the billionaires, the politicians as their saviors. That these multi-millionaires and billionaire politicians are out there working for them, that they have got their backs. The only reason billionaire capitalists don’t still have six-year-olds working in their factories is it became illegal to do so, and unions had a lot to do with that. The unions’ day in the sun has passed now, but that seems to be ok, because I have my favorite politician’s bumper sticker on my truck, much like I used to have my Yankees or Red Sox sticker there. They choose now to spend the days now screaming loyalty to their political team. But it ain’t your team, it’s their team. The ball team’s flag has been replaced by some politician’s flag and no one screams how goddamn dangerous that is.

This isn’t a right vs. left rant; this is a rant about the bait that dangles before us every day and has been swallowed to the hook. How we see any of them as having our backs, and that they care about you. It’s about the guy who works on his knees every day installing flooring, driving his twenty-year-old pickup who calls himself a capitalist. Dude, you ain’t. You ain’t even. But we swallow it all, and we fight amongst ourselves and have Thanksgiving Day arguments and families splinter… it’s ridiculous and appalling. There are incontrovertible facts staring at us in the face we refuse to see. Like how keeping machine guns away from crazy people or making insulin affordable so hard working taxpayers don’t die is a bridge too far, a mountain too high to climb. But boy, they got your back, yessir.

A friend of mine is a communist. A Cuban, hard-core, Marxist. He’s taught me a lot, but even he sees Communism in the hands of power and greed and money is as flawed as a system as Capitalism.

These people you see as your savior are keeping you walking in chains, and you seem to need to thank them for your shackles.

Sometimes when I look at the facade and think about what’s really going on beneath it, my heart breaks. I think the generation is here now, walking among us that will never understand the myth of our greatness, but will lead very different and more difficult and challenging lives than we have known.

I may be dyed in the wool working class, but I’ll be goddamned if I’ll ever swear allegiance or fealty to any man or institution.

Sometimes when the grandboy sleeps over he wakes with a start from a bad dream or scary thought, and he comes in by me and asks if he can sleep in our bed. I find it amusing, because while he is busy mastering his inner tough guy, he falls victim to the same 3am troubles and realities we all know. Sometimes before he goes back to sleep, he talks about what woke him. Other times the conversation carries on into the next morning. Even at not yet quite ten years old, I see his belief system starting to churn and crumble as he faces the undeniable realities that are confronting and confound him. He asks me tough questions and I fumble for answers.

The big news today is Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is Manhattan, and I realize it’s here again, my uneasy time. An uneasiness I never want to share with the boy. In every one of my books, there always seems to be a bit about this holiday. I wish I knew why. Perhaps because it simply confounds me.

My belief system came apart about the same time I realized the chimney in our little house by the swamp, connected to the vent on our oil burner and that fat man in the red suit wouldn’t survive that trip down our tiny chimney. Once these tales became lies, it opened a floodgate. The hardest lesson of the season was the caste system of Christmas, where the poor kids got socks, and the rich kids got new bikes, but we were subtly, or not so subtly, introduced to our place in the grand scheme. And the further down you went in the food chain, the faster the specter of war and a hard life of manual labor chased you. The shine and luster of childhood was quickly lost to us. But I’d been groomed for that. I’m a victim of the Superman TV era, I was weaned and raised on truth and justice and the American way, and Superman, fists on hips with the big gray S on his chest (we didn’t have color TV) screamed something to me I could never fully connect to, but I knew mom and apple pie and Chevrolet was something to die for.

I know I’m all over the place in this post, I apologize, but it all somehow fits together in my head. It’s all part of my confusion. I’m stuck by the absurdity of this season and all the stories me and the grandboy struggle with while at the same time wanting desperately to believe. I want to believe that we in the USA are always the good guys. We wear the white hats and come riding in to save the day. I try to not choke on the ugly truth that I’m part of the greatest and largest imperialist war machine the world has ever known. I want to believe in the hope and joy of the season, while little kids, younger than the boy, go to bed hungry and cold. Kids who’d be happy for that pair of socks.

My struggle and constant battle is with how much of my truth do I share with the boy? I don’t want him to see the facade I know all too well crumble to words and songs and dust. Do I let him watch with glistening eyes at the beauty and wonder of the glitzy plastic tchotchke and lights of this season, or do I tell him the economy that holds this whole story together counts on retail sales for twenty-five percent of its GDP, and then I’d have to explain GDP…

Frank Borman died this week. He was the commander of the Apollo 8 mission to the moon at Christmas 1968. I remember that moment, still on the black-and-white TV, of the grainy pictures of scruffy astronauts showing us “the good earth” and the confusion of pride at what man could accomplish while still knowing all too well, some kids I knew, just a few years my senior were being shot at in some sweaty, terrifying jungle in Vietnam killing each other, and the reason they were there and Colonial Borman was orbiting the moon was part and pieces of the same system.

After World War Two, and Bing Crosby and all the I’ll be home dreaming of a white Christmas or some such nonsense, we all drank the Kool Aide, and many of us still suffer its effects today. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t truly envious of them.

Sometimes I think we are all drowning and desperately trying to grab at the boatman’s oars before we finally go under…

This might have been a dream about the farm, again. I’m resolved that I’ll never stop dreaming of that place, now eradicated. I could have survived knowing it was sold and some other farmer’s cows were in the fields, out by the scary snake infested ponds, but it’s not like that. It’s not like anything it was now. Maybe it’s a lament for a world that I’m sure once existed. I’m told it’s dangerous to look back in time through the lens of nostalgia, and I don’t argue that, but there are some things worth the pain of missing them.

The boy runs through the frosted muck, the color of semi-sweet chocolate, frozen and swollen up so the ice has been forced out the top of each dollop, and crunches under his boots. He whips and whirls his way through a suddenly dense thicket. Brambles and thorns cut into the skin, and slap his face as he tries to outrun the enveloping darkness.

October has slammed closed like a great wooden door on summer and the failing light and cold of November bites with a bitter wind. He runs faster, but his destination continues to pull away, until at last he crests the big hill and sees the light glowing over the edge.

Breathless and writhing and finally over the top, the boy’s feet slipping on the frozen snow dusting, he falls. Dropping to the ground in an icy belly flop, pillars of dancing flame reach up near the stars and outwash the moonlight.

Face down and hiding in the weeds and frozen muck, he sees it all engulfed, but not consumed, just perpetually burning. The barn and the old farmhouse and the toolshed howl in the darkness, releasing the souls and memories trapped within its walls and the searing heat burns his face.

Powerless and hopeless, he watched it all burn. The rage of the fire changes, perhaps fed by the wind or far too many recollections. The souls that called this place home are freed and before his eyes it all collapses into rubble and ruin and the monster fire, no longer content to tease, consumes it all to the last stick and nail and abandoned cup and old shoe left in that mudroom off the kitchen.

He watched it burn with a young boy’s eyes, and an old man’s aching heart and he fell asleep in the frost and the mire and when he woke, he looked around and it was as if it had never existed it all.

And the boy lost sight of his ground and station and place. Not homeless, but without a home, he never woke again.