Meet Tom Joad
The voice for our way into the future is buried deep in our past
Have you met Tom Joad? Why don’t more folks know Tom Joad?
Before Springsteen gave him music, Rage Against the Machine gave him anger (always there but amped up with the one-two punch of Zach’s growling voice and Morello’s driving guitar.) Mumford and Sons picked and grinned with Elvis Costello to form a haunting vision of the man; John Steinbeck gave us what should have become America’s moral guidepost.
While many have long believed that Jim Casy embodied Steinbeck's main philosophical beliefs, Tom Joad, completely flawed and human, is the novel's main character. Tom is the character who shows the most development, experiencing what Peter Lisca calls an "education of the heart." This education, gained through experience, intuition, and the teachings of Jim Casy, best exemplifies the moral journey from self to community, from "I" to "we." Tom moves from caring only for himself to a familial loyalty to seeing the entire world as his family. Cliff Notes
I could probably spend hours giving voice to the already well-known idea that we just don’t read enough in today’s smart phone addicted world. A broad lack of knowing who Tom Joad is, tracks, at least for me, as one of the reasons that lack of reading should be considered criminal. I’ve been out of high school for a very long time, I couldn’t tell you if juniors or seniors read “The Grapes of Wrath” anymore but we did in my time (I graduated in 1992) and even then, we really didn’t spend much time on Tom’s journey and what that could mean for America as a society and culture.
Sure, we scratched the surface of the plight of the poor during the depression and the question of fairness but we didn’t really dig into Tom’s journey from the rugged individual (Hello American Mythos) to that of card carrying socialist focused on the greater good of the whole community.
Having, at the time, only read the required reading, I was unaware of Steinbeck’s political polemic between story chapters, polemic that informed the story narrative, set the stage for the feeling of a family forced out of their Oklahoma farm by the banks and other issues of the time. I was shocked sometime later reading “The Grapes of Wrath” in adulthood that I realized how dangerous those words could be and it dawned on me – “no shit they don’t include this at the high school level.” Can you imagine a group of impressionable high school students suddenly activated by scenes of kerosene poured on oranges while folks starved?!
“Migrants drive to pick up discarded fruit, but men are dispatched to spray the fruit with kerosene and burn it. Children die of malnutrition while good food rots, all in order to inflate prices. “In the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
Well, given how most of us just walk past (and that’s the least harmful thing we do) the plight of the homeless, maybe I’m overly optimistic. That said, I can’t help but feel that there was some sort of meeting between the powers that be that ultimately concluded that such teaching of the Steinbeck in-betweens would be verboten! We can’t have that, we need the plebes to hold on to this sense of rugged individual, to get out there and consume, shop baby shop! Occasionally you would stumble upon that subversive English teacher (and boy howdy, back in my day with the exception of one, all of my subversive teachers were the English teachers, god love ‘em!) who would push you to think about it deeper, read that one forbidden chapter.
If, as noted by nearly all reputable climate scientist we’ve overshot the planets resources by insanely wide margins, its time to dust this one off and maybe relearn what it means to be a vigilante for community.
And that’s where I’m going with this. More Tom Joad less Kim Kardashian is what this world needs.
If we view Tom’s journey as a spectrum that goes from the individual to the family to the whole, then perhaps, with much grace, we can look at the doomsday preppers as firmly planted in the family phase of Joad’s journey. A year’s worth of food in a dug-out bunker with enough ammunition to start World War III MAY ensure your family will survive, but what is the end game? Do you really want to be the last humans on Earth? No, we need to all be moving toward Tom’s final outcome – the whole of humanity.
But let’s not start there. Let’s pull back and just look around us to our near-immediate sphere. We can’t have a full-scale revolution until we’ve secured our local networks, made them supportive and resilient. That looks different for every single one of us and we should be embracing that, allowing our individual strengths to forge us into a stronger community.
As we internalize the journey of Tom Joad, let us do the same for that of another great thinker who also had to come to their final thoughts through a fraught journey. One whose philosophy I’ve taken into my core and will write about as well--Aldo Leopold.
'A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.'