I am listening to The
Jungle by Upton Sinclair these days narrated by Casey Affleck whose
performance is strong, clear, and very moving. I obviously don’t agree with the
customer reviews on audible.com in which Affleck’s performance has been called anywhere
from “underwhelming” to “poor.”
It is a brave thing I do, playing this book every morning
when the sky is still fractured with tinges of gray and orange and if I listen
carefully, I can hear birds chirping somewhere just out of sight. Deciding
then, when I should be celebrating every vestige of peace, to be transported
into the bitter winters of poverty, hunger, disease, and suffering in early
1900s Chicago stockyards takes courage. It
is also easy to do - cocooned as I am in my car with the heater on, the January
sun slumbering on until well past 7AM in the unusually warm California winter
that allows me to not even reach for a pea-coat when I get out of my car to walk
to the office building.
I have read some articles on how this book has made others
feel. The horrors of the meatpacking industry laid bare by Upton Sinclair have
the power of turning an attentive reader into a vegetarian for life. Shock,
disbelief, sadness, disgust, compassion – I am sure readers have felt all this
and more for the characters in the book. And I, too, feel all that, but I also
feel gratitude. I am grateful to be born in a time when it is important to
people to live well and learn what kind of food they are eating. I am grateful
that I have had a very different (positive) experience as an immigrant compared
to the characters in the book. I am grateful for having an education and to
have had the opportunity to choose what
to do with my life rather than being a passive spectator of its passing.
There are corruption and discrimination and oppression still
in the world, but I am grateful that there is at least some degree of
accountability, too, disproportionately present, but there.
There are suffering and poverty and hunger still in the
world, but I am grateful that there is a more crisp awareness of all these
deprivations, so at least there can be a stronger hope for help to come.
As I continue to read the book, about the squalor and starvation
and lack of humanity, I choose to think that this wouldn’t be possible now. I
am fooling myself - I know that. The conditions mentioned in the book still
thrive, perhaps not in the meatpacking plants, perhaps not in Chicago or in the
United States, but in sweatshops and factories all over the world and…I have to
mention this…war-zones. I choose to be grateful because I should be. I have seen
no despair in my life, not real despair anyway. And when I park my car and
pause the book, my jaw is set. I walk out of my comfortable car my heels click-clacking
on the asphalt of the parking lot, and I enter my centrally heated office with
its large glass windows overlooking a beautiful patio with comfortable chairs
and round picnic tables. I choose to be grateful for all this because I have
good reason to be, along with the ability to walk away from the book, the
impulse to nurse the notion, “Surely this doesn’t happen now.” This, I tell
myself, was a long time ago. Those were other people. And what do I know? The winter is never bitter here in the Golden State.