In It’s a Wonderful Life when George Bailey is shown the version of Bedford Falls that would have come to pass if he had never existed, it is a bewildering experience for him. The faces are the same, though worn and weary from their tough life under Potter’s greedy and callous misrule. Mary, George’s Bedford Falls wife, is a Pottersville librarian barely scraping by living in a dreary and dilapidated house. In Pottersville, Nick own’s Martini’s bar where he “serve(s) hard drinks…for men who want to get drunk fast.” But in the original Bedford Falls, Martini’s is a happy place where honest working men content with their lives stop in for a chance to relax in a convivial atmosphere.
The most unsettling thing about George’s interactions with residents of Potterville is their blindness to the possibility of a less shitty life. Unlike George, they are prisoners of their daily grind. They have no overhead view, so Pottersville has always been Pottersville as far as they are concerned. They don’t know that a slightly less rapacious capitalism, and a community oriented savings and loan might have made a big difference in their lives.
Similarly, the country’s better vision of itself is dimming. We are sliding into a time in Americans don’t recall what life used to be like before hatred, greedy and self-serving overthrew the more tradition values of charity, peace and cooperation. You can see it in Democrats like John Carney who thoughtlessly parrot the GOP’s mean-spirited talking points on Government spending, treating any outlay to ameliorate suffering as waste and any investment is the future as folly. You can see it on the evening news that doesn’t even bother to mention that Trump was elected on his promises to protect medicare, medicaid and social security. Worn down and weary from the daily litany of lies.
I don’t know how we turn it around. George Bailey had his kindly Clarence who set the world back on its correct axis. Maybe that’s a hint? Maybe the answer is for all of us to to serve as each other’s Clarence and remind each other that there is a Bedford Falls underneath the ugly skin of Pottersville? That’s what I’ll be trying to do. Even if our Pottersville is the reality and the Bedford Falls America of my youth was the dream. The dream is worth the effort.
