The People are Speaking

                            The People are Speaking

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/6/18 

In late spring of 1952 my mother sent me to the cotton field to fetch my older brother Durwood.  “Tell him Paul and his wife are at the train station in Jackson and he needs to go get them,” she ordered.

I was 8 years old.  The previous fall I had been required to pick cotton, but chopping cotton (thinning and weeding it with a hoe) was a skill I was just too young and small to master.  Chopping was left to 5 older sisters who were still living at home and to Durwood.

For some months we had nervously anticipated the arrival of Paul and his war bride.  After fighting Hitler and Mussolini, Paul had come home, only to later return to Europe to help clean up the ruins of war.  In Trieste, Italy he met and married Antonia Maria Krevitan.

What would she look like? How in the world would we communicate with her? What if the Army sent Paul somewhere she couldn’t go and she had to stay with us?

When Durwood arrived home with the newlyweds, we learned we were to call her Pupi, the Italian word for doll.  The youngest girl in the Krevitan family, she was their beloved doll.  We quickly learned why.  Soon Paul did have to leave without her and our Italian doll nobly dealt with and overcame Southern heat, Southern grease, and Southern English. (“Why ‘crank up’ car?” she asked. “Car no go up.”)

Pupi had been an office manager of a large company in Trieste.  She was well-versed in Italy’s history.  Her family deplored Mussolini. (“He no like small countries.  He want big empire.”)

Pupi became our teacher and inspiration.  We already had a radio, 4 newspapers, and 3 magazines.  Now we had a live voice from Europe.

Recent political events in Italy have hurled my mind to Pupi who died 12 years ago at age 90.  Her words “(Mussolini) no like small countries…” came to mind last October when two referendums were held in northern Italy.  The wealthy provinces of Lombardy and Veneto desired more autonomy from Rome.  95% of Lombardy’s voters voted in favor of “economic devolution.”  In Veneto, 98% voted yes as well.

While it’s premature to speak of the dis-unification of Italy, it’s unwise to disregard the clamor around the world for localism, separatism, and even secession.  In Spain, also last October, the region of Catalonia voted for secession.  Catalonia hasn’t yet declared independence.  One snag is that secession is illegal under Spain’s constitution.  In Italy, the nation’s 1948 constitution allows “negotiation with the central government on regional autonomy.”

And what do political developments in my sister-in-law’s homeland have to do with the United States?  For starters, nations today are such close neighbors that what happens in one seems to affect all.  Nationalism, a word often used as a put-down by globalists and corporations that benefit from globalism, is in the air.  Populism, another suspect word and movement, is spreading.

As in Europe, so in America.  Millions of voters are indicating how un-represented they feel.  The editor of “The European Conservative,” A.M. Fantini, recently wrote that free people around the world are getting smart about big, unresponsive government and are opting for localism and “little democracies.”

Eighteen months ago American voters elected a total outsider as President.  In other countries (France is one example) outsiders, who were dubbed populists because they were not the establishment, lost elections but secured large numbers of votes.  What is showing is a desire for regional autonomy and a resurrection of national pride.

Globalism and multiculturalism have been crammed down our throats.  Does it make sense to say that the less we have in common, the stronger we are?  Have multi-lingual nations thrived anywhere without constant dissension?  Can we really have a nation without borders?

If Pupi were still alive, she would speak to all of this.  I believe she would say what I heard her say more than once: “A-med-i-ca no need to be like Italy.  Politics no be about people.  It be about the Mussolini’s and the big companies.”

Fantini writes, “Regardless of Italy’s future, we are witnessing today the slow re-assertion of the small and the local over the large and the global.”  In other words, America isn’t the only nation with a swamp problem.  Around the world voters are snarly.  Around the world more and more non-politicians with no political experience are running for office.

Today populists, nationalists, and separatists are called radicals and extremists.  So were they in 1776.

Roger Hines

5/2/18