"When Tomorrow Comes..."

I have a modest collection of books, magazines and pamphlets published during and in the aftermath of WWII. I think they are better windows into US society as it was back then than most of the movies that were made during and immediately after the War. 

To hear lots of us gabbing these days or to see and read the posts on social media, you'd think we are living in the Worst of Times and Doom is on the perpetual horizon, but you'd be wrong.

The thing that is most striking to me about the material from the War years and immediately after was the overall positivity and futurism it featured. Yes, things were bad, life was tough, conditions were harsh, and yet... "When Tomorrow comes..." ran many refrains, so much of what people were suffering through during the War and prior to it during the Great Depression would be gone, poof, as if it never was. "When Tomorrow comes..." Life would be better -- for everyone. Friends and current enemies alike. We knew how to fix things so that the world would not descend into this kind of madness again -- and the War was definitely considered madness, something deranged and unnatural, but something that had to be done and had to be won, and we (the Allies -- aka United Nations) would do it come hell or high water or both at once. 

We might be sacrificing now, but it was for the right reasons, and the hardship Americans were experiencing was light, nothing compared to the Brits, the French, the Belgians, or bless them, the Soviets. The US might be rationing meat and butter, but at least there was meat and butter. Tires and new cars might be unavailable, but there were still rattle trap jalopys to be had, and if you were handy with tools and didn't drive very much (which you couldn't do anyway due to gas rationing) you could keep it running indefinitely. Same with your newer car if you had one. If you got a blow out, you fixed it. If your tires were bald, you were careful. Etc.

People lived rough in many cases, families confined to tiny trailers, tarpaper barracks or shacks, rooming houses that once were mansions, or doubled-tripled-quadrupled up in city apartments in buildings that were falling apart and for which there was practically no maintenance available due to lack of materials and supplies.

People made do.

Jobs were plentiful, there was that, and everyone who could was either working or in the military. One thing you couldn't help but notice is that private companies -- many of them the same multinationals of today - - were the bulwark of the War effort. They manufactured and supplied everything to the military and the civilian markets. And they were fiercely regulated by government. 

At the time, people made jokes about some of the regulations -- they seemed absurd or were impossible to meet -- but they appreciated that tight leashes were kept on the corporate overlords of the day.

Those leashes have been loosened to such an extent that there is no longer any but the most tenuous "public interest" -- only corporate interest, and particularly finance interest,  in the current political economy. 

And there is no futurism or even any concept of a Future to dream of and aim for and realize.

"When tomorrow comes...?"

What if there is no tomorrow?