Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 26

Consider whether the world you inhabit belongs to you.  Portrait of a quaint suburban street.  Green manicured lawns.  Polite little houses standing in a row.  Pansies in the flower beds.  The family dog on the porch.  Children's bicycles left on the lawn, playing cards in the spokes.  And remember, it's all on lease.  A type of loan.  Costing three percent on a good year and ten plus in a bad.  Laprell Ferris, Ken Paul, Kim Gardner, Gloria Earl, Lyle and Susan Mumford may be the faces you see waving every morning, opening their garages every evening, but they are guests living in someone else's house.  If they salt the city with their own sweat for forty years, maybe, just maybe they'll get to keep it.  But if they fall behind in this dog race we call life the real owner will come home.  A tall man in a dark suit.  A cheap man.  A nickel and dime man.  A man without a face.  Without a heart.  A man nobody ever sees but by what his hands soiled in the grime of dollar bills do - which is take, and take, and take some more.  Because to you this may be a 'home', but to him it's only a commodity.  An indistinguishable good.  Something to be bought, sold and traded in open markets.  Same as corn.  Same as salt.  Same as grain, gold, beef and gas.  If his transient treatment of the American family's roots disturbs you, perhaps you'll understand why white plastic grocery sacks follow in his wake. 

 

Perhaps you'll understand why suddenly, the boys don't want to go home.