Froma Harrop: What moved us from the land of plenty to unease?

During a visit to one of our supermarkets, a French friend looked over a long shelf of apples. Seeing several varieties piled halfway to heaven, she remarked, “This is truly the land of plenty.” It truly is, but how, for so many of us, did it become the “land of discontent”?

Of course, our political battles require challengers to go on and on about how bad things are and how they can fix what ails. Gas prices are always too high. Violent crime is rampant, even in places that see almost none of it. So many voters buy into this dark vision, which is why politicians portray life in America as a daily struggle between good and evil.

But if you look at the millennia of human habitation — or even other parts of the world today — you’ll see societies haunted by rape and pillage, starvation, and deadly epidemics.   The Great European Famine of the 14th Century killed as much as 25% of some countries’ population. On top of that, the bubonic plague brought death to as many as 30 million Europeans.

Modern medicine can conquer diseases that no amount of wealth or power could beat in centuries past. Small pox and polio have been largely eradicated through vaccination. Tuberculosis and typhoid fever are now highly treatable with antibiotics. So many take all this for granted.

Our recent runup in egg prices, caused largely by the bird flu, was not the calamity portrayed in some media. A dozen eggs that cost $4.75 in January 2023 were down to $2.52 a year later.

Sure, the sharp drop in the inflation rate has not restored some prices hiked by past inflation. But the bottom has hardly dropped out of the American standard of living. And since the middle of last year, average wage growth has outrun inflation.

“The Next President Inherits a Remarkable Economy,” says a recent headline in The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. economy, the article declares, has been “outrunning every other major developed economy, not to mention its own historical growth rate.” Through the second quarter, the American economy grew 3%. None of the next six biggest advanced countries got over 1%.

Yet 62% of Americans in a recent poll panned the economy as “not so good” or “poor.” Donald Trump kept calling it “failing.”

Factors outside of politics drum discontent into the public’s head. Especially malign are social comparisons spread by advertising and social media. Those visions of early retirement on sailing yachts, winds blowing the right way, are hard to obtain even on a good middle-class income. And there’s that suffocating coverage of the super-rich — of Jay Z and Beyonce’s $88 million Bel-Air mansion with four swimming pools.

With more of us living isolated lives, our views distorted through social media, we are even more subject to feelings of never quite measuring up. “Inadequacy is the birthright of every American,” some smart person said.

There’s not much of a market to sell contentment with what we have — even if what we have dwarfs the rest of the world and most of history. Early in the last century, running water was not a given. Electricity was far from universal, even in the mansions of the Gilded Age. What average Americans back then wouldn’t have done for the luxury of lighting a room with the push of a switch.

So much is better now, but sadly, Americans have been spun to feel perpetually cheated, to feel they’re getting a bad deal. For so many, this land of plenty has turned into the land of discontent.

This is the month of Thanksgiving. Let’s give thanks for what we have.

Froma Harrop, a syndicated columnist, writes for the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal. Her e-mail address is [email protected].