Concentrated Gloom: Abundance Year Episode 1917

Full Metal Ox Day 1852
Thursday 26, March 2026
Abundance Year Episode 1917
Noxsoma Life Camp:
Concentrated Gloom

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The Geography of Despair: Concentrated Gloom in America, 1900–2026

American history is often told as a triumphant march—a story of progress, innovation, and the expanding arc of liberty. Yet beneath this national narrative lies a darker topography: pockets of concentrated gloom where suffering was not a passing hardship but a defining, localized catastrophe. These are the moments where despair was not diffuse but gathered with terrible intensity, shaping communities, poisoning generations, and revealing truths that the national story often prefers to forget.

The 20th century had barely begun when the first shock arrived. In September 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. It was the third presidential assassination in thirty-six years, a grim pattern that plunged the nation into collective mourning and acute anxiety about the stability of the republic itself. In Philadelphia, the grief became contested ground, as civic leaders clashed over a McKinley monument—a proxy war that revealed how even shared sorrow could expose deep political fractures. The new century had opened not with fanfare, but with a bullet.

If the 1900s brought political violence, the late 1910s brought racial terror on an almost unimaginable scale. The period from 1917 to 1923 saw a wave of white supremacist pogroms across the nation, a six-year campaign of domestic terrorism that historians now recognize as one of the bloodiest episodes in American history. The Red Summer of 1919 saw massacres in Chicago, Washington D.C., and dozens of other cities. But perhaps the most concentrated gloom of all settled over rural Phillips County, Arkansas, during the Elaine Massacre. When Black sharecroppers organized for fair wages, white mobs—aided by federal troops—hunted them through swamps and canebrakes for days. An estimated two hundred men, women, and children were killed. Their bodies were left to the wilderness. A century of silence followed.

In the 1930s, the Great Depression produced a gloom so vast it became national mythology. Yet its most concentrated expression was found in the “Okie” exodus—over a million dispossessed farmers fleeing the ecological collapse of the Dust Bowl only to encounter a new kind of hell in California. Arriving destitute, they were met with hostility, slurred as “Okies,” and excluded from labor unions. In the San Joaquin Valley’s “Little Oklahomas”—makeshift shantytowns of desperation—families endured not only hunger but the humiliation of being unwanted by the very society their labor would sustain. They escaped one catastrophe only to become a despised problem in the promised land.

The postwar boom that followed World War II brought prosperity for many, but for millions of Black Americans migrating to northern and western cities, it brought a new, government-engineered form of gloom. Federal housing policies like redlining deliberately concentrated Black populations in decaying urban cores while subsidizing all-white suburbs. A Black veteran returning from war could be denied an FHA-backed home loan to move to Levittown, Pennsylvania—explicitly whites-only—while being forced into a cramped, overpriced apartment in a city center. This was not neglect but design: the deliberate creation of ghettos that isolated poverty, limited opportunity, and planted the seeds for the urban uprisings of the late 1960s.

By the 1970s and 1980s, those seeds had grown into a landscape of devastation. The collapse of manufacturing in the Rust Belt hollowed out the economic foundation of Black working-class communities just as the War on Drugs escalated into mass incarceration. In cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Gary, Indiana, concentrated gloom meant watching churches, schools, and families dismantled simultaneously by poverty and the prison system. A permanent underclass took shape, trapped in cities with no jobs and a criminal justice system poised to lock away its members for minor offenses.

If earlier despair had been urban and racialized, the 1990s and 2000s brought a quieter, more diffuse gloom to rural and small-town America. The aggressive marketing of opioid painkillers, followed by a shift to heroin and fentanyl, devastated communities across Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and New England. This was a hidden epidemic that unfolded in forgotten places, its concentrated gloom measured in overdose deaths, overwhelmed foster care systems, and the slow unraveling of family and community. It was a plague of despair that disproportionately affected white working-class communities—a death spiral often invisible to national media until it had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

The present era has brought its own forms of concentrated gloom. Declining life expectancy for the first time in a century, political violence, and the return of overt institutional cruelty mark the years from 2010 to today. The gloom here is distinguished by its intentionality—policy decisions designed to inflict suffering. From the separation of families at the border to the public vilification of vulnerable groups, this represents a form of cruelty that is not a side effect but the policy itself. The result has been widespread moral exhaustion, a sense of impasse that constitutes its own kind of concentrated despair.

Across more than a century, these pockets of gloom share a common character. They are moments when suffering is not distributed evenly across the national landscape but concentrated with terrible precision on particular places, particular communities, particular bodies. They remind us that American history is not a single story but a collection of overlapping narratives—some of triumph, some of progress, and some of enduring, concentrated despair. To remember these moments is not to deny the nation’s achievements but to insist on a fuller accounting: a history that looks unflinchingly at the geography of despair that has always existed alongside the American dream.

Keep calm. Stay positive. Your ghost chose this time to be here and you are its vehicle. Find your way through the gloom and shine. If you can’t find the way. Make the weigh. Namaste.

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