The tomatoes are up in their 200-cell tray. Most are crooked yet, their frail stems bent from their thrust beyond the swollen seed coat, through the sphagnum mix and into the light. If my husbanding is patient and dutiful, by July their stems will be sturdy enough to bear the red-riot fruits of summer.

Outside our rude greenhouse, the rest of ramshackle armed-camp America is being pruned of its 20th century New Deal tissue. The new class of no-class robber barons are convinced that the hard-won social gains of yore must be scuttled and delivered into private “markets” where Wall Street skimmers and insurance scammers can take their cut. It’s an old fetish.

Former President Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, was clear in his 1986, “The Triumph of Politics,” that “huge tax cuts and big defense increases” would require “storming the twin citadels of the welfare state — Social Security and Medicare.” Since huge tax cuts and funding the military-industrial complex’s murder and mayhem agenda are “the crack cocaine of American politics” this bipartisan project grinds on regardless of tawdry electoral theatrics.

Former President Bill Clinton was having the Social Security “private account” numbers generated when the scheme got derailed by Ms. Lewinsky’s bespotted blue dress. Former President Barack Obama’s pursuit of his “grand bargain” citadel demolition likewise fell short. (Obama’s presidency did, however, succeed in herding millions into overpriced and defective private health insurance “products” with public subsidies padding corporate bottom lines. Give the devil his due.)

Meanwhile, most all societal markers point down for the American public. Costs increase. Income doesn’t. We hear that eggs are becoming a luxury. The secretary of agriculture recommends subsistence flocking in response. Nobody laughs. Houses bring half a million bucks around here now, happily paid by folks who cashed-out somewhere else just ahead of the next fire or flood. Beggars wielding cardboard signs populate sidewalks and traffic islands. Deaths of despair increase, life expectancy decreases. For decades now the 1% have been ceaselessly enriched while the majority faction must do more with less.

Americans are supposed to think of all this as if it were some force-of-nature, a passing atmospheric event — unalterable by mere humans. Americans are not encouraged to look at other, more modern societies/systems of government. But every once in a while little glimmer flickers, buried below-the-fold in a failing legacy newspaper or maybe as chatty filler between the car commercials on the evening news.

On March 20, AP reported, “Finland is the happiest country in the world for the eighth year in a row, according to the (UN’s) World Happiness Report 2025 … but when it comes to decreasing happiness — or growing unhappiness — the United States has dropped to its lowest-ever position at 24, having peaked at 11th place in 2012.”

Meanwhile Israel, happy recipient of US-made GBU Gaza-busters ranks eighth. Mexico is 10th. Slovenia is 19th. U.S. media, when reporting on the ranking was careful to stress interpersonal “kindness” in lending context to the numbers. Generally the claim that “eating with others,” or returned lost wallets were the keys to happiness rather than economic well-being. Obviously, by those standards, homeless folks dining in a soup kitchen might be a jolly lot indeed.

In 2019, Finland held the presidency of the Council of the European Union. Its announced objectives were to promote the “economy of well-being” and to “improve the policy-level understanding of the fact that well-being is a prerequisite for economic growth and social and economic stability.”

By 2030, Finnish government policy seeks to “decrease inequality and narrow income gaps,” achieve “carbon neutrality by 2035,” and increase prosperity both socially and ecologically. It announced, “in a Nordic welfare state, the economy is managed for the people, not the other way round.”

Not so here. Of course, there’s some cold comfort for U.S. deep-thinkers/ talking heads in that “We’re Number 24!” and well ahead of cellar-dweller Afghanistan.

Maybe you’ve noticed some deep thinking among the chattering classes getting warmed up for July 2026 and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence’s signing. By 1776, there was an abolition movement growing in England to end chattel slavery. Ending its (“French and Indian”) war with France in 1763, the British declared land beyond the Appalachians to be off-limits to white colonists. Clearly, for American slave owners like Thomas Jefferson and western land speculators like George Washington, something had to be done.

At least 20% of the population were then enslaved, but the July Declaration-ists asserted that all men were “created equal.” They announced a new attitude toward the western “frontiers (and) the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is of undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

And the point of it all was to be, “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

So, 249 years-on, how’s that going?

Richard Rhames is a Biddeford farmer.