The ocsar for best picture of 1941 went to a film entitled HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY. It told of the destruction of a Welsh coal-mining town due to the forces of economic greed. We see the tragedy unfold through the eyes of the youngest son of a mining family. He witnesses the loss of his brothers’ jobs to cheaper labor, the death of his father to the unsafe practices of mining, and the eventual transformation of his town from one of green beauty to a disheveled slag heap.
Had the film been produced in our time, it could not be more relevant to the decay we see in present-day America, as the dream of an egalitarian democracy which provides for all its people turns inexorably into an oligarchy of greed and power.
America’s transformation is no accident, and in this program, Dr. Porter discusses how it has been engineered and how we might yet stop the process, reverse it, and restore the greenness of our American valley. The reversal of what is an impending tragedy which will require us to understand the mutual obligations of government and citizen–not according to political or religious ideology, but according to the words of our own Constitution.
There is no discussion more important for our nation.