During the Great Depression, when banks foreclosed on farms, neighbors often showed up at the auctions together.
They’d bid only a few cents, and return the land to the family that lost it. Sometimes a noose hung nearby as a warning to outsiders not to profit from someone else’s ruin.
It was rough, but it worked, communities protected each other when the system wouldn’t.
If a collapse like that happened today, do you think people would still stand together or has that kind of solidarity disappeared? Could it happen again?
Everything is a lot more urban now, which is a big thing that would get in the way. A farmer in the great depression would have been seeing and getting to know their neighbors a damn lot, and outsiders couldn’t exactly take a rip out on a highway to bid, either.