Join Murfreesboro Indivisible for movie night as we present The Grapes of Wrath at Premiere 6 Theatre in Murfreesboro at 7 pm on Tuesday May 19th. However, we can’t show the film for free. So, we are asking for donations. We would ask for $13 to support us and, hopefully, future politically relevant films.

“Who do we shoot?” is a question posed in the 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. The film was released in 1940 while we were in the midst of the Great Depression. It’s the story of sharecroppers in the midst of destruction of their way of life. They have to figure out how to deal with their changing world and learn how to survive.

The life of a sharecropper was hard. They didn’t own the land where they lived. They didn’t own the work that they did. Their schedule was dictated by other men or by nature. They subsisted solely on the whims of others. The industry was changing. Mechanization was making most of them redundant.

…but it’s the same life that many of us suffer today. During the Great Depression farming was a large business that required lots of labor. However, the tractor made a lot

of those people redundant. In the US, we’ve lost a lot of manufacturing jobs over the last fifty years. Some of us have moved to modern day sharecropping platforms like Uber and Lyft, but even those will be eliminated by Waymo. (…and Tesla if they ever figure out self-driving.)

So, the advice for the past fifty years has been to go to college, get a degree, but if you are in a position where you move numbers on a screen, artificial intelligence is coming for you.

The Grapes of Wrath also has the Dust Bowl in the background of the whole story. It shows the poor planning skills of business. Most businesses are only focused on the next quarter, the next season’s crops, or the end of this year. They ruined their farm land with poor ecological planning. We are doing poor ecological planning to create data centers for AI.

Are we planning for the people and the next twenty years? We can’t let our futures be dictated by business or machines. We have to plan for the future because as Ma Joad informs us, “We’re the people.”

Please donate $13 and join us as we watch The Grapes of Wrath. Seats are limited. We might run out of space. Donate today!

 

To purchase your tickets, follow the link in our bio!

When: Tuesday, May 19, 2026
Where: Premier 6 Theater
810 NW Broad St #200
Murfreesboro, TN 37129