I got bounced from one number to another—but then you know the feeling.

I put down the telephone seething with anger, and then it occurred to me that besides raising my already too high blood pressure, my experience only underlined what so many Americans face today—a feeling of helplessness.

We are all at the mercy of many things these days: machines and systems that don't work, a city hall that won't listen, legislators who seem uninterested in what we consider important, a medical care system that seems broken and unfixable, automobile traffic that never abates and television programs that grow steadily more stupid and pointless.

Why is this so? Has our world changed that much?

Maybe it has; maybe it hasn't. I think back to the time of my uncles. All were farmers. They called themselves ranchers, but they were all really small farmers. Each of them farmed not more than a hundred acres. Most of the work they did themselves, although sometimes families joined together at harvest time to lessen the need for labor. They thought of themselves as independent, Thomas Jefferson's yeomen, free thinkers, beholden to no one.

It was, of course, an illusion. They had no control over the weather, the bounty or lack thereof of their annual harvest. They could do almost nothing to affect the price of what they sold. Each of them had too small a part of the market.

They could dry and store what they harvested for a year at most, and sometimes they did this, hoping that next year the price would go up. It seldom did.

Usually they were mortgaged to the hilt to get themselves through the lean years. In the depths of the Depression one of them lost his ranch to the bank. It foreclosed because he could not pay back his loan.

Neither he nor my other uncles ever starved, of course, because they always grew enough to feed themselves and their families. But, although all their lives they worked hard, none of them ever got rich, and all of them died without being able to give their children anything but the land they had once farmed.

In time their children, unwilling to grow crops, sold the land, and it was covered with houses. The farms became cities.

Since they have passed on, things have gotten worse. Agribusiness has mushroomed. The land is tilled not by yeomen but by corporations, often with foreign labor.

Increasingly the corporations that bought the small, family-owned factories have merged into larger and larger conglomerates.

If corporations are faceless and impersonal, conglomerates are omnipotent and godlike. More and more they have gone overseas to find cheaper and cheaper labor. America has become a so-called service nation. It does not deal in products so much as it deals in services. There has evolved a difference as sudden and subtle as that which removed all my uncles from the land and moved them into towns and cities.

There they found they did not belong. Their world had suddenly vanished, leaving them alone, isolated.

Somehow the same thing has happened to the American body politic. Somehow the intimate relationship we once had with the towns in which we lived and with those we elected to run them has disappeared. It's not so much that we can't fight city hall. Now we are not sure where it is.

And those we elect to national office somehow seem as distantly located as the labor force that makes our shoes, our electronic devices, our clothing and even our food. Politics in the United States, like economics, has come to be operated on the theorem that bigness is next to goodness. It takes or seems to take enormous amounts of money to be elected to anything: Congress, state offices, the presidency.

Lawmakers often seem less concerned with passing laws than in raising money. Globalization affects us all, but in an inverse way. As the world grows increasingly smaller and smaller, our control of it seems to lessen. Writing letters to our representatives or to newspapers makes less and less of an impression on the body politic. Even though we are constantly reminded that we are the world's only remaining superpower, we are launched into shooting warfare against at least some of our wishes, trying to end a dictatorship about which we knew almost nothing.

So from where we live to where we rule, we seem to act or be acted upon without our consent or understanding.

Just as my uncles could control neither the weather nor the crops they harvested or the market in which they tried to sell their produce, so do we seem to be at the mercy of forces greater than ourselves.

How we regain control over our world is, I think, going to be the dominant issue of this century.