Berry

 I pulled Wendell Berry's "The Hidden Wound" off the shelf for another read.  Published in 1989 before Berry became our American prophet of healing, it is his meditation upon his own role, as a rural white person in the border south, in racism.  The phrase, "the hidden wound" refers to the wound we whites have given ourselves in the course of our centuries long treatment and mistreatment of the negroes in our midst.  It is, he argues, a mirror image of the wound we have inflicted upon them.

I have been bothered, as an upper midwestern farm kid and now an aging Minnesota farmer over how this applies to me.  While negroes have been scarce in my experience, I grew to adulthood among Mexicans and Americans descended from Mexicans laboring in the sugar beet fields.  Right now, down the road in the nearby dairy factories, brown skinned people milk the cows we milked formerly.  Little is heard about the harsh impact upon rural communities, mostly white, of this collectivization of agriculture.  Nothing at all is said about the effect on the people working there thousands of miles away from home.

The working of slave or underpaid and abused labor helps us separate ourselves from the strict expectations and difficult life of actually working the land, and in so doing hinders our understanding of it, putting beyond reach our availing ourselves of its blessings.  This is the wound.

Berry wants to understand his wound as completely as he can in the hopes that understanding as much as possible of it may help it to heal.  

There is another wound.  This has to do with ownership of the land.  Native wisdom tells us we cannot ever own land.  We have yet to take that in and meditate upon its meaning in our lives and for our future.