Difficult hope

Example of a column published monthly in Graze newspaper.  Go to Graze@grazeonline to order.

Timothy Snyder says that we need to join others, some of whom we do not agree with or even particularly like, in worthwhile work. Snyder, as it happens, is a full professor of history at Yale and as such is part of the elite. He may in fact be thought of as something of a leader in that exalted group due to the fact that he regularly gets turned to for an explanation of why our government, but more to the point, our entire society no longer seems to work. He also holds against the narrowing of “the news” to a few national outlets at the expense of the robust local news we still had just a few decades ago. I would add that far too much of this “national news” is in fact thinly disguised opinion, and that it, especially the electronic versions of it, are much the cause of our screaming at each other and being at each other’s throats.

But we know this: What Snyder is urging upon us is an activity and approach still common in rural America. We have here in our small communities volunteer fire departments and ambulance crews as well as first responders who try to keep people from dying until the ambulance gets there. We also sponsor as a regular thing various kinds of dinners and other sorts of celebrations aimed at getting together what money there is available for the help of a family in trouble due to health issues, usually, but other pressing matters as well.

This should probably be viewed as the tail end or leftover of the life that went before. It is a shadow, or reflection of the attitude and practice that once described our entire lives, including the economic part, here in rural America. The farming of my boyhood a half century ago here on this farm seemed to me at the time to be simply reality. It was the way farming was and was done. Today it is gone, a shadow of the past.

My own father, a man who held himself to a reasonable standard of decent behavior, would and did work at silo filling, baling, and manure hauling with a man he knew to be a thief. He did so because they were neighbors and he needed to. But it is important to point out that he knew them and by that fact had some control of the situation. But his own thinking often enough was to leave the rural approach behind rather than improve it.

My own best friend through my school years grew up on a farm that took a different approach. His father used tractors, but was leery of them. The team of horses stood in the barn in the winters, as a kind of honor for the work they had done. They were still used in the oat harvest, done by a thresting ring. My family thought their farm was “a little slow”.

We are who we are. Consider the words of my late friend Dennis, the dairy scientist who figured out how to bulldog the University into building a dairy grazing program at its station at Morris, just north of me, as he addressed the gaggle of twenty somethings visiting my farm who were finding it difficult to understand how we related to our neighbors, most of whom must take a dim view of our practices. Dennis said that if I had livestock out on the road or my barn on fire, the neighbors will all show up to offer what help they could. This did not mean, he said, that they would show up at my funeral. A farm boy himself, he understood the rural mind.

It will not do to overstate the case here. Many of us involved in one or another of these volunteer activities find ourselves looking around trying to see who might take up the work when we lay it down. It is impossible not to see that as the economy which runs the country whittles down our numbers we will get to a time when we cannot do for ourselves even in these necessary things. We are all, I am afraid, rural people who have managed to live out of our time. But the clock is quite obviously running for urban America too and indeed, the world as a whole as well. What is true for us here in rural America is true in large part for the country as a whole. We are in the grip of savage financial forces. So it is necessary for us to look carefully to see what we might salvage from our former lives and particularly what we might build anew out of the destroyed parts of our rural communities that lie scattered everywhere.

First is to acknowledge how insidious and destructive our modern tendencies are. The baneful influence of the modern state and economy are undeniable but it is important that we see that this destructiveness works through us, in addition to being imposed upon us. My own father, who worked with his neighborhood as he needed to, was the first in the community to own a combine. It was a cobbled together sorrowful affair, more trouble than it was worth, but it did free him from the threshing ring. It freed me as well from what is now a fond memory for my boyhood best friend. It took me some time to see that this move toward agricultural progress was also a move toward the decay of the rural community. Each time I drive to town I see the barn, now abandoned, that housed the team which that farmer used in the 1950’s to help my friend’s father in the oat harvest.

We must ask if rural community and technology are always incompatible. It is important to be honest here. I would not like to give up high impedance fence chargers, portable fencing, livestock trailers, modern hay handling equipment, somewhat less dangerous tractors, etc. I am also alarmed and dismayed by the situation I see in the community. If I walk around the outside of my farmstead I will see approximately eight farm sites, all but one of which was the center of a working farm when my wife and I started here in the 1970’s. Today none of them are. That is drastic change in a few decades. Others have followed as witness the consolidated schools, some struggling to survive and the plague of dollar stores near empty downtowns. If many others in the nation have suffered with that kind of change we have all the explanation necessary for the volatile politics we are drowning in.

So I couldn’t cooperate with my neighbors anyway, because I have none that are farming. Additionally, I knew everyone of those eight families in the seventies. Now I know at most three.

I am convinced that the question about technology and community is an important one. It is about the well being of our neighbor as our religions instruct us. And it is one that those of us who control farm businesses should wrestle with. But it is difficult. I have not made much progress with it in my own thinking. Neither have our national public intellectuals from the sound of it.

Somewhat easier to consider is the possible good effects of farm driven vertical expansion. I think this is because it moves us back toward other people. I have argued before for the economic goodness of local production, processing and sales of local products, in my case hogs, eggs, beef. I will not rehearse that here because now I want to advance the idea that we need to find useful work with other people for our own-and their-mental, emotional and social well being. We need to do things together and this need goes well beyond recreation, as important as that can be. It also goes beyond profit taking to some sense of prosperity, a word that points beyond our own financial well being to that of others. The new thing now, for me, is that the troubles we are in as a nation point out very clearly that this is true of all of us, urban people as well as rural. It is said that misery loves company. But so does hope!