Democracy

Political democracy must rest upon economic democracy or it is soon reduced to mere forms, which is currently the case with us.  Elite money trumps whatever anyone besides the elite thinks.

This is most evident to any who have lived, as I have, through the destruction of a dispersed agriculture.  The landscape here, consisting of mostly 200 to 300 acre farms in my youth, is now collected into several six and seven thousand acre empires and the situation of the working people and rural communities becomes much more precarious now than it was in the regular former hard times on the farm.  One of these huge establishments has up a sign advertising for "harvest drivers".  It doesn't trouble itself as to how these drivers are to keep body and soul together for the other forty weeks of the year.  Nowhere in our politics or economy is there any sign of elites troubling themselves over the situation of working people.   

It was Malcolm X rather than Martin Luther King who brought this thinking out during the sixties.  It was his insistence on the need for a dispersed wealth to support the black reach for civil rights, plus his failure to guarantee "non-violence" that struck so many whites as dangerous and radical.  It is why Martin is lionized today as an American saint and Malcolm is a historical figure.  Wall Street thought Martin was "safe" where Malcolm was not.  This is, however, a misreading of Martin, as we will find out.

Political democracy cannot be sustained on anything but economic democracy.  If we wish decent treatment for black people, or if we wish to honor the voice of working people, thus reducing support for the Trumps of the world, we must do it by making it possible for people-all people-to build a bit of wealth thus achieving the stability of life, family and community so necessary to a decent life on earth.

care

Ellen Davis, biblical scholar, ponders what it might mean for this generation to “work the garden and serve it, to observe and thus preserve it.” This matter is critical for our survival on earth. Now we have the productionists in control. Quantity rules. The matter of land care/food production is drastically simplified. The agriculturalists are outside looking in.

It would seem we have more pressing matters. The coronavirus decimates our elderly and infirm, as well as our working population. The police too often carelessly use and even murder our black fellow citizens. Our attention is, as always scattered among a multitude of urgencies. We have not yet considered the possibility that this might be one big question.

Greed brought black Africans in chains to our shores because southern planters could not make enough money by actually hiring the poor whites they were surrounded by. Land hunger wrenched black people violently from their homes and enslaved them.

Of course land hunger must have land. The land was taken violently from the native population, which was corralled up and starved on a tiny portion of what they once were at home on.

Human populations push relentlessly into wild areas. Agriculture is often the point of the spear. Viruses then jump from wild populations across specie lines and infect us with one pandemic after another.

This was brought to a head by my sudden realization that the farming business I had found so pleasing-livestock on the land-depends upon people poorer than I taking large risks with their own health to work in slaughterhouses, while our government structure does nothing to protect them, rather choosing to protect their employers from lawsuits over poor labor practices.

What would be the endlessly ramifying results if we began to see ourselves as keepers of the garden rather than as entrepreneurs? Can we push greed down and bring care and a sense of belonging up? Do we have a choice?

raspberries

We have reached that point in every summer where the raspberries begin to bear fruit.  The crops are started, the cultivations done as well as can be, the cattle are in their second grazing rotation, the first crop of hay made and I am daily grazing through the raspberry patch picking through the hollyhock blooms to find the best and juiciest of the lot.  I happen to be the only one in the house that likes raspberries.  For one small reason and for a brief time, life is good!

birdsong

There seems to be a pair of western meadowlarks in the east part of the pasture.  I see them on the electric wire overhead or on a pasture fence post singing their beautiful flute like eleven or twelve note song.  It ascends for two notes followed by a third note almost swallowed or expressed on a drawn breath, and then descending for another six or seven notes.  It is an absolutely distinctive prairie sound that has been so long absent here.  It was simply the song of my youth sixty years ago surrounding me as I tramped these fields seeing, hearing and tasting the world.

Now they are back, a coda to my life and, I hope, a blessing to my grandchildren. They are a present sign that some of the farming things we are doing now, emphasizing perennial plants and producing animals on the land as much as possible, are moves in the right direction.

jobs

It takes no great mental effort to see that the powerful people and institutions are using the coronavirus shelter in place time to dispense with as many of the "jobs" as they can.  Many sheltering people will have no job to return to.  So what better reason to start thinking about the meaning of work?

Anyone lucky as I have been to have spent my working life managing and working a small farm has a head start here.  Much as the economics profession and the corporate elite would like to have us think that work is about money and nothing else.  Farmers, at least diversified smaller ones, know better.

I have been fortunate to happen on two women thinkers recently that helped me open to this subject.  Ellen Davis, biblical scholar, writes in her examination of the circumstances surrounding the building of the Tabernacle in Exodus that traditional cultures thought that "the active form of wisdom is good work"  This thought certainly occupied the hearts and minds of the farming men who taught me and the women who taught and fed me sixty five years ago.  Though they would never have questioned it, in just five or six short decades since, this understanding of work has nearly vanished from us, in favor of the modern notion that work is something you do the least of in return for the most money.

Davis continues:  "Wisdom does not consist solely in sound intellectual work; any activity that stands in a consistently productive relationship to the material world and nurtures the creative imagination qualifies as wise."  She continues:  "The modern failure to honor physical work that is skilled. . .has resulted in the devaluation and humiliation of countless workers."

Susanne Langer, twentieth century philosopher, picks up the theme, observing that a great threat to mental security is the modern mode of working.  She says that". . .the nearest and surest source of mental satisfaction has dried up. . .Technical progress is putting Man's freedom of mind in jeopardy." 

The money is not the issue.  The tech industry could be made to write each of us a monthly check and it wouldn't be a financial burden to them-they are that rich.  But no one can give us the meaning back.  For that we will have to create among ourselves an entire new society and economy.  We must create our own meaning.  Elites cannot provide meaning, only control. 

summer

In summer when my shadow grows to about my height it is time to walk out to the pastures and the fields.  The cattle are uncomfortable this first hot day and the hogs as well.  We got the cattle to shade and the hog sprinkler started and now it is the end of the day; time to walk out and let the sweat dry in the fitful breeze to see what has become of the world as we got through the time from noon til now. 

I can see what weeds are coming in the corn, judge how the grass regrows after we made a too early start in the north pasture and try to figure if the bulls can stay where they are for another two or three days.  It is also a time to quiet the mind, begin some plans for tomorrow and look forward to a night's rest.  For me, it is also a time to ruminate on how unusual the work I have been blessed with really is in the modern world and to contemplate how little the world can tolerate the draining of meaning from work and what it has done to all of us.

meanings

In a world where people are managed in corporations by HR (human resource) departments, it should not surprise that the Trump administration has referred to people as "Human Capital Stock"  And we should note that the word "resource" when applied to mineable metals, wood products and fertile soil, is generally, contrary to what the prefix "re" should mean, in reference to things that are used up in the effort to make other things; for instance, soil to make food, or people to make corporate  profit.

"Renew", "restore", "rebuild", "replenish"  are all uses of the same prefix that indicate taking some kind of care.  But with "resource" the meaning seems to fall away and I wonder if that does not indicate either a carelessness in language or a deliberate destruction of meaning in pursuit of what we want.
There is more of the advertising lingo here than of careful precise speech.

What if we began to refer to fertile living soil as part of Creation-or creation if religion makes us squeamish.  Soil then becomes a made thing, made by God.  It also takes on the meaning of "gift".  And it involves us in using that which we did not make, with the sense of gratitude and responsibility that entails.

We must somehow become responsible for our impacts upon that which we did not make, certainly including people.  If we have sufficiently ruined the meaning of "resource" it may help to use other words, other language, to remind ourselves of our responsibilities in the world.