Margotlog: Surviving Trump, Hate, and Rock and Roll
Sometimes when I need a little leavening, I decide that our new president looks a bit like an aging, old-timey rock and roller. Wild hair, upper lip hung over lower, brow furrowed with fury and concentration. Sometimes, when the war he seems intent upon waging on his constituents sends me into an ecstasy of numbness or a spasm of fear, I recall other wars waged on noncombatant populations. I am reading about just such a war, "War in Val d'Orcia" by Iris Origo. An Anglo-American patrician by birth and behavior, the Marchesa Origo became Italian by marriage and sympathy. Buying 2000 acres in a corner of Tuscany, she and her husband turned their skill and fortitute frst to reclaiming wasted land and impoverished Italian tenants in the 1920s and 30s. Then just as they were bringing better management and productivity to these wasted farms, World War II demanded more of them.
Back to Trump: So far, life under Trump has induced numbness, disbelief, ridicule (mostly private), wild hope, and now grief. I am grieving the loss of a leader whose aim is to unite us in hope, who strives to better the lives of our country, while honoring others around the globe, while continuing work to protect and heal a clearly damaged planet. I'm grieving the possibility of a leader who inspires us to better deeds, who urges us to improve the lot of human and natural worlds. I'm grieving the lack of a leader who thinks widely, deeply, quietly, and purposefully. Who does not meet each challenge with an instant Tweet. And now I'm recalling a recent photo of our first Bush president and his wife Barbara, both hospitalized at the same time, now recovering. The photo showed them facing each other in a quiet moment, his chin touching her hair, she smiling up at him, both with inward quietude. I never voted for a Bush, but these people never shocked, dismayed, or terrified me. Partly because theyacted thoughtful, caring, and capable of quiet.
During the intense fighting during World War II, the Origos decided to take in twenty children whose homes near Genoa had been bombed and whose parents either dispersed or killed. It was an exercise in compassion, and a lot of work. The children were traumatized. Some hurt or ill. The Origos hired teachers, established beds and play areas, taught the children to work in small ways on the farm.
What struck me so fully was the contrast between a world gone mad with hate, conflict, destruction and death, and the Origos' daily effort to resist and protect these children, to continue feeding them, supporting their tenant farm families, hiding partisans and other combatants in the woods. Their work was all absorbing, full of incessant demands, challenges, needs. Yet they created sanity. They focused on what they could do and drew others to help them. They did not turn inward in fear or hate. They worked against the worst in humankind by doing the best within the circumstances.
This brings me to one more recognition: the thousands of women who attended the Trump inauguration as protestors were crammed in so close they couldn't march or see much of the ceremony. But as one wrote in today's StarTribune, being there together in such large numbers was enough. Working together, we can overcome dismay, fear, lethargy. If we can't take fire from a president's words, we must take fire from ourselves.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Margotlog: Larger Fields, Smaller Towns: A Minnesota Dilemma
Margotlog: Larger Fields, Smaller Towns: A Minnesota Dilemma
When I first started traveling north, south, east and west as a writer-in-the-schools, the towns I visited in Minnesota were thriving. This was the 1980s, 90s, and into the 2000s. Some towns were larger than others, but even the smaller towns who joined together to form "consolidated schools" had several cafes, a bevy of church steeples pointing toward the sky, a car dealership, a garage and mechanic, a pharmacy, several barbers/hairdressers, grocery stores (not necessarily huge chains), a dress shop, and what we liked to call "A Five and Dime," which of course was ludicrous since hardly anything cost only a nickle or dime anymore.
Often mornings and evenings, farmers who passed the slack winter days drinking coffee "in town," sat around in booths or stools "shooting the bull," while their children trudged past outside on the way to school, or took the orange school bus "over the river and through the woods." I almost always had a room in a motel on the edge of town. Sometimes, even farmers, married to school teachers, knew who I was, a stranger yes, but welcome, someone to stare at as I, too, entered the cafe, walked past in my mukluks and red down coat, and slid into a booth. What I ordered for dinner has left no memory, but I do remember the rumble of masculine voices, and a waitress, in pink or blue uniform, with a tiny apron across her middle, standing at the end of the booth and taking my order. She knew me as "the visiting teacher." When I told her my name, she'd remember it for every one of the five evenings I ate there.
Sometimes in warmer autumn or spring weather, I'd walk to the town cemetery, hearing echoes of the students' names I was teaching in grades 4 - 6 or 7 - 9. Sometimes, I even cruised back roads, pausing to stare at tumble down barns and houses with their windows broken and doors off the hinges. Barns had their high roofs "stove in," but the walls often stood foursquare, full now of pigeons, mice, rabbits, and who knew what else. Maybe a traveler on foot who needed shelter for a free night's rest, slept in the dirty hay, unable to afford a motel room.
Gradually, this rather nice balance between people and land, living inside an economy of modest scale that yet supported quite a few families, often enough to keep a grammer school going in town, this lovely balance collapsed. First came bigger and bigger machines which required consolidation of fields, then came the sell- off of farm land to those few with lots of cash. Finally the more diversified farming of an earlier era disappeared. As far as the eye could see, acre after acre of corn or soy beans stretched to the margins of small streams.
It didn't take long before the towns began to dwindle. The few farm families with the cash to buy out their neighbors, purchased huge machines to plant the 'row" crops margin to margin of larger and larger fields. These families upgraded their farm homes, expanding into fireside "family rooms," or huge kitchen/sitting rooms. For all necessary purchases, they could no longer trade in towns where their parents and grandparents had lived because the towns were drying up. There simply weren't enough people to support a garage and a drug store, several grocery stores and a pharmacy, a beauty parlor, a five and dime, and a bank.
But these families sitting in the midst of their huge acerage, enjoyed driving bigger and bigger trucks to larger farm towns that still retained the retail services necessary to keep them fed, clothed, healthy, and practicing the "old time religion." All the high school students rode school buses, but still in some towns, there weren't enough children to support a modest grammar school. The children had to be bussed farther and farther away.
Grant Herfindahl, retiring from his job as executive director of The Farm Service Agency/U.S. Department of Agriculture, has seen this enormous consolidation take place. "Many crop farmers grow only two commodity crops, corn and soybears" he told a StarTribune writer in early January 2017. "The number of farms has dropped" (with average size expanding from 400 acres to 2,000). "When I began working in Pope County 20 years ago, there were about 115 dairies, and now maybe there're 30 left. And all of those 115 dairies were cumulatively raising about 6,000 cows. Today we've got new dairies(with) 6,000 cows in one dairy. This trend has been happening for a long time." (StarTribune, 1/8/2017 Business, D3).
This trend is creating a silent environmental disaster, on the par, if not the scale, with what Silent Spring described years ago. Because of the enormous size of the fields, and the main crops, corn and soy beans, needing vast amounts of chemicals to keep them bug free and growing, our Minnesota streams and rivers, the ground water that most of us pump for daily use, is being polluted, often to the point of killing fish, and endangering our health. Weedy margins where flowering plants grow, necessary for bees, butterflies, birds, have disappeared. We have a nationwide crisis in pollinaters. Monarch butterflies who depend on milkweed plants are unable to survive.
Equally as appalling are the caving in of small towns, with their diversified economies. Yes, according to Grant Herfindahl, some farmers across Minnesota have found a middle way--keeping a chunk of acerage planted, but also working jobs in towns. But the norm becomes larger and larger farms; fewer and fewer jobs. And, of course, as jobs in towns dry up, those who used to make a modest living are now poor, and on welfare. Rural poverty is one of our state's growing problems. It is not a happy land anymore. The rural core is dying.
There are some solutions: such as requiring all farmers to maintain buffer zones on their fields. Such areas of native plants help pollinaters survive, and also filter run-off of farm chemicals to prevent polluting neighboring streams and rivers. But though crucial, such buffers do very little for people left by the wayside as their towns are dying. We need to encourage relocation of small factories to rural Minnesota. We need to re-educate people who used to work in commerical establishments for jobs in various e-industries. These are some thoughts, but there is enormous resistance among "big" farmers to the environmental changes necessary to curb poisoning our streams, lakes, and rivers. If we don't legislate compliance, we will be overcome just like our pollinators. We will all eventually become victims of this current "Silent Spring."
When I first started traveling north, south, east and west as a writer-in-the-schools, the towns I visited in Minnesota were thriving. This was the 1980s, 90s, and into the 2000s. Some towns were larger than others, but even the smaller towns who joined together to form "consolidated schools" had several cafes, a bevy of church steeples pointing toward the sky, a car dealership, a garage and mechanic, a pharmacy, several barbers/hairdressers, grocery stores (not necessarily huge chains), a dress shop, and what we liked to call "A Five and Dime," which of course was ludicrous since hardly anything cost only a nickle or dime anymore.
Often mornings and evenings, farmers who passed the slack winter days drinking coffee "in town," sat around in booths or stools "shooting the bull," while their children trudged past outside on the way to school, or took the orange school bus "over the river and through the woods." I almost always had a room in a motel on the edge of town. Sometimes, even farmers, married to school teachers, knew who I was, a stranger yes, but welcome, someone to stare at as I, too, entered the cafe, walked past in my mukluks and red down coat, and slid into a booth. What I ordered for dinner has left no memory, but I do remember the rumble of masculine voices, and a waitress, in pink or blue uniform, with a tiny apron across her middle, standing at the end of the booth and taking my order. She knew me as "the visiting teacher." When I told her my name, she'd remember it for every one of the five evenings I ate there.
Sometimes in warmer autumn or spring weather, I'd walk to the town cemetery, hearing echoes of the students' names I was teaching in grades 4 - 6 or 7 - 9. Sometimes, I even cruised back roads, pausing to stare at tumble down barns and houses with their windows broken and doors off the hinges. Barns had their high roofs "stove in," but the walls often stood foursquare, full now of pigeons, mice, rabbits, and who knew what else. Maybe a traveler on foot who needed shelter for a free night's rest, slept in the dirty hay, unable to afford a motel room.
Gradually, this rather nice balance between people and land, living inside an economy of modest scale that yet supported quite a few families, often enough to keep a grammer school going in town, this lovely balance collapsed. First came bigger and bigger machines which required consolidation of fields, then came the sell- off of farm land to those few with lots of cash. Finally the more diversified farming of an earlier era disappeared. As far as the eye could see, acre after acre of corn or soy beans stretched to the margins of small streams.
It didn't take long before the towns began to dwindle. The few farm families with the cash to buy out their neighbors, purchased huge machines to plant the 'row" crops margin to margin of larger and larger fields. These families upgraded their farm homes, expanding into fireside "family rooms," or huge kitchen/sitting rooms. For all necessary purchases, they could no longer trade in towns where their parents and grandparents had lived because the towns were drying up. There simply weren't enough people to support a garage and a drug store, several grocery stores and a pharmacy, a beauty parlor, a five and dime, and a bank.
But these families sitting in the midst of their huge acerage, enjoyed driving bigger and bigger trucks to larger farm towns that still retained the retail services necessary to keep them fed, clothed, healthy, and practicing the "old time religion." All the high school students rode school buses, but still in some towns, there weren't enough children to support a modest grammar school. The children had to be bussed farther and farther away.
Grant Herfindahl, retiring from his job as executive director of The Farm Service Agency/U.S. Department of Agriculture, has seen this enormous consolidation take place. "Many crop farmers grow only two commodity crops, corn and soybears" he told a StarTribune writer in early January 2017. "The number of farms has dropped" (with average size expanding from 400 acres to 2,000). "When I began working in Pope County 20 years ago, there were about 115 dairies, and now maybe there're 30 left. And all of those 115 dairies were cumulatively raising about 6,000 cows. Today we've got new dairies(with) 6,000 cows in one dairy. This trend has been happening for a long time." (StarTribune, 1/8/2017 Business, D3).
This trend is creating a silent environmental disaster, on the par, if not the scale, with what Silent Spring described years ago. Because of the enormous size of the fields, and the main crops, corn and soy beans, needing vast amounts of chemicals to keep them bug free and growing, our Minnesota streams and rivers, the ground water that most of us pump for daily use, is being polluted, often to the point of killing fish, and endangering our health. Weedy margins where flowering plants grow, necessary for bees, butterflies, birds, have disappeared. We have a nationwide crisis in pollinaters. Monarch butterflies who depend on milkweed plants are unable to survive.
Equally as appalling are the caving in of small towns, with their diversified economies. Yes, according to Grant Herfindahl, some farmers across Minnesota have found a middle way--keeping a chunk of acerage planted, but also working jobs in towns. But the norm becomes larger and larger farms; fewer and fewer jobs. And, of course, as jobs in towns dry up, those who used to make a modest living are now poor, and on welfare. Rural poverty is one of our state's growing problems. It is not a happy land anymore. The rural core is dying.
There are some solutions: such as requiring all farmers to maintain buffer zones on their fields. Such areas of native plants help pollinaters survive, and also filter run-off of farm chemicals to prevent polluting neighboring streams and rivers. But though crucial, such buffers do very little for people left by the wayside as their towns are dying. We need to encourage relocation of small factories to rural Minnesota. We need to re-educate people who used to work in commerical establishments for jobs in various e-industries. These are some thoughts, but there is enormous resistance among "big" farmers to the environmental changes necessary to curb poisoning our streams, lakes, and rivers. If we don't legislate compliance, we will be overcome just like our pollinators. We will all eventually become victims of this current "Silent Spring."
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