Monday, December 11, 2017

THEY CALL IT PROGRESS

                                               

In Man’s zeal to find bigger and better ways to accomplish things, there’re always casualties. Driven by the love of the almighty dollar and corporate profits, our way of life evolves each and every day in this capitalistic society. That’s not meant to be a criticism; it’s a fact of life here in America. It’s lead, follow or get out of the way.
At some point progress bumps heads with nostalgia and people who don’t want to change, get hurt in the process. There are thousands of coal miners in West Virginia who want nothing more then to pick up their dinner pails and go to the mine each day but no one wants their coal anymore. There are people in towns all across this nation who live just down the street from a shuttered factory and remember when they had two lives’ that they lived. One for their family and one for the company. Now a robot does their job in half the time. Abandoned farmhouses dot the prairies of the Midwest, sad reminders of a time when a family toiled to grow crops and tend their animals. Now huge pieces of machinery chew up in one bite, more soil then a legion of family farmers could turn over in a day, with their antiquated machinery.

Yes its sad. It’s sad because we were so happy living like that. Maybe we grew up on a family farm, four generations old, smelling sweet clover and fresh cut alfalfa fields not muddy feedlots spilling over with manure and cattle caked with it. We wore that farmers tan and those calluses’ in the summer like a badge of courage and in the evening one would sit on the porch with that good kind of tired, and hear nothing but the mourning doves, perched on the power line, cooing above us and the frogs croaking in the swamp. Or maybe some of us worked eight hours a day, punched the clock, then went home to our families in a quiet neighborhood, confident each week that paycheck would be there on Friday, always grateful for the job.

It was a time when merchants in small towns closed up their shops at five thirty p.m. on weekdays, except Friday nights, when they stayed open until nine for the farmers and then they went home to their families too. Sundays, they did like the good book asked us to do. It was a day of rest and you went and visited friends and relatives or watched the city team play baseball at Pine Grove Park and had a picnic in the park. No one complained that the liquor stores were closed. No one knew what Wall Mart was and when you went to the local hardware store, Phil would take the time to not only cut some screen for you but also show you how to fix it.

If I could go back for just one day it would be a summer day in June of 1957 and I would be sixteen, standing along the railroad tracks west of Staples. I would be pumping my arm in the air as a huge steam engine roared by me on that ribbon of steel pulling over a hundred boxcars and the engineer seeing me would blow the whistle, while leaning out the window and give me the highball. Grains in the fields would nod their heads from the rush of the wind from the train blowing by. The pockets on my tattered jeans would have only a pocketknife, no cell phone and no I-pod. My bicycle lying in the ditch would have my old baseball glove slipped over the handlebars and an old steel fishing rod tied to the bars. I would be on my way to Dower Lake. It’s hard to imagine living like that now but take my word for it. It beats what we have today.



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