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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