Ambition and Ambition
I've been doing a little reading recently about the founding personalities of this state. And I'm not too sure I like them. And, given as I know why I'm not too sure, I'm not too sure what this says about me.
The early history of this state's politics is heavily, almost exclusively, marked by men of high personal ambition. But that's what bothers me, their ambition was so personal. None of them were from here, but then we couldn't expect them to be either, given as the native population was either truly Native, and therefore not recognized as US Citizenry at the time, as well as being an oppressed class, or otherwise very small in numbers. That we would have to take as a given.
But the founding fathers, if you will, of the state, or at least those who obtained high political office, seem to be marked by a singular story. They were from back east, they were often lawyers, they saw Wyoming as a wide open place where a person, often a lawyer, could make it big really quickly, as there were so few people and so many opportunities, and they translated this into political power. Sometimes they stuck around thereafter, but often they did not.
I may be misreading them, but to those people this state was nothing more than a vehicle to personal success. The state probably meant nothing more to them than any other place, and their own personal "success" was the goal. They were highly personally ambitious.
But what about that sort of ambition? It certainly doesn't comport with what Wendell Berry calls "becoming native to this place", and it isn't the sort of ambition that I have, or most long term residents of this state have. People who have stuck it out here in lean times (and aren't all that happy to see people moving in, in spite of the pathetic babblings of the Casper newspaper calling 70,000 new residents something to be thankful for. . .hardly). People who are really from here, love the land as a rule, and while we don't all agree with what means, we can all agree we love the state.
I suppose this might mean that my personal ambition is pretty skewed, or at least not very American. I really don't get the thinking of people who move all over to follow a career. And that seems destructive to me on top of it. Never living anywhere, really, they never value anything other than themselves.
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