Note the comment about inflation in this item.
Comparatively, we really live in the "cheap food era", although we rarely seem to grasp that. That ties into a bunch of things, include a long lasting post World War Two agricultural policy designed to produce that, but which at least accidentally, if nothing else, emphasizes scale over everything else, to the detriment of those who might wish to enter the production end of the field.
ῥίζα γὰρ πάντων τῶν κακῶν ἐστιν ἡ φιλαργυρία*
1 Timothy.
I have to admit that I'm disappointed by the failure of Senate File 103, the bill that would have increased the number of hunting licenses reserved for for in state hunters. That is, of course, open to skeptical retort as I'm an instate hunter, and I would have potentially benefitted from that.
But more than that, as I've noted here before, I'm basically a subsistence hunter and I'm serious about it. I'm not a "head hunter". Indeed, I don't personally grasp the amount of money that people will spend to hunt out of state, but I suppose that its based on retaining a connection with the wild they've lost through urbanization. Maybe that is what makes sense of it. What I think would make more sense, personally, is to hunt locally, and if that's too expensive, they should focus their efforts accordingly to make it less so. But because they don't, and because their expenditures in Wyoming are part of the economy, we cater to that and the bill didn't pass.
Setting aside the tourist dollars aspect of it, and just the monetary and subsistence aspect of it, this is one of those putting values over money type of judgments that seems to be lacking a lot in the modern world, and indeed, in fairness, is generally lacking in any one era. The point of outfitters and the opponents of the bill in the legislature is that outfitting and out of state hunting is a business in the state, it brings dollars into the state, and we shouldn't hurt business. And there's a lot to be sympathetic about in that argument, particularly as the state is really hurting for cash. But there's philosophical reasons to set monetary concerns aside on some things. There are things that we should value over money in ways that are hard to define as they're all intellectual.
Also, pure monetary arguments can be really bad ones, and generally almost every really awful idea that has made the world worse has some economic aspect to it. Henry VIII gained support fraudulently usurping Papal authority in the English church not so much by brilliant theological arguments, which were lacking for his campaign, but by driving monks out of monasteries and handing them over to his supporters. It was devastating in every way and reverberates through society today, but when you get right down to it, temporal monetary considerations trumped the concerns stretching out to eternity. Money often wins.
Still, it shouldn't.
Monetary considerations played into a legislative argument this past week on another topic. Not that this is surprise, that plays into a lot of arguments in Cheyenne. This one was about marijuana. There's a bill to legalize it and regulate it basically like alcohol. "The state would generate a lot of money from taxing it" came up as an argument.
That's true, but the state would also generate a lot of money by legalizing heroin and taxing it, or legalizing prostitution and taxing that. You get the point. Things aren't made illegal because they have a negative taxation aspect to them.
Indeed, most of the "we'll tax it" type of arguments for legalizing something that has as association with vice are not well thought out anyhow, as rarely does anyone balance the taxation against the costs the vice creates. Nobody, that is, figures out how much caring for those who are permanently wasted on dope will cost, and contrary to what people assert, that will happen.
When I was a National Guardsmen I ran into one of my former soldiers on the street, after he was discharged. He asked what I thought he should do as he was so badly addicted to marijuana he couldn't get off of it. I guess it was nice to be asked, but still in my 20s, even as an NCO, I didn't really know what to tell him. I offered some advice, but I don't recall what it was. More recently somebody I know related to me how one of their daughters had gone to school, dropped out, and came home a wreck as she was addicted to it and in a state of severe depression. They got her off of it, but she's now working in a hopelessly low paying occupation and likely will live a really marginal life.
I don't see a reason to encourage any more stupefaction of our society than we already have. If it were up to me, I wouldn't have repealed prohibition in the 1930s, and I'm not a teetotaler.
I know why we do these things, however. We've built a world that we don't like much, and its easier to spend our cash blotting it out from our consciousness than to really address it. Or, and probably more accurately, those who benefit from the society we've created are profiting mightily from it and they'd resist any changes. It's easier for them to just hand you a joint.
If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
Edmund Burke
I was stunned this past week to learn that the United States has now authorized more money to be spent on pandemic relief than it spend on the New Deal. It's also more money than the United States fought fighting every war we've fought since the end of the Cold War combined.
That's insane.
I get that something needed to be done, but that didn't need to be done. There's no way to spend that sort of vast amount of money well or wisely. It will be wasted. It will also be inflationary.
I'm not yet 60, but I can see it approaching and I pretty much figure, with this sort of vast injection of cash into the economy, inflation is inevitable Goodbye retirement.
Now, that's sort of a selfish view, but at some point a person must be realistic. In looking at the actual impact of pandemic on the economy it turns out that most of the economy was hardly impacted at all. What was massively impacted was the service sector. No matter, relief checks are going out to people who never lost their jobs and were never in danger of losing them.
The section of the economy that did find their work impaired is fairly large, around 10,000,000 people. That's a lot of people, but it's actually a small percentage of workers. And the money being thrown around to everyone won't help them much, as a large percentage of those jobs are never coming back. Lots of people acclimated to working from home where they are comfortable, don't have to buy as many work clothes, can be around their cats, dogs and families, and don't have to put up with the guy three cubicles down who thinks that basketball is interesting.
Because they aren't coming back, not as many restaurants and bars are either. They just aren't.
Focusing that money where it was needed would have been a good idea. Throwing out checks to everyone on the assumption that people are going to run out and buy 500 cups of Starbucks doesn't make any sense at all.
As a further aside on this, the Democratic controlled House of Representatives seems set to act on a bunch of social policy bills of a "progressive" nature. I haven't heard of their acting on a "Green New Deal" slate yet, but if they ever intended to, this probably shot their bolt. It's not really possible to have any kind of New Deal when you just spent way more money than the New Deal itself cost, unless you are willing to super heat the economy.
The irony of all of this is that it can't really be said that the current occupants of Congress don't remember the inflation of the 1970s and how awful that was. They must, as a lot of them were there then, or at least in politics. The same generation that came up in the awful early 1970s has never left power.
He who loses money, loses much; He who loses a friend, loses much more; He who loses faith, loses all.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I had an interesting conversation with a coworker the other day who is somewhat obsessed about his graduating high school senior's plans. I can understand that, the future of children when you have them, particularly those whose future you can not accurately foresee, is a constant and deep worry for parents.
It lead in a strange direction, however, and that lead me to ponder something further.
My father's father left home when he was 13 years old to go to work. My mother's grandfather started working as an office boy, the same occupation my father's father started off as, when he was still a child. I don't even think he was a teenager at the time. My father's grandmother came to the United States from Ireland when she was 3 years old, accompanied by her 19 year old sister who raised her. She never saw her parents after age 3 again. My mother was descendant in part from Quebecois, which in turn means that she was also descendant almost certainly (and certainly my DNA would support that) from orphans from Ireland adopted right off the docks in Quebec, the survivors of Coffin Ships who lost their parents in the journey from Ireland and who would be raised as French speaking Quebecois.
I note all that for a tricky reason.
All of the people here I can identify went on to successful lives. My father's father ultimately briefly came back to Iowa and then went on to Colorado as a businessman, married, and then pursued his career successfully to Nebraska and then Wyoming. My father's grandmother moved, probably with her sister, to Colorado and married a shopkeeper in Leadville, and retired to Denver. My mother's grandfather ultimately came to be the CEO of the company he started off as an office boy for. They all had successful, and moral, lives and had successful families.
They also all lived in an era when the impact of immorality was pretty obvious and, while they were not the recipients of advanced degrees, the plain facts of biology were known and obvious to all. We've lost all of that.
Wealth seems to be a lot of the reason why. They all spent part of their lives living hand to mouth, although not all of them by any means. Very few people do that now, which is overall a good thing. But it's also the case that society has become so rich that there are now a lot of people who are made miserable by it. Part of that is that people have a lot of time and money to spend on what are really basic urges, and to stray off in ways in which they come to try to self identify themselves by things that were in the background, but not self defining, in earlier eras. People are now identifying themselves by their diets and sexual urges, for example.
Only a vastly rich society can spend so much time thinking about food and sex and define individuals in society that way. If you move from Cork to Victorville Colorado and its 1890, for example, self defining yourself as a vegan would not only not occur, it'd be regarded as stupid, as it would have been stupid.
This doesn't mean that our vast wealth has liberated us from such things, but rather its seemingly enslaved us to our basest instincts. Free from nature and distant from nature's God, we want to be gods ourselves, but can't seemingly think of a better way to do that than to redefine the most basic nature's that God has given us.
That can't and won't go on forever, but the longer it goes on the worse the fall and recovery will be.
With luck, it might even snow for us.
Haruki Murakami
It wasn't snowing when I got up.
All the second half of this week the weather report has been promising a massive amount of snow. The southeastern part of the state is supposed to get up to three feet of snow.
I'm really skeptical that will happen. It isn't snowing here yet. We'll see. Anyway you look at it we really do need the snow or we're going to be in a severe drought this summer.
The thing that always surprises me in these circumstances are the reactions to the weather. There's lots of complaining about it. But other than drive to work in it, we don't really have to deal with it for the most part, unless you are employed in an outdoor profession, which is indeed totally different.
Lawyers who do litigation used to have to contend with the weather constantly, but now that everything is done via the internet, this isn't the case anymore. The last major winter legal trip I made was to Baker Montana, and that's now over a year ago. The weather wasn't great when I did that, to be sure, but I used to contend with winter travel constantly. Not now. And I wonder if the days of travel will really ever come back. They probably won't. It's changed much about work, including even the psychology of it.
Not that I haven't done some traveling, even during the pandemic. And indeed, I've managed to catch bad winter weather twice while doing it, although both were daytrips.
Anyhow, for most people, winter snowstorms merely mean that you drive to work in the snow. Not everyone does that well, however. I was nearly killed earlier this week when some person on a snow day rocketed through a red light and nearly hit me. They never slowed down. And I've been seeing my fair share of out of state license plates on cars of what may well be new residents in which they're driving in an obviously scared condition. If we get hit again COVID refugees will likely start rethinking their relocation.
Indeed, the weather in Wyoming is just flat out bad in ways that don't occur to most Wyomingites but which are actually bad and difficult to explain. A Texas friend of mine once pointed out to me that Wyoming's northernmost latitude is still further south than northern France, which it is. Indeed, much of Wyoming's latitude is on the same plain as northern Italy or southern France. The reason he pointed this out is that he was convinced that because this is our latitude we must have the same weather than the south of France does.
Not hardly.
We're deep in the interior of the plains and our winters are long and summers short. We have wind constantly all year long. Ft. Fetterman, outside of what is now Douglas Wyoming, had the highest insanity rate in the Frontier Army, and the wind and weather conditions are often blamed for that. Every other year its noted that Wyoming has a high rate of depression and that this contributes to it as well, most likely for immigrants who come in here thinking that the nice conditions they saw in June are what we have all year long. Indeed, I once read a deluded comment by somebody who bought some land outside of Bosler Wyoming about how they intended to retire there from their university job in California and then the only worry they'd have is which horse to ride that day. Well, they don't ride horses outside of Bosler in January except by absolute necessity. My guess is that person, if they moved out at all, hated Wyoming by March.
Be that as it may, our indoor life everywhere has insulated us from really dealing with the weather. Last week the county shut its offices and the school district did as well. I simply drove to work, not realizing that it was that bad. Right now, the State of Colorado, which likes to have a massive fit about everything has mobilized the Colorado National Guard for the storm.
Well, like Dire Straits sang, "Money for nothing and kicks for free".
One thing that weather like this usually brings up is a comment to the effect that "on days like this it sure is nice to work indoors". I've honestly never thought that. Maybe its growing up here and being a semi feral person, but as long as I don't have to brave the highways, I like the big storms.
__________________________________________________________________________________
* "[F]or the root of all evils is the love of money."
I don't have a photo of a shot record to post, but I received my first COVID 19 vaccination shot on Monday. I'll be looking forward to the second. Over the years, I've been vaccinated for every virus common and rare known to man (I've been vaccinated for small pox three times, twice after the disease was extinct) and the reaction to the vaccine was mild in comparison to to some prior vaccinations I've had (yellow fever was the worst one). Since the pandemic started one lawyer I've worked with and against died of COVID 19, the father of another one I know, and a court reporter that had reported in court for me before. I'm glad, for more than one reason, to have received the shot.
Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland.
This is not to say that Bill Gates is a bad guy.
I know very little about Gates personally, but I don't think he's a bad guy by any means. Quite the contrary. Gates is a quietly religious man who, along with his wife, is a dedicated Catholic.* He donates heavily to very serious causes. He's such a philanthropist and, along with Warren Buffet, on a certain edge of things, that he's feared by certain sections of the alt right, that have cooked up, amongst other things, the wild theory that he's responsible for the Coronavirus pandemic in an effort to inject people with microchips and control them through cell towers, which is frankly an absurdly stupid conspiracy theory.
So I'm not saying Gates is a bad guy.
Actually, he seems to be a pretty good guy, to the extent I know anything about him, which admittedly isn't all that much as I don't really find the lives of the famous to be all that interesting.
Rather, what I am saying is that a nation of over 300,000,000 whose economics are heavily scaled towards the wealthy in some ways deprives opportunities to entry farmers, and to those who would become real farmers, by treating land as a freely obtainable resource for people who don't actually use it for their own personal principal income.
Now, again, I can't blame Gates. He didn't create the system, he's simply living it. And to his credit, his farm land is farmed, not retired.
But a nation where most people can't enter the most basic and fundamental livelihood has something existentially wrong with it. That's happened to many nations in the past, and it's always been a fundamental flaw when it occurs.
*In the idiotic way it so often does in American journalism, this has caused one noted journal to comment that Gates departs from his Catholic faith as he "follows science", apparently unaware that Catholics are big believer in science and that most Christian denomination do not hold positions antithetical to science.
NFU SERIES: WHY I FARM: REFLECTIONS ON MY ABSURD CAREER CHOICE
Just the other day, I ran a post from Lex Anteinternet that is highly related to this topic here. It was:
Lex Anteinternet: A Mid Week At Work
Conversation. Why you became wh...
I'd already started typing out this post when I did that. This makes this one slightly disrupted in some ways, and I've refocused it a bit.
Any, regarding the NFU writer and the question posted above, I don't think it is, but when you review it, you'll see that the young writer in question chose farming as she has very high ideals.
I wanted to be a farmer, but I didn't have high ideals.**
Well, I probably had some high ideals, and in many things they've become higher over time, which isn't to say that I'm close to obtaining sainthood by any means. But my career choice as not based on high ideals. Indeed, whenever I hear a practicing lawyer say they became a lawyer because they "wanted to help people", I automatically think, "oh bullshit".
I don't talk much on these blogs*** about my own early life or frankly my life in general. I keep that stuff to myself, pretty much. But I'll make a slight exception here.
I've wanted to be in the outdoors since I was small. I never imagined a career in anything else really. That's because I'm a nearly feral human, as odd as that may seem. That tracks a lot into my post about being from and of Wyoming, which was linked in above.
My only real vocation, in the deeper sense, is that of hunter. Well, frankly, that may not be true. At least that's not how outsiders view me. Indeed, a conservation of a year ago or so lead one of my legal colleagues to opine that a person such as me could have only two possible vocations, lawyer or priest. That was it.
That's was an interesting comment from a very highly educated person. He's a lawyer too, as noted, but he's also an industrial psychologist. I'm not sure exactly what industrial psychologist do, but they're some sort of psychologist. Obviously he has some insights that I may lack. I've pondered that statement since then and I don't know that he wasn't right.
He's also, I'd note, a German by birth, having come to the United States as a young adult. That makes a difference too, as culture heavily impacts your world view.
Be that as it may, when I was younger, I only wanted to hunt and fish. Frankly, if I could do nothing else but hunt and fish now, that's what I'd do. I'd be some sort of subsistence type character, hunt, fish, and garden. And probably read. What does that make me?
I've wondered if it make me lazy, actually, but I don't think so. I certainly didn't end up in a career for the lazy and as other people think I'm a workaholic, I guess I'm not. And somebody who eschews ATVs and who will go out in all weather and hike, often alone, for miles, isn't lazy.
Anyhow, with that sort of mindset, when I was young, I hoped for an outdoor career. Early on I thought about becoming a soldier as, in my mind, they were outdoors. As I aged into mid teens, however, I wanted to be a Game Warden, as they're outdoors.
Around about the time I was a high school senior I looked at trying to homestead in the Yukon, which still had land available to do it. It didn't seem quite feasible, and soon thereafter the Canadian government shut the door on that, probably correctly, but that option thereby seemingly closed with that door. Queen Elizabeth II apparently had other things in mind for her distant ex pats.
My father was a dentist. Whatever you are thinking that means, it doesn't mean that.
My grandfather on my father's side had owned, in his final years, a packing plant in our small city. He'd been in the packing industry most of his adult life, if you measure adult years the way they are measured today. If you measure them the way he must have, he spent a few years in the oceanic shipping industry in the office, starting when he was 13. But from his early 20s, he worked in the packing industry, which well suited his Iowa origins.
His later years were his 40s, and he died in his 40s.
I don't know what my father's early career goals were. He never said. As the oldest boy, chances were good that he was originally headed down to the packing plant. He did work there in every aspect of it, as my grandfather "wanted him to see what real work was like". The packing plant was sold, however, shortly after my grandfather's death, by necessity. He was still a teen.
Given that, he went to work, while still going to college. He worked at the post office and decided to make that his career, until my grandmother decided that wouldn't be his career. He started off in engineering but one of my uncles was becoming a dentist and he followed that path as well.
By all accounts he was an excellent dentist, but I never thought of him in that way.
Nowadays, dentistry is somewhat associated with wealth, but it wasn't then. Kids of dentists and doctors today will often flaunt it a bit, as it means they have vicarious money. We didn't. Rather, being the son of a dentist at the time meant that 1) people would tell you "I hate dentist", which they really didn't, but which you still hear today, and 2) they'd ask you dental questions, as if dental knowledge is genetic.
Dentists top the charts in professional suicides which says something. My father never commented on what it was like to be a dentist but once, which was to note how people complained about going to the dentist all the time. Anyhow, while conversations he had with other dentist and doctors were really illuminating and educational, outside of the office he didn't discuss dentistry. He brought it home, however, as dentist made dentures at the time, and that was done in his evening hours.
In our home, table talk was on history, nature and science. My father as an outdoorsman, preferring fishing over hunting but doing both. He also was a heavy duty gardener in the subsistence farmer category, really. It's from him that I received my love of the outdoors.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, I was leaving high school.
Well, farming in the Yukon was out and we didn't have a farm or ranch ourselves, so it was off to become a game warden. And then my father mentioned that there were a lot of people around here who have wildlife management degrees that didn't have jobs.
That was enough, from a person who rarely gave career advice, to send me off in another direction, and that direction was geology. Geology is all outdoors, right?
Well, ironically, it also lead to what my father had feared, unemployment. There were no jobs as I graduated into an oilfield depression. I tried to find a job for a year, and then back to school I went, as a law student.
Law student?
Yeah, a law student.
Being a lawyer, you might note, has nothing to do with being outdoors.
It was first suggested to me that I might consider the law as a career when I was a college student in community college.
The reason that it first appealed to me is related to the point linked in above, once again. It wasn't that it sounded like "an exciting career" or that it afforded an opportunity to save mankind. Indeed, when I hear people wo hare law students or contemplating becoming law students express really high ideals regarding being a lawyer, I know that they are in for a monster sized disappointment. "I'm going to become an International Law Lawyer and save the whales!". BS, you're going to litigate in small claims court in Dayton, Ohio, spanky.
What was the case, however, is that, like dentists, you could be a lawyer and be here.
Now, the reason that the law was suggested to me had nothing to do with that. Rather, my community college history professor thought I had an analytical mind and that suited me to become a lawyer.
The professor in question was one Jon E. Brady, and he was a great community college history professor. I think he would have been a great history professor in any institution. In fact both of the history profs I had at Casper College, Jon Brady and Dr. David Cherry, were great teachers.
Anyhow, it was Jon Brady's comment that started the wheels in motion. I didn't actually know that he was a lawyer himself at the time, and only learned that well after I was a lawyer. At least one other lawyer has told me that he made a similar comment to him, which is what caused him to become a lawyer, but that lawyer's on line career story tells a considerably different tale, so who knows. The truth is probably in the middle there somewhere.
And as a student, I was pretty feral. Living in my hometown while attending community college, I went hunting several times throughout the week as a college student. When I moved to Laramie to attend the University of Wyoming, I went hunting less, but still quite a bit. And I lived on wild game at the time. When I was first a lawyer I hunted and fished a great deal, and my father and I came close to buying a small ranch together, before he died. After that, I lived once again pretty much on wild game until I got married.
To make a long story short, my wife and I have livestock so in some ways I came back around to my original career goals, sort of. So is this a success story? I suppose it at least partially is. I'm still as feral mentally as I was when I was 16. I'm not outdoors in recent years, however, anywhere near as much as I'd like to be, and that's due to my work. It's also my own fault, to an extent, and at least according to my wife, it's a matter of perception, as she claims I'm hunting all the time.
My first day on the job, the office manager, who had worked for the firm for decades, and who had probably wearied of young lawyers by that time, made the comment that she hoped I would like being a lawyer and that I might end up "wishing I'd been a farmer". I recall thinking that if being a farmer was an option right then, that's what I'd become. It isn't an option for everyone, not anymore. The NFU writer's article doesn't really explain where she is now and what's she doing, but she is a climate activist and it sounds like she's worked at experimental farms. That makes a person a type of farmer, to be sure, but my guess is that it doesn't make a person a long term one.
Breaking into real agriculture today is really tough. In my senior year as an undergrad in geology I told one of my friends that what I really wanted to do was to be a rancher, and that I guess that I must just not be ambitious. He commented that he thought that a fine ambition. I've actually worked at it now for decades and I am that, but I don't support my family doing it, and I'm now getting old. I've done something else career wise, and I have to be honest about it. I'm never going to be a full time rancher or farmer. Never. When I die, and I find myself in that odd dream retrospective state represented in the final scene of No Country For Old Men now quite a bit, even if that day is a decade or two off (and we never know), people who didn't really know me as a person will simply categorize me as a lawyer, and the state bar journal, in whatever form it is in then, will run an obit like it does for every passing lawyer that hails your achievements, if there were any, in the profession. Lots of people think of me that way pretty much exclusively now, and one of my close friends in the law recently told me that "if I had your practice I'd be proud", which was an odd off hand remark to make (I'm not really sure what brought that up, and I didn't ask).
I'm not really a proud fellow, about anything, I guess, so it was an odd observation to hear. Of course, as Garrison Keillor says, "we always have a backdoor view of ourselves", which makes it hard, I think, for anyone but a narcissist to really be existentially proud of themselves.
Anyhow, is her career choice absurd? No, definitely not. Is the idealism behind it misplaced? Probably so. Idealism behind most careers of that type is misplaced, including the expressed idealism I sometimes hear about entering the legal field, which I tend to discount as self serving propaganda or words for other ears, not your internal ones.
Life is packed with endless compromises. What ultimately governs the success or failure of them isn't based on economics too much, but economics is a big influencer in them, to be sure. A lot of that has to do with your internal values, and if that value is money, you're not going to be a success no matter what. A lot of success can be measured in just how close we can get to what we'd do if we wanted, in a world where we really don't get to do whatever we want. Not too many people anymore can "choose to be a farmer" in the old time sense, i.e., buy a farm and farm it, or buy a ranch and run it, unless they're very rich. There are other ways to do it, but frankly it almost always involves family ties, which is just fine, or it involves working at something else which probably amounts to your main job. We'll take that topic up, the economics of land ownership, absentee landowners, and the wealthy in some other post.
Anyhow, farmers can help save the world. Lawyers can too. Youthful idealism is vital to all human endeavors. But in wanting to be a farmer, and in being a farmer, I tend to think that its something that is practically in your DNA if you have it. Hard to explain, but deep down.
Which I guess is pretty close to the concept of youthful idealism.
Footnotes:
*This is the first original content post on this blog, fwiw. It was originally going to be on Lex Anteinternet, and it actually will be, but here first.
**By farmer here, I meant farmer, or rancher. I frankly have always preferred animals over plants, so ranching would be my first choice.
***We run a whole platoon of blogs, the most active of which as a rule is Lex Anteinternet where this was originally going to be posted.
I had a conversation just yesterday with a Middle American. One of those people, that is, who is from the Midwest and from the middle class. One of those sorts of folks with a Rust Belt background who has lived the real American life, with blue collar grandparents, lower middle class parents, and who has done better than their parents.
Not like people who were born and raised in Wyoming or one of the neighboring states.
It was really interesting.
And it occurs to me that if you are from here, and we do have our own distinct culture, the way you look at topics like careers are fundamentally different than other Americans, or at least Americans from other places. We're practically not Americans in this regard. Or at least those who stay are not.
And that tends to get lost on people as we're a minority, most of the time, in our own state.
I've noted it here before, but I was once flying into our local airport and two oil industry employees were in the seat behind me. They were both from somewhere else. One had been stationed in Casper for awhile, the other was arriving for the first time. The new arrival asked the old one about the people in the town, and the insightful other replied
What you have to realize is that there are two groups of people here. People who came in to work in the boom and those who are from here.
The new arrival then commented that the natives must dislike the new arrivals. That fellow, however, replied:
No, they just know that you are leaving.
And we do.
I've lived through at least three busts, one of which altered my original post high school career plan of becoming a geologist. If you look at it, oil spiked during World War One, the price declined after the war in the 1920s and collapsed during the Great Depression, spiked again during World War Two, declined following the war but then turned rocky in the 50s and 60s, spiked in the early 70s, collapsed in the 80s, rose again thereafter, and then collapsed again in recent times. Being born in 63, I experienced the 60s, but don't recall, them, experienced the 70s, which I do, and then the ups and downs since then.
Indeed, all over town there are accidental monuments to booms prior. Three downtown buildings are named for oil companies, none of which still use the names they did back then and none of which is still in town. A golf course on the edge of town called "Three Crowns" was named for the three refineries that once were here, one of whose grounds is occupied by the golf course. In certain areas of down when they dig a foundation, they hit oil, not due to a natural deposit, but due to leaks long gone by from those facilities. Across town one still operates.
If you are from here, and have lived through it, you come to expect the economy to be this way. You worry about the future but you don't imagine you can control it.
Middle Americans do.
I hadn't really realized this directly, but I should have.
My friend, noted above, hasn't lived in Wyoming except during good times and the recent collapse. He's been panicked and has related that to me more than once. He can't believe that things could have collapsed, and I can't grasp how a person couldn't. Then, in our conversation, it became very plain.
He's a really nice guy with a very nice family, but he views careers in the Middle American sense. That is, you study to find a "good job", by which that means one that pays well. You go where that job leads you, for the high pay. It's all about the pay. The pay determines what you become, what you do, and where you live.
It doesn't for the long term Wyomingites.
Oh sure, pay always matters. Wyomingites are just as wanting to get rich as anyone else,. . . or not.
As there are limits, and the limits are the state itself.
Wyomingites, those born here, or those here for an extremely long time and probably from a neighboring state, have an existential connection with the state that's hard to grasp. We are it, and it is us.
This is completely different from the "oh, gosh, it's so pretty I'm glad I came here" reaction some newcomers have. Lots of the state isn't that pretty. Some Wyoming towns are far from pretty. No, it's something definitely different.
And it's also different from the belief that an industry must keep on keeping on because it must. We see that with lots of people who moved in when the times were good. If things collapse, it's not because Saudi Oil Sheiks can fill up swimming pools with crude oil if they want to, or if Russian oligarchs want to depress the market because they can, or because coal fired power plants are switching to natural gas. It has to be somebody's fault, probably the governments, and probably the Democrats.
Not too many actual Wyomingites feel that way, even if we worked in those industries or wanted to. We just shrug our shoulders and say; "well, we knew the boom would end", because we did.
Of course, as will be pointed out, we never do anything about that. That's our great planning failure. But frankly, it's hard to when the town's filled up with newcomers you know are temporary, and they don't want to change anything as they like the low taxes, etc., and this will just go on forever, because for them, it already has.
Which takes me back to my friend. He's upset as the boom appears to be over and that means it might impact his take home, which in turn means that he might have to leave, or so he imagines.
Why? Well, that's what you do as an American, right? If the dollars are higher in Bangladesh, you go there. You, must.
You must as otherwise you won't be able to afford whatever it is you are seeking to buy, or do.
I knew an elderly Wyoming lawyer, from here, who in his first years didn't practice law as he graduated law school in the Great Depression when there was no work. I've known more than one engineer who took completely different jobs for the same reason. An accountant I served in the National Guard with worked as a carpenter. A different accountant I knew was a rig hand during a boom, as that's where the big money was at the time.
Which gets back to career planning.
When my father planned his career, he started off to become an engineer, but he became a dentist. It was because he knew he could obtain that job an and come back here, as that's what he wanted to do. I know a dentist is the younger son from a ranch family, and that's what he did too. I know lots of older lawyers who were the younger children of ranch families, who took that path as there was no place on the ranch for them. And I'm often surprised by people's whose career paths were absolutely identical to mine, almost to the t.
Both of my career attempts, the one successful and the one that failed, had the same logic behind them. Geology was field that employed people here when I was studying it, and I thought I had a talent for it and would be able to find a job. When that fell through, on to the law, as I'd never heard of an unemployed Wyoming lawyer.
But the state was the primary focus in my mind. I'm of it, it's of me.
"I want my kids to be able to stay here", he told me. Well, so they can.
But whatever the economy holds for Wyoming's future, if that means you go just for the mega bucks, career wise, that career is probably somewhere else.
And that's why a lot of people leave.
Those of us who are from here and stay, really aren't unique as a population. There are plenty of examples of this in others.
In 1876 the Sioux left the reservation for one last foray into the wild. They knew it wouldn't last. That wasn't the point. People who wonder what they were thinking aren't of this region. The Anglo American culture at the time thought they should turn into farmers. They didn't really think so, no matter what.
In Utahan Robert Redford's adaption of A River Runs Through It, the protagonist, who is moving to Chicago, asks his brother to come with him. He responds
Oh no brother, I'll never leave Montana.
In David Lean's adaption of Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Larissa notes when she's being transported away from disaster, that Zhivago's absence isn't accidental.
He'll never leave Russia!
We are native, to this place.
A Swiss painter and illustrator, who painted heavily agrarian scenes.
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