Lex Anteinternet: Missed Vocations?

Lex Anteinternet: Missed Vocations?: 

Missed Vocations?

This thread was originally started months ago, and then sort of abandoned.  I then found it again, and oddly enough, for some other reasons, I started typing out a thread that was sort of related to it.  Given that, I'm picking this one back up.  I quite frankly don't know if it's still on the same topic or not.

Anyhow, the other day I was speaking to a working class fellow who is connected to a lawsuit when the topic of his children came up.  They're in the same line of work that he is.  He told me, "I tried to get them to be doctors or lawyers but . . . "

He probably ought to be glad they didn't listen to him.

I listed to my father the one and only time that he gave me career advice, which I've noted here before, and that was a mistake.  I was planning, at the time, of becoming a game warden.  I was still in high school at the time, probably a junior, and mentioned it, and he noted that there were "a lot of unemployed people around here" with wildlife management degrees. There likely were.  Indeed, a family friend of ours was glad when his son gave up that pursuit to become an electrician for the same reason.  I never commented on it, but it saddened me.

I started off in geology, but when I graduated with that, there were no jobs in it. So, ironically, I ended up with the no job situation anyway.  I went to law school after that, as I'd never heard of an unemployed lawyer.

The other day, a friend of mine from my geology student days, who now works in another field as well, commented on how they can't find people to work. We've been noting the same thing.  He noted that "it's nice to have a job that you love, but most work is just work". 

Truer words were never spoken.  

Having said that, some work is worse than others.  One thing that's been noticeable recently in the law is that younger people are leaving the field of litigation.  Quite a few young law school graduates are just not going to work at all.

On the upper end, where I am, peering out from the edge of my late 50s into my early 60s, I'm at the point where retirement becomes a possibility, or maybe not.  Like Col. Nickerson in A Bride Over The River Kwai, you also begin to look back.  You also find, right about that time, that if you are a professional that you have no real frame of reference for retirement, and that everyone will conspire against it.

Indeed, most conversations that you will get into right about then start off with the "you're too young" or "what would you do?".  But beyond that, there are those who will express outright fear about your retiring, and they're mostly members of your own family.  Nobody encourages a person to postpone retirement more than a spouse, I think.  That's probably not true for people once they hit actual retirement age, say 65 or 67, but if the topic comes up earlier, you'll get the "that's a great idea, if you just get in . . . "  In other words, you need to keep working.

And for a person in my situation, with two kids still in college, that's probably true.  Something has really changed since I was that age in that conditions that existed when I was young are now pushed upwards in years.  

Or perhaps I just didn't notice them then.

Insurance is one such thing. We just switched insurance carriers as insurance for our two college age children is brutally high.  If I were retired right now, that would be the single biggest expense month to month I'd have right now.

So the old plow mule is turned around to plow another row.

"You missed your calling" is a phrase I used to hear adults utter when I was a kid, in reference to people who seemingly should have entered some occupation they didn't ^[1]. .  The phrase was based on the concept of everyone having a "calling".

Given that it was so common, when I was young, I sort of assumed that everyone actually had a specific calling.  I.e., you might have a calling to the priesthood, or you might have one to be an auto mechanic.  I know that I'm not the only one who had this assumption, as one of my uncles mentioned having had the same concept when he was a kid.

That's not the way that Catholics generally understand it, however.   What Catholics actually believe is that people generally receive a calling to a vocation, in religions terms.  As one Catholic site puts it:

A person can have many different callings in life. For instance a person can have a calling to marriage, to fatherhood, and to a certain occupation. In the Catholic worldview everything we do should be ordered toward discerning and responding to the will of God, the ultimate good in an imperfect world. Ordering our lives toward God’s desire is the way in which we get to heaven. We do this in many ways. The following list is not exhaustive:

• Discerning our primary vocation (marriage, priesthood, religious life, etc.)
• Discerning our particular vocation (whom to marry, etc.)
• Following God’s will for our relationships
• Avoiding sin and seeking to examine our conscience to discern where we are falling short and where we are responding to grace
• Seeking to understand how God wants us to respond to circumstances in the world around us

That no doubt is not only partial, it may not even be fully accurate, but generally Catholics believe that you have a calling to a state of life, i.e., some sort of vocation.  Maybe you are specifically called to be a priest, monk, or nun.  Maybe you are called to the married life.  Maybe you aren't called to either, but to something else.

I bring (brought) ^[2]  this up in the context of the news over the past couple of weeks about Native schools in Canada.

Eh?

Bear with me.

Probably most people who might stop in here have read a bit of this news, but I'll first note that reading a news story like this from a foreign country is inherently confusing, as you always feel like you aren't getting the full story, because you are not.  So, given that, those of us down in the US are only partially informed on this story.

From what you can pick up, and in fact a lot of this has been reported before and isn't new, news, this is the story.

Canada and the US both had, in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, a policy of what we can more or less call forced assimilation. This was a government policy.  The general concept was that it was doing Natives a favor if you separated them from their children, and raised the children in the predominant European culture.

Now, this is obviously a gross condensation of the policy and the deeper you get into it, the less uniform it was.  

In the US, for much of this period, there was a policy of cooperation with religious denominations in this effort.  That varied enormously by location and practice.  It was, for example, pretty extensive on the Wind River Reservation, but not in the way noted above. Children weren't separated from their families, but rather Churches located as missions, with schools, on the Reservation.  At least one, the St. Stephen's school, still exists.  At these schools, children came during the day and went home when school was over.

The big U.S. school was the Carlyle school in Pennsylvania, but it wasn't run by a religion at all, but rather by the Federal government.  This appears to be the pattern that Canadian schools first had.

Canada, however, unlike the US, was heir to the English education system, which was much different.  The United Kingdom in historical terms only went to what we call public education pretty recently, starting with minimal public education requirements in 1880, and only requiring education up to age 14 in 1918.  People with money, in the UK, didn't go to public schools, they went to private schools, and given the social stratification of the time, that meant that the people who counted, so to speak, were those people.  In Ireland, which of course was part of the UK up until the result of the Anglo-Irish War, this meant that nearly all the education was provided by the Catholic Church, which wanted out of it when Ireland became independent but which the government didn't cooperate with, meaning Ireland still largely educates its young through the Church.  In Canada, education worked on a mixed English model, with Quebec being the major exception, as the education there was all private.  Indeed, up until the Quiet Revolution most Quebecois were still educated by the Catholic Church, which the Church also wanted out of in Quebec.  Indeed, often missed in the story of the Quiet Revolution was that it came about, in part, as the Church wanted out of education and running the hospitals.  Ireland would have done well to have learned the Canadian lesson at the same time, but still hasn't.

Anyhow, in the US there was a mixed Native American education model.  Some children were carted away from their families and educated in boarding schools, the most famous one of which was run by the United States government.  Some were run by religious institutions. Other children were educated locally, often by religious institutions, but on a model that's familiar to us today and which didn't involve separation from their families. Others simply weren't educated at all.  And as public education advanced in the United States in the 20th Century, Native American children came more and more into local school districts, some of which, like Wyoming's Fremont County School District No. 14, were almost all Native American by default.

So what's the point here?

Well, generally there's a lot of retrospective horror over this system that both the US and Canada had, and not without good reason.  It seems awful now.  At the time, however, it was generally accepted that Native populations should be subject to forced assimilation through education and that was a good thing.

That was never a good thing, but it was the universal view.  The added part of that, however, is that even if that was the European-North American view of things, neither of the two large North American countries were well-prepared to take the task on.

That probably ought to give us some pause about the educational direction we're forcing on young people today. Does it really suit what's going to make them happy?

I can't really use my own example in this context as it's too old to be relevant, but there was zero effort to provide students with any insight into this topic when I was that age.  Figure it out for yourself was the method that was used, which in my case was really figure it out for yourself.  My father, not without reason, was pretty silent on the topic.  My mother was ill, and her contribution was basically "you can go to any school you want to", with Notre Dame being mentioned as a possibility

I can't really use my own example in this context as it's too old to be relevant, but there was zero effort to provide students with any insight into this topic when I was that age.  Figure it out for yourself was the method that was used, which in my case was really figure it out for yourself.  My father, not without reason, was pretty silent on the topic.  My mother was ill, and her contribution was basically "you can go to any school you want to", with Notre Dame being mentioned as a possibility, probably as a cousin of mine who was a good student, and one year older than me, had gone there.

And that suited him really well.  He pursued a course of study that ultimately lead him to a career as a university professor in a neighboring state.

In my own case, the only suggestions on careers that ever came were from a grade school teacher, who suggested to my parents, or rather predicated, that I'd end up a teacher, the comment from my father as noted, some comments from my mother that "you're good at science", and then a comment from Casper College prof Jon Brady that I was suited for an analytical career as a lawyer.  Brady, interestingly, was a lawyer by training who spent his entire post Navy career as a history professor.  That same view, I'd note, is a view held by a lawyer friend of mine, who felt that the only other career I'd be suited for is that of priest, but then he's German and holds a German view of such things.

Anyhow, that's how I ended up where I am.

I've been thinking.Tomorrow it will be twenty-eight years to the day  that I've been in the service.

        

Twenty-eight years in peace and war, I don't suppose I've been at home more  than ten months in all that time.  Still, it's been a good life. I love India. I wouldn't have had it  any other way.   

But there are times... when suddenly you realize you're  nearer the end than the beginning. You wonder...you ask yourself...         what the sum total  of your life represents...what difference your being there  at any time made to anything... or if it made any difference  at all really.  Particularly in comparison  with other men's careers.    

I don't know whether that kind  of thinking is very healthy...but I must admit I've had some thoughts  along those lines...from time to time.

Col. Nicholson, The Bridge On The River Kwai.

I've been looking out at the legal field now, from a 30-year deep in view. . . .no, that's not true.  

I've been looking at litigation, from a 30-year prospective.

And that's not the same thing.

I've worked almost my entire career, well actually all of my entire career, in litigation.  I can't say that that view is an encouraging one, really.  Conditions have in fact gotten worse, it seems to me.  Lots of attention is paid to the sorry state of American politics but very little to the sorry state of the American justice system, i.e., the litigation system, as people are acclimated to it.

A Catholic saint who left his career as a lawyer to become a Priest remarked to one of his friends that he was leaving the practice, as "there were too many ways to lose your soul" as a lawyer.  I don't know about people who draft contracts, but it's certainly true of litigation.  And it's gotten worse over the years.

It's also something that younger lawyers now generally want no part of, as has become increasingly evident in the post pandemic onset world.  To really find that "glory of the American judicial system" type of belief, you have to be talking to lawyers who are now in their 50s.  Nobody else believes that, and younger lawyers want no part of it.  

That's become increasingly evident to me in recent months.  I look across the deposition table and the faces I see are only a little younger than mine . . . if not older.

Frost wrote on The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

John Greeleaf Whittier, in Maud Muller, lamented what might have been.

Maud Muller, on a summer's day,

Raked the meadows sweet with hay.

 

Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth

Of simple beauty and rustic health.

 

Singing, she wrought, and her merry glee

The mock-bird echoed from his tree.

 

But, when she glanced to the far-off town,

White from its hill-slope looking down,

 

The sweet song died, and a vague unrest

And a nameless longing filled her breast—

 

A wish, that she hardly dared to own,

For something better than she had known.

 

The Judge rode slowly down the lane,

Smoothing his horse's chestnut mane.

 

He drew his bridle in the shade

Of the apple-trees, to greet the maid,

 

And ask a draught from the spring that flowed

Through the meadow across the road.

 

She stooped where the cool spring bubbled up,

And filled for him her small tin cup,

 

And blushed as she gave it, looking down

On her feet so bare, and her tattered gown.

 

"Thanks!" said the Judge, "a sweeter draught

From a fairer hand was never quaffed."

 

He spoke of the grass and flowers and trees,

Of the singing birds and the humming bees;

 

Then talked of the haying, and wondered whether

The cloud in the west would bring foul weather.

 

And Maud forgot her briar-torn gown,

And her graceful ankles bare and brown;

 

And listened, while a pleasant surprise

Looked from her long-lashed hazel eyes.

 

At last, like one who for delay

Seeks a vain excuse, he rode away,

 

Maud Muller looked and sighed: "Ah, me!

That I the Judge's bride might be!

 

"He would dress me up in silks so fine,

And praise and toast me at his wine.

 

"My father should wear a broadcloth coat;

My brother should sail a painted boat.

 

"I'd dress my mother so grand and gay,

And the baby should have a new toy each day.

 

"And I'd feed the hungry and clothe the poor,

And all should bless me who left our door."

 

The Judge looked back as he climbed the hill,

And saw Maud Muller standing still.

 

"A form more fair, a face more sweet,

Ne'er hath it been my lot to meet.

 

"And her modest answer and graceful air

Show her wise and good as she is fair.

 

"Would she were mine, and I to-day,

Like her, a harvester of hay:

 

"No doubtful balance of rights and wrongs,

Nor weary lawyers with endless tongues,

 

"But low of cattle, and song of birds,

And health, and quiet, and loving words."

 

But he thought of his sisters, proud and cold,

And his mother, vain of her rank and gold.

 

So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,

And Maud was left in the field alone.

 

But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,

When he hummed in court an old love-tune;

 

And the young girl mused beside the well,

Till the rain on the unraked clover fell.

 

He wedded a wife of richest dower,

Who lived for fashion, as he for power.

 

Yet oft, in his marble hearth's bright glow,

He watched a picture come and go:

 

And sweet Maud Muller's hazel eyes

Looked out in their innocent surprise.

 

Oft when the wine in his glass was red,

He longed for the wayside well instead;

 

And closed his eyes on his garnished rooms,

To dream of meadows and clover-blooms.

 

And the proud man sighed, with a secret pain,

"Ah, that I were free again!

 

"Free as when I rode that day,

Where the barefoot maiden raked her hay."

 

She wedded a man unlearned and poor,

And many children played round her door.

 

But care and sorrow, and child-birth pain,

Left their traces on heart and brain.

 

And oft, when the summer sun shone hot

On the new-mown hay in the meadow lot,

 

And she heard the little spring brook fall

Over the roadside, through the wall,

 

In the shade of the apple-tree again

She saw a rider draw his rein,

 

And, gazing down with timid grace,

She felt his pleased eyes read her face.

 

Sometimes her narrow kitchen walls

Stretched away into stately halls;

 

The weary wheel to a spinnet turned,

The tallow candle an astral burned;

 

And for him who sat by the chimney lug,

Dozing and grumbling o'er pipe and mug,

 

A manly form at her side she saw,

And joy was duty and love was law.

 

Then she took up her burden of life again,

Saying only, "It might have been."

 

Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,

For rich repiner and household drudge!

 

God pity them both! and pity us all,

Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;

 

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

 

Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies

Deeply buried from human eyes;

 

And, in the hereafter, angels may

Roll the stone from its grave away!

Paul Anka definatly wrote, however, about "my way" for Frank Sinatra.

And now the end is here

And so I face that final curtain

My friend I'll make it clear

I'll state my case, of which I'm certain

I've lived a life that's full

I traveled each and every highway

And more, much more

I did it, I did it my way

Regrets, I've had a few

But then again too few to mention

I did what I had to do

I saw it through without exemption

I planned each charted course

Each careful step along the byway

And more, much, much more

I did it, I did it my way

Yes, there were times I'm sure you knew

When I bit off more than I could chew

But through it all, when there was doubt

I ate it up and spit it out

I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way

For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself then he has naught

Not to say the things that he truly feels

And not the words of someone who kneels

Let the record shows I took all the blows and did it my way

And Édith Piaf  claimed, likewise, to regret nothing.

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien, qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

C'est payé, balayé, oublié

Je me fous du passé

Avec mes souvenirs

J'ai allumé le feu

Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs

Je n'ai plus besoin d'eux

Balayer les amours

Avec leurs trémolos

Balayer pour toujours

Je repars à zéro

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien, qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Car ma vie, car mes joies

Aujourd'hui, ça commence avec toi

So what to make of all of that.

Well, maybe they're all correct, in context.  Probably the healthiest view is that of Anka and Piaf, maybe.  If so, it's not one I hold myself.  I wonder what might have been.

People tell me I should not.  But I find myself like Col. Nicholson like that.

Which gets me back, I guess, to the original point of this now overlong essay.  The horrors described in the Canadian example are fairly mis-portrayed, or are to at least some degree, and we know that horrors likewise occurred in the American example that have no religious role in them at all.  And I've earlier written on the example of the Quiet Revolution and its aftermath.  What I suspect, to some degree, all of this tells us is that a lot of people in those examples were not in their real vocations.  They took those ones up for various reasons, but a true calling, at least in some instances, was likely not there.

We can't really expect a calling, for most people, in the secular world.  But inclinations and talents do point us in certain directions.  People discerning a talent for analysis thought I should go into law, something I didn't see in myself.  That habit or inclination is definitely there, however, and spills out constantly on this cyber page.

What I likely didn't and still don't have an inclination for is fighting, which is what arguing really is.  But I've spent a life time doing it now, and apparently am pretty good at.  That brings up another oddity of human nature.  Some people are endowed with talents that they probably realize, but they don't really appreciate in an existential sense.  People endowed with athletic ability, for example, who are disinterested in sports.  People who can argue really well, but don't like arguing.

Even more mysterious is the strong drive towards something that can never be fulfilled, and this too is a central aspect, really, of missed vocations.  Willard Cochrane, an agricultural advisor and economist in the Kennedy administration, worried about the fate of so so farmers, for a lack of a better way to put it.   That is, farmers who were good enough to get by, up until then, but not good enough to get by in the Cold War fence to fence farming regime that the Cold War brought in.  Plenty of people have a deep love of something that is an occupational vocation, in the secular sense, or used to be, but in the modern world, are wholly unable to fulfill it.  People who would have been farmers, ranchers, or whatever, and now cannot be, as the means are not there for most modern people.

Indeed, I think the entire current culture of pet ownership shows that to a degree.  People will pack a dog around to their office jobs or install a cat in an urban office as in a world that better reflected their natures, they'd be around animals all the time. We all would.  In the world we have, we aren't, and we're much the lesser as a result.

Indeed, that gets back to the entire subject here.  I've looked at it in the context of the past.  I.e., women who became nuns as they wanted to be teachers or nurses in Quebec, or men who became Priests as they wanted to be academics.  In my generation and the preceding one, there are lots of men who became lawyers, doctors and dentists because they'd grown up farmers and ranchers, but there was no place on the homestead for them, so they took a professional occupation nearby.

Indeed, also in my generation, and I think in the prior one, the necessity to obtain and keep work was a huge deal, and forms a great deal of the current lack of understanding on the part of these generations and the younger ones.  Having a job was the most important thing about jobs in general.  People sent their children into law, medicine and the like not because they thought their kids would make great lawyers or doctors, but because they'd make money there and those jobs seemed stable.  That no doubt has massively contributed to the large dissatisfaction rate with law that young lawyers have, with some 60% of new lawyers wanting out.

It is, we know, a fallen world.

Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

Genesis 3.

I guess we can't expect much better.

But I think we do.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things...

Thoreau, Walden.

Where does this lead us?

I'm not sure, but I suppose it behooves us to try to find our vocation and see if we have a calling, and to listen to it.  Consider that deeply and wisely.  Pray about it.

Footnotes.

1. This is where the old text starts.

2.  Part of the older text, showing how much time has passed since I first started working on this thread.

Lex Anteinternet: Refusing to admit a misake

Lex Anteinternet: Refusing to admit a misake: 

Refusing to admit a misake

Now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an intellectual fault; it is a moral fault also. It is not merely our mental inability to understand the mistake we have made. It is also our spiritual refusal to admit that we have made a mistake. 

G. K. Chesterton Eugenics and Other Evils

Foothill Agrarian: Over the Horizon

Foothill Agrarian: Over the Horizon: Fundamentally, Flying Mule Sheep Company is in the business of turning sunlight, carbon dioxide, and rainwater into meat and fiber. Our shee...

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXVI. Pets and Pope Francis, the man who can't get a break. Pangur Bán. Warped Hollywood. Ghislane? The return of Boston marriages. Khardasian Attention Disorder

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXVI. Pets and P...: 

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXVI. Pets and Pope Francis, the man who can't get a break. Pangur Bán. Warped Hollywood. Ghislane? The return of Boston marriages. Khardasian Attention Disorder

There's no such thing as "fur babies"

Pope Francis commented on childless couples and pets.

Before I go into that, I'm going to note that one of the things about Pope Francis is that he tends to be incredibly hard to pigeonhole, even though his fans and critics love to go around doing just that.  And here we have just such an example.  Only weeks away from making it pretty clear that the Latin Tridentine Mass needs to be a thing of the past, as far as he's concerned, and while he's the Bishop of Rome, he says something that's radically. . . traditional.

Here's what he said, in so far as I tell, as I can't find a full transcript of his remarks.

Today ... we see a form of selfishness. We see that some people do not want to have a child.

Sometimes they have one, and that's it, but they have dogs and cats that take the place of children.

This may make people laugh, but it is a reality.

[This] "is a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and diminishes us, takes away our humanity", he added.

Oh you know where this is going to go. . . 

Right away I saw predictable "I'm not selfish, it's my deep abiding love of the environment. . . "

Yeah, whatever.

Apparently there were a fair number of comments of that type, as a subsequent article on this topic found that, nope, most childless couples are childless as they don't want children, not because of their deep abiding concern about the environment.

Indeed, tropes like that are just that, tropes.  People tend to excuse or justify conduct that they engage in that they are uncomfortable excusing for self-centered or materialistic reasons for more ennobled ones, or even for ones that just aren't attributed to something greater, in some sense.  

Not everyone, mind you, you will find plenty of people who don't have children and justify that on that basis alone.  Indeed, in the 70s through the mid 90s, I think that was basically what the justification was, to the extent that people felt they needed one.  More recently that seems to have changed, although there are plenty of people who will simply state they don't want children as they're focused on what the personally want, rather than some other goal.  Others, however, have to attribute it, for some reason to a cause du jour.  In the 80s it was the fear of nuclear war, I recall.  Now it's the environment, although it was somewhat then as well.  I suppose for a tiny minority of people, that's actually true, but only a minority.

Whatever it is, the reaction to the Pope's statement will cause and is causing a minor firestorm.  Oh, but it'll get better.

The same Pope has already made some Catholic conservatives mad by his comments equating destroying the environment with sin.   And there's a certain section of the Trad and Rad Trad Catholic community that's unwilling to credit Pope Francis with anything, even though he says some extremely traditional things, particularly in this area.

A comment like this one, if it had been made by Pope Benedict, would have sparked commentary on the Catholic internet and podcasts for at least a time.  There's no way that Patrick Coffin or Dr. Taylor Marshall wouldn't have commented on it, and run with it in that event.

Will they now?

Well, they ought to.

Am I going to? 

No, not really.

I could be proven wrong, but I doubt I will be.

The Pope's point will be difficult for the childless to really grasp.  I don't think I became fully adult until we had children, really.  People who don't have children don't really know what its like to, I think.  And I think that probably includes even those who grew up in large families.

At any rate, I have a bit of a different point, that being my ongoing one about the industrialization of female labor.  In no small part, in my view, childless couples in general have come about as our modern industrialized society emphasizes that everyone's principal loyalty should be to their workplace or a career, without question.  As put by Col. Saito in the epic The Bridge On The River Kwai, people are to be "happy in their work".

That means that they don't have time for children, they believe, and moreover the children are societal obstacles to the concept that the only thing that matters is career.  It's the one place that ardent capitalist and ardent socialist come together.  And, as its often noted, particularly by both working mothers and folks like Bernie Sanders, it's difficult to be both a mother and worker, with it being my guess that the more education that goes into a woman's career, the more this is the case.  Society, and by that we mean every industrialized society, has no solutions to this, and there probably aren't any.  About the only one that Sanders and his ilk can come up with is warehousing children sort of like chickens at the Tyson farms.

It's also a lie, of course.  Careers, by and large, don't make people fulfilled or happy, for the most part, although there are certainly individual exceptions.  Statistical data more than demonstrates that.

The Pope, by the way, is not against pets.

Messe ocus Pangur Bán,
cechtar nathar fria saindán;
bíth a menma-sam fri seilgg,
mu menma céin im saincheirdd

Caraim-se fos, ferr cach clú,
oc mu lebrán léir ingnu;
ní foirmtech frimm Pangur bán,
caraid cesin a maccdán.

Ó ru·biam — scél cen scís —
innar tegdais ar n-óendís,
táithiunn — díchríchide clius —
ní fris tarddam ar n-áthius.

Gnáth-húaraib ar gressaib gal
glenaid luch inna lín-sam;
os mé, du·fuit im lín chéin
dliged n-doraid cu n-dronchéill.

Fúachid-sem fri frega fál
a rosc anglése comlán;
fúachimm chéin fri fégi fis
mu rosc réil, cesu imdis,

Fáelid-sem cu n-déne dul
hi·n-glen luch inna gérchrub;
hi·tucu cheist n-doraid n-dil,
os mé chene am fáelid.

Cía beimmi amin nach ré,
ní·derban cách ar chéle.
Maith la cechtar nár a dán,
subaigthius a óenurán.

Hé fesin as choimsid dáu
in muid du·n-gní cach óenláu;
du thabairt doraid du glé
for mu mud céin am messe.

I and Pangur Bán, each of us two at his special art:
his mind at hunting (mice), my own mind is in my special craft.
I love to rest—better than any fame—at my booklet with diligent science:
not envious of me is Pangur Bán: he himself loves his childish art.
When we are—tale without tedium—in our house, we two alone,
we have—unlimited (is) feat-sport—something to which to apply our acuteness.
It is customary at times by feat of valour, that a mouse sticks in his net,
and for me there falls into my net a difficult dictum with hard meaning.
His eye, this glancing full one, he points against the wall-fence:
I myself against the keenness of science point my clear eye, though it is very feeble.
He is joyous with speedy going where a mouse sticks in his sharp-claw:
I too am joyous, where I understand a difficult dear question.
Though we are thus always, neither hinders the other:
each of us two likes his art, amuses himself alone.
He himself is the master of the work which he does every day:
while I am at my own work, (which is) to bring difficulty to clearness.

Pangur Bán, a poem by an unknown Medieval Irish monk.

The Seamus Heany translation, which I like better.  It really gets at the nature of the poem:

I and Pangur Bán my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.

‘Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

The Values candidates

Jeanette Rankin of Montana, who was a pacifist, and voted against delcaring war in 1917 and in 1941. She's a hero, as she stuck to her declared values.

While I’m at it, I'm developing a deep suspicion of conservative candidates and figures that express certain highly conservative social positions but don't quite seem to adhere to them in their own lives.  This coming from somebody who is obviously highly socially conservative themselves.

This comes to mind in the context of "family values", "protecting the family" and the like.  I see and read stuff like that from conservatives all the time.  So if you are saying that you strongly value the family, and protecting the family, etc., why don't you have one?

Now, some people are no doubt deeply shocked by that question, but it's a legitimate one, and I'm not the first person to raise it.  If a person might ask if I seriously expect people to answer the question, well I do.

Now, in complete fairness, all sorts of people don't have children for medical reasons.  But more often than that, if a couple don't have them, they don't want them. That's what's up with that.  And you really can't campaign on your deep love of the family if you are foreclosing that part of the family in your own lives, absent some really good reason.  More often than not, the reason is money and career.

Recently I saw, for example, a statement that a person is deeply committed to family and loves spending time with their nieces.  Well, everyone likes spending time, for the most part, with nieces and nephews.  That's not even remotely similar to having children, however.  Not at all.

I'll go one further on this and note this as I do.

The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones.

Luke, 16:10.

I note this as some of the conservative value candidates, if you look into their backgrounds, have question marks that should give pause for the reason noted above. If a person doesn't keep to their principals in small things, or basic things, why would they keep them on anything else?

One conservative candidate that I'm aware of, when you look up that person's background, was born of an ethnicity that's overwhelmingly Catholic and went to Catholic schools growing up.  That person was undoubtedly a Catholic. That didn't preclude, however, the candidate from getting divorced and remarried to another person who was divorced.

Now, that's quite common in our society, but it's completely contrary to the Catholic faith without some explanation.  Maybe there is one.  I don't know, but it's a fair question, just as it would be if a Jewish candidate grew up in an Orthodox household but operates a delicatessen featuring ham.  That may seem odd, but if you are willing to compromise on small things, you'll get around to the big ones, if the small ones also express a deep principle.

If you won't compromise on small things, or things that are represented as elemental to your declared world view, you are dependable in a crisis. On the other hand, if you participated in a faith, and were educated by it, and okay with its elements, and it formed part of your worldview . . right up until you had to do something difficult and chose the easier path. . . well, there's no real reason to believe that haven gotten there once, you won't do it again.

The candidate, I'd note, has been stone-cold silent on the insurrection.  From that, you can tell the candidate knows it was an insurrection, but is unwilling to say diddly.

The Primordal Connection

St. Jerome with lion.  St. Jerome is supposesd to have taken a thorn out of a lion's paw, and the lion thereafter stayed with him. While some might doubt some aspects of this, St. Jerome's lion is also recounted as having caused fear in the monestary in which he lived, and having adopted the monestary's donkey as a friend.

Back to pets for a second, one added thing I think about them is that for a lot of people, they're the last sole remaining contact with nature they have.

There are lots of animal species that live in close contact with each other and depend on each other.  We're one.  We cooperated with wolves, and they became dogs as they helped us hunt. Cats took us in (not the other way around) as we're dirty, and we attract mice.  We domesticated horses, camels and reindeer for transportation.  And so on.

We miss them.

One more way that technology and modern industrialization has ruined things.  Cats and dogs remind us of what we once were.

And could be, again.

Warped legacies

An awful lot of what the Pope is tapping into has to deal with the combined factors of moderns forgetting what, well, sex is for, and what its implications are, and that root morality and human nature remain unchanged.  There are probably more generations between modern house cats and Pangur Bán than there are between your ancestors who were waking up each morning in the Piacenzian and you.

Which takes us to men, behaving badly, and everyone turning a blind eye.

And, of course, Sex and the City.

She is fiercely protective of Carrie Bradshaw and livid that she and everyone else at the show has been put into this position, It is not about the money, but rather her legacy. Carrie was all about helping women and now, under her watch, women are saying that they have been hurt.

Sarah Jessica Parker on the scandal involving James Noth.

M'eh.

A note from Wikipedia regarding the series:

When the series premiered, the character was praised by critics as a positive example of an independent woman in the vein of Mary Richards. However, retrospective analysis tends to place more emphasis on the character's repeated and often unrepentant infidelities, with many critics instead viewing her as narcissistic.

Carrie was about helping women?  Well, excuse me if that was deluded.

Scary legacies

This news item came out the same day, I'd note, that Ghislane Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking.  And by that we mean procuring underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein.

Eew, ick.

Connection? Well, none directly.

Or maybe.  More narcissism and obsession with unrestrained desire, or lust.  

It sort of seems that you can't unleash this without it oozing out as filth sooner or later.

On Maxwell, because I tend to get my news by reading, I'm left perplexed by how a person says her first name, Ghislaine.  I have no idea. I heard it on the nightly news the other day, but the spelling is so odd, I immediately forgot how to pronounce it.

Boston Marriages

Some recent headlines from the ill historically informed press department:

What is a Platonic life partnership? These couples are breaking societal relationship norms

And:

Platonic Partnerships Are On The Rise, So I Spoke To These Friends Who Have Chosen To Live The Rest Of Their Lives Together
"I don't think our love and commitment together should pale in comparison to romantic love."

Oh my gosh! This means that people don't always default to acting like their characters in Sex In The City or Sex Lives of College Girls!

Could this be a new trend?!?  Oh my oh my, what would it mean.

Well, maybe people are just defaulting back to normal, but we're unable to grasp that as we've been steeped in seventy years of Hugh Hefner pornification of absolutely everything. ^[1]  This isn't new.  Indeed, we've dealt with this here before in our  Lex Anteinternet: The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past...

 post. Let's take a look:

But there is more to look at here.

Another extremely orthodox cleric but one of an extremely intellectual bent, and who is therefore sometimes not very predictable, is Father Hugh Barbour, O. Pream.  I note that as his comment on same gender attraction in women was mentioned earlier here and came out in a direction that most would not suspect in the context of a "Boston Marriage".  Father Barbour did not license illicit sexual contact, i.e., sex outside of marriage, in any context either, but he did have a very nuanced view of attraction between women that's almost wholly unique in some ways.  Like the discussion above, but in a more nuanced form, it gets into the idea that modern society is so bizarrely sexually focused that its converted the concept of attraction to absolute need, failing to grasp the nature of nearly everything, and sexualized conduct that need not be.  Barbour issued an interesting opinion related to this back in 2013, at which time there had just been a huge demonstration in France regarding the redefinition of the nature of marriage. 

Katherine Coman and Katherine Lee Bates who lived together as female housemates for over twenty years in a "Wellesley Marriage", something basically akin to what's called a Boston Marriage today.  Named for Wellesley College, due to its association with it, Wellesley Marriages were arrangements of such type between academic women, where as Boston Marriages more commonly features such arrangements between women of means.  Barbour noted these types of arrangements in a basically approving fashion, noting that its only in modern society when these arrangements are seemingly nearly required to take on a sexual aspect, which of course he did not approve of.

Hmmm. . . . 

Men and women who don't marry have always been unusual, but the sexualization of everything in the post Hefner world has made their situation considerably more difficult, really.  Society has gone from an expectation that the young and single would abstain from sex until married to the position that there must be something wrong with them if they are not.  This has gone so far as to almost require same gender roommates, past their college years, to engage in homosexual sex.  I.e, two women or two men living together in their college years is no big deal, but if they're doing it by their 30s, they're assumed to be gay and pretty much pressured to act accordingly.

Truth be known, not everyone always matches the median on everything, as we will know.  For some reason, this has been unacceptable in this are as society became more and more focused on sex.

At one time, the phenomenon of the lifelong bachelor or "spinster" wasn't that uncommon, and frankly it didn't bear the stigma that people now like to believe.  It was harder for women than for men, however, without a doubt.  People felt sorry for women that weren't married by their early 30s and often looked for ways to arrange a marriage for them, a fair number of such women ultimately agreeing to that status, with probably the majority of such societally arranged marriages working out. Some never did, however.

For men, it was probably more common, and it was just assumed that things hadn't worked out.  After their early 30s a certain "lifelong bachelor" cache could attach to it, with the reality of it not tending to match the image, but giving societal approval to it.  In certain societies it was particularly common, such as in the famed Garrison Keillor "Norwegian Bachelor Farmer" instance or in the instance of similar persons in Ireland, where it was very common for economic reasons.  

People didn't tend to assume such people were homosexual, and they largely were not.  Indeed, again contrary to what people now assume, except for deeply closeted people or people who had taken up certain occupations in order to hide it, people tended to know who actually was homosexual.

I can recall all of this being the case when I was a kid.  My grandmother's neighbor was a bachelor his entire life who worked as an electrician.  After he came home from a Japanese Prisoner of War camp following World War Two, he just wanted to keep to himself.  A couple of my mother's aunts were lifelong single women and, at least in one case, one simply didn't want to marry as she didn't want children, and the other had lost a fiancé right after World War One and never went on to anyone else.  Her secretary desk is now in my office.  In none of these instances would anyone have accused these individuals of being homosexual.

Taking this one step further, some people in this category did desire the close daily contact of somebody they were deeply friends with, in love with if you will, but that need not be sexual.  Love between women and love between men can and does exist without it having a sexual component.  Interestingly, it is extremely common and expected when we are young and up into our 20s, but after that society operates against it.  People form deep same gender relationships in schools, on sporting fields, in barracks and in class.  

Some of those people won't marry, and there's no reason that their friendships shouldn't continue on in the post college roommate stage.

Well, society won't have it as everything needs to be about sex, all the time.  Haven't you watched The Big Bang Theory?

Tatting for attention?

Kourtney Kardashian, I think (I can't really tell the various Kardashians from one another and don't really have a sufficient interest to learn who is who), apparently is now all tatted up now that she has a tattooed boyfriend or fiancé or something that is.  And by this, we mean heavily tattooed.

Like, enough already?

Apparently Salena Gomez has a bleeding rose tattoo.  I don't get that either, but I'm sure that piles of ink will be spilled on it.

Footnotes:

It would be worth noting here that early on a female researching on Hefner's early publications noted how much of it was actually in the nature of barely disguised child pornography, with cartoons particularly depicting this.  This lead to an investigation in Europe, and the magazine rapidly stopped it, but it's interesting in that the magazine was so debased that it not only portrayed women as stupid, sterile, top-heavy, and nymphomaniacs, but also underage.

The impact however had been created, and by the 1970s the full on sexual exploitation of child models was on.  As debased as society has become, it's at least retreated from this.

Lex Anteinternet: The Great Hesitation?

Lex Anteinternet: The Great Hesitation?: 

The Great Hesitation?

Evidence for the “great resignation” is thin on the ground

Job quits are not unusually high

So states The Economist.

And not just the economist.

Perhaps. . . but I think something else may be going on, which explains the caption of the entry here.  Let's call it The Great Hesitation.

The recent news stories on the Great Resignation are claiming its pretty much bunk.  But what was it in the first place?  Well, supposedly just what the name implied.  People were quitting their jobs in the post Pandemic world. 

Apparently, they aren't.

That doesn't mean something isn't going on.

Some personal observations.

A couple of months ago, in late summer, I tried a case in Denver.  The hotel I stayed in downtown had very little in the way of staff.  We were warned about that upon checking in.  It was also quite spartan downtown in general, and maybe that explains it.  Maybe they just hadn't added staff back, as they weren't anywhere near at capacity. . .maybe.

Countering that, downtown restaurants were back open, and they seemed fully staffed and plenty full.  Well, full, not hugely full as they often had been.

Further, however, it seems that the entire legal industry is experiencing an entry level lawyer shortage.

Not that there's a shortage of graduating folks from law school.  Not hardly.  There are lots of new graduates.  They're just not taking law jobs.  And that isn't a singular observation, it's extremely widespread.

This is also true of staffing positions for law firm.  Lots of openings. . .no takers.

So what's going on?

Well, maybe not resignations, although one newly minted lawyer I'm familiar with, who was mentioned in a draft post here the other day, is on her third or fourth position in just two years.  But some of those were temporary by nature (one definitely wasn't).

Rather, it seems fairly obvious, people aren't going back to jobs they once held, or they're holding off entering the job market entirely.

At some point, that probably has to end, but this is some sort of big social trend.  And it's been going on for a while.  We may have in fact just noticed it, and in part it may be somewhat amplified right now.

So what's up?

Well, a lot of what's up is what we've noted here again and again about the nature of modern work, and people are reacting to it. And the people who are reacting, are those at the entry level, or those who have been knocked out of work.  People aren't getting in, and they aren't coming back.  

Those who never left, have kept on keeping on.

The other thing that is going on is, I suspect, something that's been going on for quite some time.  And its a generational thing.

The World War Two and Silent Generations weren't given much option about working, but because of the war and developments in it, combined with the advance of certain types of (domestic) machinery, they entered work at a pretty advantageous time.  The World War Two Generation built the modern American work culture, although they did it when they were quite young.  And the Great Depression and the Second World War enormously amplified a trend that had been going on since the early 1900s, which was the migration from the country to the city.  The Silent Generation went along with all of this, as it didn't really have any choice. The Baby Boomers, in spite of initially protesting everything, fully embraced it by the 1970s, theirs being the last generation to enter the workplace in which 1) you didn't need a college education in order to get a decent paying job; and 2) a bachelors degree pretty much let you write your own ticket.

Things have fallen apart since then, although the generations that entered upper middle class positions haven't noticed or have excused it away.

It turned out, and turns out, that a bunch of the things Americans were told since 1945 about work, combined with economic policies in place since that time, have created a work life that people simply just don't like.  Shipping blue collar jobs overseas, amplifying the move to the big cities beyond what was already in place, and putting everyone in cubicle jobs didn't suit their tastes as it doesn't suit nature.

Additionally the inflating requirement for a college degree, combined with the forced industrialization of female labor has pushed the marginalization of young adults back to some degree.

Indeed, in the draft posts I have up here, I have this item, which I'll incorporate here as its somewhat relevant.

 Some time ago we took this highly unpopular view here in our Zeitgeist series.

Children and Forced Industrialization

You've seen them here before, and yes, here they are again.  Migrant farm couples, 1938.

I've come to be simply amazed by the degree to which Americans are now acclimated to the concept that the government ought to pay for things, well, related to sex in some way or another.

Joe Biden's economic "relief" bill, which really addresses a topic that no longer really needs addressing, includes a big boost for pre K childcare.

Why?

To make my surprise, if that's what it is, more plain, what that means is that money will come from taxes (and loans) to help pay for the childcare of people so that they don't have to pay for it, directly, themselves.  

More bluntly, this will make it easier, which is part of what is being boosted as a reason to do it, for those with low incomes to have two working parents, as the thesis is that otherwise they'll have to make economic choices that will be difficult.

First of all, while it makes me sound like a Marxist saying it, isn't it clear that what this amounts to is the forced industrial employment of women?  What hte goal really is, is to make it easier for working mothers to work, which rapidly equates into forcing them to work, which is essentially what our economy had done over the past 70 years.  That is, we've converted from the early industrial revolution economy of forcing men out of their homes to work from eight to twelve hours per day to one t hat now requires women to do the same.  In order to do that we've subsidized all sorts of things to the benefit, essentially, of industry, and now we propose to go one step further.

Indeed, the irony of this is that this is where Marxist and Capitalist come back around and meet.  Early Marxists sought the dissolution of marriage and the collectivization of child care.  That has been regarded s horrific, but that's exactly what industrial economies have done over the past seventy years and the Biden Administration proposes to knock it up a notch.

This isn't just.

It isn't just to force women to leave their children in order to work.  It likewise wasn't just to do that in the case of men, but the level of subsidization evolved into force was lower in that case, although still very real.

It also isn't just to tax people in order to pay for the children of others, except in dire emergency.  People like me who have paid for and raised our own children are now being asked to pay for the care of children we don't remotely know, including children who are raised in circumstances which we wouldn't approve of.  If, for example, we can be taxed to pay for childcare for these children, can we also justly require that they be raised with basic sets fo values, including the value of a two parent home, which quite a few won't have?  No, certainly not, we won't be allowed to suggest that.

I feel this way, I'd note, on a lot of programs in this area, the long lasting ones which provide examples of why going down this path is a bad idea.  I've mentioned the "free and reduced" lunch and breakfast programs before, which directly transfers the duty of feeding children from parent to government.  I know that it had good intentions, all of these things have unthinking good intentions.  The proposals to wipe out student debt or provide free college education also have good intentions, and also are all massively subject to the law of unintended consequences.  What they also are, without it really being thought out, are subsidies for industry in varying degrees.

I know that the ship has sailed on many of these things, the strong evidence against doing them notwithstanding.  It's almost impossible to go back, once these steps are taken.  Americans may imagine themselves in some quarters as being rugged individualist, but even people who imagine themselves to be real libertarians acclimate themselves to such things pretty quickly.  But it is interesting to wonder what would happen if things went the other way.  I.e., if, save for K through 12 education itself, the government simply got out of this area entirely.  Feed your own children, provide for you own children, no subsidies for childcare of any kind, and not even any governmental bodies that seek to enforce child support orders.  Leave it up to the individual.

It'd be really rough for some at first, but I suspect pretty quickly a lot of the old rules would rebound once the burdens returned to the individual.  It might even do more economically than proposals to raise minimum wages would, as lots of families would be back to one breadwinner.

But no, we're just going to keep in marrying the government and making it the big parent.

I should note that probably right away, if anyone reads this, there will be a claim that this is radically traditionalist or something, or maybe anti feminist.  Feminism, I'd note, is a term that's now so broad to pracitically not have a meanning without further refining, but in any event, none of that is intended.

Indeed, I'd note that its already the case that the public sector has, in some instances, taken care of this much the same way that it took care of health insurance during the 1940s.  It's a recruiting incentive.  Some big firms of various kinds have in house daycares so their female employees don't have to worry about finding one and still being able to get to work.

In addition to that, at least by my observation, it's also the case that workplaces have becoming much more child friendly over the years, particularly in recent years.  I never observed children in working spaces when I was  younger.  Never.  Only farms and ranches were the exception.  Now I see them all the time.  Its not unusual at all for female employees to bring children into the office for one reason or another, often for long hours, and for that to result in very little notice.   Therefore, I really don't think that the claim "women will have to choose to go childless" is true, although that no doubt has an economic aspect to it. The poorer you are, the fewer the options.  It's one thing to bring your child into a business office. It's quite another to your job at the bar or restaurant.

I also don't think that this would ipso facto mean an increase in abortions.  Indeed, the current legal trends are towards increasing restrictions in this area as both men and women support increasing restrictions.  And social trends seem to suggest that younger people are less interested in acting like their grandparents who came of age in the 60s and 70s in this area in general.

What I do think, however, is that it forces choices up front and therefore vest "moral hazard" where it ought to be vested, at the individual level.  That probably reemphasizes some old values while combing them with the new economy, which should be done.

It probably won't be, however.

That pretty much guaranties that this blog won't be receiving any Radial Feminist Of The Year awards.

Following that, we ran across this item on Twitter:

I don’t want to work. I want to be home with my baby and I can’t afford it. I hate that. I hate it so much.

My point would have been a different one at the time I first noted these things, but they're still relevant to this one.  Lots of people who would have entered their full adult years in their late teens and then gone on to pretty stable adult lives by their mid 20s, now are in college and university for many years instead by necessity.  Some are pursuing careers that they really want to be in, both men and women, but many are there by economic force or compulsion  The reason that's relevant is that they've become acclimated to it, and at the same time know that jobs they've trained for that they really dont' want won't be all that much when they obtain them.  

The solution?

Well, maybe they're making it now.  If much of the old economy was remade in a much more local, direct, fashion, it would not be a bad thing.

2021 Holiday Reflections. The Agricultural Edition.

This will be an unusual post for here, as I'm doing something unusual in general.

Most years, but not all years, I post a "Resolutions" thread on our companion blog, Lex Anteinternet.  This started off, quite frankly, as being satirical in nature, but this year it's much less so.  Satire is a delicate form of humor, often ineffectively done, and this past year hasn't been very funny, so there's not much that satire would really do, for the most part, other than be super snarky.  Snark is almost never helpful.

Anyhow, this blog, which used to simply be a catalog of agrarian themed entries on Lex Anteinternet, has grown into its own a bit and now has a little original content, although not much. Anyhow, we're going to run this post independently, even though another Resolutions thread will already be up on Lex Anteinternet.

Well, two, actually.

Anyhow, this past two years, if anything, have been ones that have shown how Chesteron, Leopold and Abbey were quite right, even though they remain voices crying in the wilderness. The voices we've heard instead, most often that of an ex President and his hard core acolytes, haven't been helpful.  Maybe it's time to drag out the Vanderbilt Agrarians, Chesteron, and Wendell Berry and see what they have to say.

Indeed, that will be our first resolution for agrarians, farmers, would be farmers, and just folks in general.

1.  Check out Berry, Abbey, Leopold, or Chesterton

The current pack of yappers is offering little in the way of deep content, and a lot of what they have to say about anything is outright destructive.  Every now and then something of value is stated, but it's hard to hear it in the general mess of things.

Let's be honest.  Almost all of the current "we need to go in this direction" is at least a little bit misinformed.  If you aren't grounded in what's real, any wind can blow you over.

Doing a little reading of some grounded folks would be a really good start in things.

And things be Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold and G. K. Chesterton would be really good starts.

2.  Cut out the citations to the "I’m a billionth generation farmer/rancher" in the wrong context, and don't support it when its made in the wrong context.

This is one of a couple of posts here that are really directed at a very narrow few, rather than the majority of ranchers. 

Actually, it's not directed at ranchers at all, but rather at the rancher ex pats. Those who hail originally from the soil, but now no longer are working it.  For those who descend from prior generations of ranchers and are still in it, the more power to you.

I've posted on this already, but it really doesn't matter if your great-great-grandfather broke the sod in Niobrara County in 1890 if that doesn't mean you are in agriculture today.  And it doesn't make you royalty.  And. . .

3. Knock off the "agriculture is a hard way to make a living" line

Now, I want to be careful here.

Agriculture is a hard way to make a living, because of economics.

What it isn't, however, is a hard way to live.

This has been on my mind, to the political year, anyhow, but it recally came into the forefront of my mind again recently listening to an episode of  Wyoming:  My 307.  It was the one on ranching, which you can find here:

RANCHING IN WYOMING

In it, it had a long session pondering "why do we do this?" which arrived at a very interesting conclusion, that being "it's a vocation".

I think there's something to that.

But, we ought to be careful thinking that somehow because we're out in nature, and nature is a bit rough, that we're suffering. Far from it.

I've been a lawyer, a solider, worked on drilling rigs, a writer and a stockman in what now amounts to a whopping 45 years of working (I started working for pay at age 13).  So I think I know a little about work and what hard work is, and isn't. And what work is like for most people.

Somewhere at some point in time somebody fed a line of crap to agriculturalist that their work is uniquely difficult in an existential sense.  Perhaps in a physical sense, that's somewhat true, but there's plenty of other dangerous physical work that puts you out in all kids of weather.

And most modern work is, quite frankly, utterly meaningless.  Most Americans don't like their jobs, as no rational scientient mammal would like most of the jobs that now exist. 

What agriculture isn't is something that makes you work more hours per day than other people, particularly professional people, in  horrible conditions.  Not even close, quite often. And the working conditions and nature of agriculture are far better than that for most other people.  If you think that your job is somehow worse than a computer engineer in a cubicle, you are fooling yourselves massively.

Indeed, this sort of whining, and that's what it is, really needs to stop.  It's self deceptive.

Indeed, its harmful it two ways.  It's self-delusion and makes us think that, if we believe it, we are really working a lot harder than other people, when in fact that's just not true, and it also causes us to force children off the land for a better "town job" that won't be better.

Almost everything about life in the towns and cities is worse.  We ought to realize that.

If you doubt it, leave the ranch or farm and go into town.  You can't come back, and you'll regret you left.  Pleantly of people will line up to take your place.

4.  Having land doesn't make you "landed" nobility.

This, I'll note, is also directed at a narrow few, not the broader majority, of those in agriculture.

Something really disturbing has developed in the US over the past century in which those lucky enough to be born in to agriculture sometimes sort of regard themselves as petty nobility in a way.  It expresses itself in all sorts of odd ways.

Now, I don't want to suggest this is common.  

Most farmers and ranchers aren't this way at all.  But you'll see examples of it where people in agriculture will express a degree of contempt, on rare occasion, about average people.  It feeds into the thing above, in a reverse fashion, in that there's a sort of "we work hard for a living" without realizing that a lot of other people do as well.

I'll be frank that the last two items are sort of in reaction to a current political campaign.  I'm not going to get into the pluses and minuses of the merits of any candidate, but something about the videos of the campaign really strike me the wrong way for their strong rancher pull.  I'm tired of people appearing on political ads in cowboy hats arguing that you need to vote for somebody because they came from an agricultural family that knows what real values are.  It's insulting.

5.  Support getting people into agriculture.

The worst enemy of ranchers in the west are ranchers and by extension this is true about agriculture in general.  Agriculturalist decry those who regard their units as big public parks, which they should, but at the same time they don't do anything to try to help average people get into agriculture.

The reason for that, in no small part, is that it would mean a big personal sacrifice.  We could support legislation that made agriculture and agricultural land tied to actually working the land as your real and sole occupation, but we don't as that would massively depress the value of the land. It's that value that operates against us in the first place, as it means the Warren Buffets of the world become the only one who can afford the land.

We could pull this up by the root and cut it off at the head.  If we really think we're special and the real examples of the common men, we should.

6.  Think local and organize.

My entire life I've heard complaints about the midstream in agriculture.  The price of beef goes up, and cattle on the hoof do too, and the very few packers there are reap the rewards.  It's hard on consumers, and it's hard on ranchers.

I'm sure the same is true in other fields of agriculture as well.

Well, enough of that. We know it's unfair, so what we have to do is to replace the middle men with processors of our own. We could do it.  

Indeed, some agricultural enterprises, like sugar, do in fact do just this.  But it should expand. Co-ops for this purpose, organized to process for the member's benefits and not their own, would be ideal, and could more than compete with the big packers.

7. Think Agrarian

Modern agriculture suffers heavily from the worship of materialism that intruded heavily into the 20th Century and, along with it, specialization of everything.  We in agriculture often hear of "monocultures", but we almost all do just that.

Our predecessors did this much less.  Up into the mid 20th Century it was really rare to find ranches that didn't also farm a little bit, for the table, and every rancher hunted (often illegally) as well.  Farmers were the same way. A wheat farmer in Kansas was a wheat farmer, but he was probably also taking some game with a shotgun and probably kept a few pigs for the table,, and so on.

We have the resources and could lead the say on that, and indeed, some do. But the real banner carriers on this sort of thing shouldn't be people in the "homestead" movement, who are mostly chopping up big parcels of land to the ultimate detriment of everyone.

8.  Know who is your friend and who isn't.

This doesn't apply to everyone either, but I'm sometimes surprised how some in agriculture can be hostile, intentionally and unintentionally, to those who aren't, but who want to enjoy something on the land.

"No Trespassing" signs and "No Hunting" signs are signs to locals that they aren't welcome. Signs stating "This Land Leased To Outfitter" are the same thing, except they show that the lack of welcome has been monetized.

Bills to privatize wildlife are the ultimate acts of hostility. Falling in second are bills to transfer public lands into private hands.

We should realize that there are people who are genuinely hostile to agriculture.  The local newspaper publishes op ed articles by members of an organization that definitely is.  There are a lot more people who aren't in agriculture than who are, and we tend to forget that, as for most of us most of our friends are in it.

Given this, at some point we really risk public hostility.  Shut access off to the land, and next thing you know you'll be seeing "tax ag land like other land" and things of that nature, and you are out of business  and out of cash.

It doesn't really take that much to be friendly to people.

Likewise, for some reason those in agriculture often support entities and operations that are land destroying.  I've never understood that, indeed as we'll often complain about the same entities if they're on our places.  

9. Think really local.

None of us are here forever.  Try to keep that place, and keep the familiy in it.

People do a lot of things for a lot of reasons, but every time I encounter somebody, and I do fairly frequently, who ends up telling me "I grew up on a ranch", and I find them working as a lawyer, doctor, accountant, or whatever, I think it's a tragedy. That shouldn't have had to happen.