The Truth is Simple Enough

Last ski before the rain

For those of you who are waiting on custom spoons, Rye would like you to know that he is getting close to catching up on orders. He thanks you for your patience. 

If ever one were looking for an excuse to lapse into a weather-related depressive episode, this morning is it. The rain is gathering courage by the minute, and the already too-warm temperature is rising steadily. Snow has slid off all roof surfaces but the low-angle, rusted tin lid of the woodshed, and even that’s not long for this world, as evidenced by the precarious curl hanging from its downslope edge like a wave caught at the height of its unfurling. I gave it wide berth on my way to feed the pigs, let me tell you.

Last night we watched the documentary Rich Hill, which chronicles the lives of three teenage boys in the town of Rich Hill, MO. For any of you inclined to take my advice and see it for yourselves, my only caution is that you might want to wait until after the holidays (or at the very least, until it’s stopped raining). And I do advise you all to see it, although I hasten to add that in some ways, it’s not an excellent piece of film-making; we found it to be a little slow, and the preponderance of night-time scenes ask a lot of the viewer, because there are long periods when it’s a bit difficult to actually see what’s going on.

Still, the power of the movie is not confined to its technical chops, and instead lurks primarily in the honesty with which to portrays the reality of small-town American poverty. It does not attempt to make heroes of its subjects. Indeed, at times it almost begs us to indict these families for poor decision making – for instance, the preponderance of smoldering cigarettes and super-size sodas is almost painful to behold, and in many scenes, it’s difficult to even like these people. They swear at their children. They lie in bed. They smoke cigarettes and drink soda and swear at their children while lying in bed.

But I think it’s precisely because the film is honest that it works. I never felt manipulated; I never felt like anyone was trying to convince me of anything in particular, and therefore I came away from it more convinced than ever that we inhabit a rigged economy. No, not just economy: It’s more than that. It’s a rigged society, where those who are born to parents who know how the game is played learn for ourselves how to play the game, and are thus rewarded. And those who don’t are too often condemned to a life spent in the margins, desperately trying to figure out the rules for themselves.

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On a not-entirely-dissimilar note, I was intrigued by the following comment in response to Monday’s post.

In your post you mentioned the ability to not consider your food in financial terms as indicative of three things: a well off luxury, foresight/luck of property ownership and mostly the acquisition of hands on competence and skill building in a “university” that doesn’t formally exist. I would like to know if you think you’d as vigorously and joyfully pursued that university if you didn’t have the well off-ness and property ownership as a prerequisite?

In combination with the aforementioned film, this got me thinking a little more about how we actually ended up where we are, which is at least in part dependent on a chain of events I often describe as being forged from dumb luck.

First, I should probably put “well off-ness” in context, which in our case, is the well off-ness of decidedly middle-class America. There are no trust funds and there is no assurance of a future inheritance. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that if we were truly in a pickle, we needn’t worry about starving, not merely because our family wouldn’t allow such a thing occur (oh, sure, they might let us dangle a bit, wait until we’re down a few pants sizes and maybe a kidney or two, but I doubt they’d totally hang us out to dry), but equally because we are fortunate enough to have a network of friends and community who possess the resources to care for one another. Not so much in a financial sense – the majority of our friends and neighbors are not wealthy – but in the resources of hand and land that are ultimately what support us all.

Second, I suppose in some regards our property ownership was a prerequisite for us putting ourselves through the School That Doesn’t Exist (STDE… say it out loud… sounds like study, don’t it? Clever, eh?) I mean, so much of what we learned in STDE we learned on this land and from people in this community. This is not to say we didn’t come to this property with some basic skills – for instance, we’d both worked construction, and Penny had spent the past dozen or so years managing field crews on organic vegetable farms. And I know these skills – however crude they were and in some cases, still are – have been an asset. But in all honestly, it often seems as if we’ve had to unlearn as much as we’ve had to learn. Hell, we’re still unlearning all the time.

I’m not convinced that owning property is a pre-requisite everyone’s attendance to STDE (and now it occurs to me that the acronym STDE actually sounds like a sexually transmitted disease, and I will thus cease to employ it). I know people who’ve learned many of these skills on someone else’s land. I know of people who’ve learned these skills while living in the city. Conversely, I know of lots of people who inhabit property ideally suited to hands-on, land-based competence who are disinterested in even the most rudimentary of these skills. It’s not that they couldn’t learn them – hell, if I can learn them, anybody can. I think it’s mostly that they just don’t want to. Or that it doesn’t even occur to them.

I thought about this quite a bit while watching Rich Hill. Because it seemed to me as if the families in the film weren’t merely lacking money; they also lacked a particular type of resourcefulness that might have allowed them to prosper in the absence of money. I do not know this with certainty; it’s only a movie, after all, a snapshot of their lives. And even if what I say is true, I do not believe they are to blame for this lack of resourcefulness, which is in no way, shape, or form cultivated by the consumer economy and its insatiable need to make us its dependents.

Anyway. I leave you to your Christmas (or whatever your preferred celebration might be) with this rather long and sober post. I suspect a few of you might wish to have read something light-hearted, something about the beauty of the season, the togetherness of family, the abundance of the table and the packages under the tree. And so on.

I sincerely hope you are in a position to have all of the above. I really do. But in the midst of it all, let’s not forget that the presence of these things in our lives is not a given. Because you and me, we’ve been fortunate enough to do one of two things: We’ve either figured out how to play the rigged game, the one with all the convoluted rules that sometimes have us wondering what our lives might look like if we just said fuck it and stopped playing. Or we’ve been stupid-stubborn enough to make up our own game, and you know what? I can’t promise that even this game isn’t rigged. I can’t tell you it’s all milk and honey.

But no matter how you look at it, the truth is simple enough: Not everyone is so lucky.