Brian Kaller is rapidly becoming one of my favorite non-sewing bloggers. He writes about a wide range of topics and, in his position as an American living in Ireland, has a unique perspective on the world. He's from the area around Ferguson, MO, and has posted a bit about that this week. His latest contained a little nugget that I thought was worth re-posting here, as I think he captures what it is that I am missing in (post) modern life.
"Most of the economic relationships – their rudimentary means of getting food, shelter, warmth, water, security and so on – the basics of life – are vertical, to strangers in distant and possibly unaccountable institutions, rather than horizontal, to family or neighbours nearby, or singular, things that they can provide for themselves. We grow up warehoused in schools, and most young people are aware of it and don’t appreciate the squandering of their early years. But it prepares us for the life that many American children will live, as cubicle plankton in office jobs. We didn’t grow up with many real skills to provide for ourselves, and most of us didn’t know anyone else who had them either, so that kind of life was difficult to imagine.
When I talk with elderly people here, or people from any traditional society, who grew up before wealth or electronic media, I find their lives were fundamentally different. Most security was accomplished through social pressure and shame, rather than armed men wearing uniforms. Young men grew up occupied with chores and hard labour, rather than the opportunity for mischief. People were able to provide for their own needs in many ways, that we were not raised to be able to do.
People had deep relationships to other people around them, so that the person who runs the shop might have also helped dig your father’s grave, and might have helped you with your first communion. These many threads of relationship in every direction wove a quilt of community, which cushioned the weight of the world. So people might have been poor, but they were incapable of feeling poverty the way Americans do now, for their lives were not spent floating idly upon a sea of strangers."
~Brian Kaller, Ferguson: Just the Beginning, Restoring Mayberry blog, November 29, 2014
I like that line: "their lives were not spent floating idly upon a sea of strangers."
ReplyDeleteI like that line too; very well said and articulates the loss of so much that is in what we now call 'today'. and it shows me how important it is to be involved in other's lives including children. Everyday I think of something new to tell Mr. Husband about the Sunday school class I teach and how much each child has importance and is loved in so many ways.
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