FAIR TIMES TWO
My daughter and I went to the fair for a second night to check out the animals and score some beef barbecue. There are several animal barns on the fairgrounds, holding everything from sheep, goats, pigs and cows to roosters, hens and rabbits. We discovered that the goats await their fate with a stoic silence, while the sheep maintain a steady defiant chorus of baa’s. Not for them to suffer or do anything else in silence.
On the way over to the horse barn, we stopped by the birthing area to watch a cow give birth to a calf. As we got there, the mother was laboring to push out her calf, visible only by two hooves and two nostrils waiting for their first breath of air.
Eventually, two veterinarians hooked up chains to the calf’s hooves and pulled her into this world. She lay there on the straw, motionless. The mother, exhausted from her labors, couldn’t move. The two vets rubbed the calf briskly with straw to simulate the licking of a mother’s tongue, the action of which stimulated breathing.
The calf slowly stirred to life and raised her head tentatively from the straw. Finally the mother lumbered to her feet and went over to her baby and began licking her. Not a dry in the house.
I was purposely graphic in the details (and believe me I left the gory stuff out) because this is how life was lived – raw and direct – up until 100 years ago, give or take. People and animals had to be self-reliant because in rural America or Poland or China, whatever came up had to be dealt with right then and there with whatever means lay at hand. This is how you were expected to live your life, on your own, self-reliant.
The one thing country folk could count on was the help of their neighbors in times of disaster or trouble. In some parts of my county, the more rural parts, that ethos of watching out for your neighbor still runs strong. The dark side of that generous impulse is an instinctive wariness around strangers. When you are on your own you learn to be careful.
This in a nutshell is the American experience: Self-reliant, but always ready to help your neighbor while remaining watchful around strangers. To some degree these are warring impulses that must be balanced out depending on the situation.
Take health care reform. Most folks believe in personal responsibility. Your health and how you care for it is your problem. Some folks think that the neighbors should be expected to pitch in from time to time if things get really tough and a family is doing without through no fault of their own. At the same time there is a reluctance to provide for strangers who haven’t done anything to help themselves or the community.
Put all those together and you can have an uneasy mix of sometimes conflicting values. Now me, I’m a small town city boy who moved to what used to be the country. I look around and I see a lot of uncertainty as the old ways fade but the new ways don’t look all that good.
Change is always hard, but that’s the one thing we Americans have always been good at. We’ll get through this and we will adapt to new times, no matter how painfully, but we will always return to the fair to remind ourselves of where we came from.
September 22, 2009
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County Fair
Self-Reliance
