The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Redux Rendezvous II

2 June 2010

Volume 12, Issue 22

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Negative metaphors, metaphors everywhere, and all of them seem to work. Into such a simplistic worldly description, we continue treading water this week. Just like where do we begin?

News that the United States is about to become a model of a failing European state are grossly optimistic or pessimistic, depending upon your point of view. The reason behind all of this hoopla is simply the fact that the vast majority of the American people are unwilling to play the game. The importance of this gaming the people punditry is being broadcast into our homes and offices by those needing to sell ideas, but also products deemed to make the world better.

If you seriously look beyond the hype and hyperbole however, you see that life goes on. Furthermore a realistic look at the present vibrantly illustrates, that in a realistic context the present isn’t all that bad, and generally Americans may not control the future, but they still have a faith in the God who does. In that context, the plans by the mice who say they know what they are doing in that land back where the sun rises, doesn’t seem to relate to the men and women who daily go about their lives out here in the hinterland.

So in that context of American development, we all have truly become a nation of Native Americans, some of them we call Indians, in that respect the Canadian term First Nations, seems more appropriate, but only on the surface of the current progressive spin. A deeper look shows that the old concept of unity in diversity, or “Out of Many, One,” is still very appropriate. The reality is if the immigrants to these United States had wanted to be and remain Europeans, or Asians, Latin Americans, or even Africans, they could have stayed where they were, even if they died trying, or returned later.

The continents we call the Americas were the last place that people settled and we are all immigrants to these shores, with the time frame measured in thousands of years at most, no matter how you spin the origin.

On Memorial Day I had the opportunity that I had wanted to do for a very long time, that was to attend the service at a church in Sherman, about seven miles northeast of the town a Wilbur (population 914 in 2000). Sherman today consists of a small church, built in 1888, an old grange hall, now converted into a storage shed, one singlewide manufactured home, a couple of other farms within line of site, and a cemetery.

In that cemetery are buried my great grandfather and grandmother and other relatives, who settled in the area in 1883. My grandmother went to school in Sherman and lived in Jump Canyon down on the shores of the then Columbia River. Much of that homestead is now submerged under the reservoir waters of Lake Roosevelt, but his best ground is now the Whitestone Winery vineyard. The Jumps came to America from England and have been around since before the Revolution.

Essentially a century ago Etta Jump married Adolph, a Dane who was born somewhere from Chicago to Wilbur via Minnesota, in 1891 along the Chicago to Minnesota loop. His story was he was born in a covered wagon, and at this time we have found no information to dispute that story, except being born in February in Minnesota, in a covered wagon, may be a tale, but then again the date may have been flexible also, for there was no birth certificate. In Wilbur there is still an area known as Dane Town, but Wilbur has always been much too small to have a neighborhood. Wilbur also had both Danish and German Lutheran churches, and both nationalities comprised the majority of the immigrants to this prairie land.

The little church in Sherman, filled to capacity holds about a hundred fifty people, and was filled to capacity. After the service there were sixty-one vehicles parked on the surrounding grass. The service itself began and ended with Christian prayer. It recognized all the military veterans in attendance, including the branch of their service. The oldest attendee was ninety-four, the youngest was less than a month old. People came from as far away as Arizona and Montana.

The Andersen pioneer family was honored, Andersens with the Danish “sen” not the Andersons “son”. After the service everyone stayed for a potluck that included the church-cemetery association furnished fried chicken, and enough other food to serve maybe another one hundred fifty people.

Weather the whole day was gloomy with off and on rain, showers, sometimes heavy, but that just made the experience all the more memorable. So far all the rain this year is good for the wheat crop, but with much more rain, rust and other wheat diseases, may cause a decrease in yields, but be assured of this, next Memorial Day the little church at Sherman will again be filled with a hundred fifty proud Americans, they will pray, sing songs, get to know people and relatives they didn’t know existed, and maybe it will be ninety degrees, without a cloud in sight.

After the church service and the potluck we drove to the Wilbur cemetery, picked up the decorations from my parents and grandparent’s graves, went to visit for a time my cousin and wife that live on the German Bauer place south of Wilbur and returned to Spokane. Having too much fried chicken, potato salad and dessert, I slept most of the way.

Today we really can’t comprehend what would compel someone to move from somewhere to Sherman or even Wilbur without some guarantee of a substantial reward on the finish end. I believe the answer is two fold. First of all they saw opportunity where their stay behind neighbors back there, saw only fear and trepidation. Secondly they knew they would not be alone. I don’t know who was the first Dane to move to that region of Washington Territory, but while others were truly pioneers, they knew they could join many times family members and others who shared a similar cultural diversity.

Much of that vision of opportunity came from the reality of the frontier. Not only that, great grandpa Jump could always go to his relation’s Jump Mercantile in Creston, eight miles to the east of Wilbur and about the same distance from Sherman. The story goes that he developed a small homestead not all that far from Creston, but decided that by moving down into Jump Canyon near the Columbia, the summers would be cooler, the winters warmer and the wind wouldn’t blow all the time.

On the Miller side of the family, Peter Miller immigrated from Denmark, was married in Chicago to his Danish wife, and was a carpenter by trade. All those Wilbur Danes would need someone to build their houses. When he died his autopsy showed that he had liver problems, not all that uncommon with Scandinavians. I learned at the Sherman service that the men at family events and other times would separate from the women and go into a cellar or other places and discuss manly things and share manly beverages. It seems my covered wagon born grandfather didn’t particularly like that beverage part of the community, for even in this retirement days, he served as the janitor of the Lutheran church in Reardan, but he would not join the church because they served real (alcoholic) wine for communion.

So today are we Americans lazy or do we just lack the risk-opportunity vision?

Americans are still the hardest working nation on earth. Back a century ago if you wanted to get ahead you worked ten to twelve hours a day six days a week and on Sunday you went to church. Today that is pretty much the same thing, except we have a tendency to forgo the Sabbath to work around the home to do the things we can’t afford to hire out. So the lazy thing seems to disappear, and even the laziness that does seem present today seems to flow from the risk-opportunity vision. Why bust your behind if the pays the same and no one seems to care?

The American Dream is based upon the individual; today that individual American Dream has been displaced by working for the man. A hundred years ago, to be successful you needed a diversity of skills; to be successful today, you are required to be a specialist. That specialist position varies, from working assembling widgets in a union factory, to writing code to make some widget work better. Others get paid for telling us how great all these widgets are working or not working, and for a hefty portion of their spiel we get to hear or see about the widgets that pay their bills.

If we go back to the beginning of the article, to the metaphors of things not working today, it could be considered miraculous that they are all things, big things that only months ago we hoped would allow us to continue the limited risk, limited opportunity vision. The perceived reality was that if I just did my boring job for twenty to thirty years, I could retire undefeated and do what I always wanted to do, either with my union-government pension or my own investments. The hitch is that all this recent prosperity is a mansion of debt, built on debt leverage, with very little underlying natural wealth. The misadventure for most American’s today is that they want to stay behind in the old world, when a new world frontier is beginning to open.

Luckily for we Americans, we still have the most underlying natural wealth of any nation in history, and much of the debt has been leveraged and sold to those places from whence Americans left long ago. That is not really good news, just a lesser of a continuum of negative metaphors.

I read a column today that used the premise that what people are beginning to see in President Obama is not his liberal agenda, or dissing of American greatness, it is the understanding he is incompetent. In our columns from the beginning of Obama’s ascendancy, we have stated that the skill set required to be a community organizer are far different than required to be the leader of the free world. But given the alternatives and the risk aversion of the American people, we elected the person that we desired, and really I’m not sure the alternative choice would have done anything to alter the big evolving scheme of things.

This is also illustrated in the Gulf BP oil problem. The President said last Thursday that he was concerned totally in stopping the leak. At best he was being disingenuous, furthermore there is not anything that he can really do, and there are a whole lot of things where he can do something that might be more positively effective, if he had the skill set and the staff to pull it off.

However, BP and its leadership are in a world beyond their skill set also. The reality is that the natural laws of the universe show overwhelmingly that collective bigger is always better doesn’t really solve anything, and in fact hinders true diversity in ideas and solutions. The crony government, their special interests, the military industrial complex, and the financial investment institutions that created this debt world of faux prosperity, are really dinosaurs of a stupendously changing world. Change we don’t want to believe in, but is happening because our world is undergoing realignment with natural principles that we have called Business Ecology for a quarter of a century.

That redux of society will lead to opportunities to create communities outside unsustainable cities, outside the limitations of the ways we have always done it, into a true new world order that is the true antithesis of the collective pitched utopia of the same name. The industrial age led to the requirement that people worked in factories doing specialized and boring tasks. This new way vocation means you can work in ways that truly create instead of just build.

Much of the software I use on a daily basis is created in small companies and individuals, in the USA and around the world, through a localized version of inalienable rights of our human creation, those being most commonly voiced but still not understood, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That information, in the broadest sense, will slowly combine with capital and other materials to change wealth-producing opportunities, well beyond what most of us would consider geeky.

That broadly is an outline for a worldwide Redux Rendezvous, more details to come in installment III next week.