Bridging the Divide: a First Step toward a Sustainable Economy

Sometime in the 1990s, I was in grade school and was volunteering with my mom to help serve the food at a benefit concert. There was rain, so we were lugging boxes and coolers and coffee makers into a backup location, a recreation center in the neighboring town. As we walked through the doors, both my mom and I stopped short at what we saw: men, grown men, playing basketball, in the middle of the day. I stood there, gaping, until my mom whispered at me to stop staring and keep moving.

Looking back, now I know that these men were almost certainly white-collar workers who met to play sports over their lunch breaks, and there's really nothing too unusual about that, but the concept of this was so foreign to my life at the time that I could not make sense of what I was seeing. In my world, working men were sweaty, hungry, and tired at lunchtime, and they were happy to get a break to sit down and eat. After lunch, they might stretch out and take a "10-minute snooze," as my dad called it, lying on the porch rug so as not to get anything dirty with his work clothes. Then they went back to work. They did not play basketball.

This generalization was true for almost every family I knew, growing up in a small town with an agricultural and manufacturing economic base where most people showered after work, not before. But still, even in that small town, there was a noticeable divide in the social order, that between "town kids" and "country kids," and, it was preferable to be a town kid. Because, in the summertime, town kids biked to the swimming pool and saw their friends every day. They had some chores, like mowing the lawn and taking out the trash and drying the dishes, but town kids said the words "I'm bored" out loud to their parents and slept in. They walked to school or had a laughably short bus ride both ways. In comparison, country kids, at least the ones I knew, stayed home nearly all summer. We did not use the word "chores" unless it referred to feeding animals. We worked, a lot: in the garden, the barns, the pastures, the machine shop. Every fall when we returned to school, we would get to know our friends again, compare callouses on our hands and watch the skin peel off as we returned to desk work after a summer spent outdoors. We rode the school bus on its long, circuitous loop through the countryside every single day. The differences stacked up and did not go unnoticed in the social hierarchy of grade school.

Then, in high school, I got the idea that a good life meant leaving the country and moving to a city, that leaving was the only way to recognize my potential and that to stay was to fail in some way. I had high aspirations of leaving my small town, rural life, but, in the end, like a pebble that should have skipped but just plopped, I didn't make it far. When I moved to live in a neighboring town for the first time as a brand new college student, I was used to the absolute silence of the country and couldn't sleep due to the noise of cars passing, dogs barking, and the train rumbling through town. Later, as a newlywed living in a small house in a quiet part of that same town, I would laugh at the sight of my neighbors raking leaves up to a neat line at the edge of their property. I would struggle with the feeling of being observed all the time. I did enjoy the ease of biking to the grocery store, walking to church, and running into friends around town, but began to miss the freedom and the work that came with living in the country, and wanted my kids to experience that, too. So, we moved to what some might call "the middle of nowhere," and are now working to restore a small farm, sweating and tending and getting to know our place.

So, now I occupy a unique position, straddling the line of urban and rural, white and blue collar, academic and agrarian. For three days a week, I am in a classroom, working to teach aspiring engineers about how to use new software and different emerging technologies, as well as asking them to think deeply and with intention about their work, life, and faith. The other days, I am working either in the barn, garden, or kitchen, hands digging into manure, piles, dirt, or a bowl of bread dough, thinking deeply and with intention about work, life, and faith.

The daily realities of peoples' lives can be so different that they, like grade-school me, would stand and gawk if they were confronted with the lives of others. The divide between "town kids" and "country kids" is still apparent in today's world, and the difference in way of life can lead to a difference in basic values, in what we see as human flourishing. From my unique position, I have observed the prejudices of each group toward the other, but want to especially call attention to how rural communities are stereotyped and ridiculed in our society. The words "redneck" or "hillbilly" often invoke images of someone living off the land and doing things for themselves, on the fringes of civilized life: hunting, fishing, butchering, tinkering and fixing... but this independence is ridiculed instead of admired. Rural people are often referred to as a monolithic group, especially in political discourse, and common negative stereotypes cast them as uneducated, unsophisticated, and resistant to change. The rural life is seen as something to escape from (my own teenage angst is an example of that), or it is romanticized from afar. 

In reality, of course, rural communities are diverse and complex, including people with deep knowledge of land, tradition, and community. I have witnessed and lived through the resourcefulness and hard work that it takes to live in the country, and the mutual support that is a result of close community ties. Of course, not everything is perfect, but rural communities have a lot to offer, but this is often not recognized in our society today.

Here's another story: a college student that I know was traveling to work as an intern at an industrial site in a different part of the country. On the way there, he got a flat tire and pulled over to the side of the road. Unsure of what to do, he called his new supervisor, a seasoned blue-collar worker. His supervisor said he should just change the tire to the spare. The student said, ok, how do I do that? The supervisor said, well, start by loosening the lug nuts. The student, poor guy, replied with What's a lug nut?  This was just too much for the supervisor, who simply could not believe that anyone did not know this information, and the intern's nickname was set for the next six months: Lug Nuts.

It might seem silly to many (most?) of us that someone doesn't have the first idea of how to change a tire, but is it, really? After all, many (most) of us do not know how to churn butter or drive a team of horses, because we don't need to. Developing technologies and different ways of life mean that those skills are mostly lost to our society. Similarly, advancements in vehicle and tire design, and in different ways of life, mean that fewer people ever find themselves in need of a roadside tire change, and that particular skill is also becoming more uncommon. More broadly, many traditional farming and handiwork skills have been nearly lost over the last hundred years: processing fibers, hand sewing and quilting, seed saving, cheesemaking, butchering and meat preservation, timber framing, stone masonry, blacksmithing, shoe cobbling, tailoring... most of us wouldn't have the first inkling of where to start, and those who do are treated as quaint curiosities.

As times change, these skills are slowly lost, but, just as concerning, they are not valued. Our society generally considers physical labor - work that often happens in rural communities - undignified and menial when compared to work done sitting at a desk, those jobs that come with a lunch break that might be spent playing basketball. Working with your hands outside, or in a barn, or on a construction site, or in a manufacturing facility is generally seen as less desirable and less deserving of pay than working with your brain and a screen. This classist way of thinking is one of the major factors that have contributed to the rural and urban societal divide.

Well, you might be thinking, who cares? Times change. Why is it concerning that these old-timey skills are lost and undervalued? Why move out to the country and work and sweat all summer, instead of enjoying the conveniences that modern life gives us and accepting that life has changed?

Well, first, Garrison Keillor, in one of his stories from Lake Wobegon, said of the generations that came before: "They lived between the land and God."  This is a beautiful sentiment, evoking nostalgia and romanticizing what we often call a "simpler time." We like to imagine ourselves as having moved on from that dependence, separate, secure, insulated from trivial matters like the weather and soil health, but I would like to posit that we are still, all of us, living between the land and God, but we have simply forgotten it. The reality is that we are dependent upon many things for survival and well-being: the health of the soil, God's providence, each other. 

Second, besides the inherent dignity that should be recognized in skilled labor, recognizing the value of these skills can help us find a better path forward. In terms of an economy as management of available resources, in order to have sustainability, we must understand and acknowledge the processes of production, and that includes honoring the people that hold those skills. Understanding and appreciating any process from beginning to end, whether it be food production or manufacturing method, naturally yields engagement and investment. If we do not begin to prioritize a more sustainable economy, we will continue down the path of valuing cheap consumable goods more than the flourishing of humanity. It will lead toward only eating food that grows on mega-farms and then travels for thousands of miles, using up nonrenewable fossil fuels and supporting unsustainable farming practices. We will be wearing only clothes that are made of petroleum-based fabrics and sewn and shipped across oceans. We will not know how to properly value resources or understand our dependence upon the natural world. We will continue to operate under the assumption of scarcity, instead of embracing gratitude and a sense of abundance.

Further, Wendell Berry says,

"An authentic economy would be based upon renewable resources: land, water, ecological health. These resources, if they are to stay renewable in human use, will depend upon resources of culture that also must be kept renewable: accurate local memory, truthful accounting, continuous maintenance, un-wastefulness, and a democratic distribution of now-rare practical arts and skills."

In this sort of economy, rural people and those that work with their hands have a lot to offer. It is time to recognize this as start to healing division and derision and as a step toward a more sustainable economy, working to properly order our values and bring forth flourishing.