Diversity and Change

How I loved the old days. A little country church in the Ozarks filled with people who were the salt of the earth, a river that was clean enough to drink from, a time when things couldn’t get better than they were. We were kids being raised by parents who wanted us to have it better than they did, and never thought about how quantity doesn’t always equal quality. They are nearly gone now, that generation which stood up against an evil force in a terrible World War, and could not be defeated. They were strong people who grew up close to the earth, without much luxury, grounded in faith and values and an ability to take so little and make so much out of it.

Before them generations had come and gone without changing much. My grandfather lived with so little that he threw away nothing, wasted nothing. While he lived in fear of the earth destroying him, our grandchildren will be able to destroy the earth! My grandfather’s generation was the last to live something like their ancestors. His was the last age when men talked the same language as those who lived a hundred years before them.

My grandchildren speak a different language entirely, than I do. I don’t believe they can understand what I mean when I tell them that their children or grandchildren may need to be more like my grandfathers were to survive. Men of tomorrow may need to change back a little, but right now no one is buying that.

Men of today, especially those who lives are engulfed by society and politics, are always clamoring for change. But is change always good? In nature, no species maintains skyrocketing populations for long. High numbers will cause that species to suffer and a natural control such as starvation and disease will drop those numbers drastically. The earth will also not support a constant increase in human numbers. Water will be a problem, food will be a problem, and in some places air to breath will be a problem. What the earth can provide to us isn’t limitless. Timber, food, oil, even water, is limited. We will have to devastate the earth to support ever-increasing numbers of people. And it isn’t always what we have to have, but what we WANT.

Most of today’s men have one problem; nothing is ever enough. I don’t remember that being the way it was when I was young. Seems my grandfather’s generation was far less greedy. We aren’t so much like that today. We never have enough money, a new enough car, a big enough, or fast enough boat. On a smaller scale, we don’t have fishing lures or fishing equipment that is ‘good enough’. Have you ever noticed that about all of us? What came out last year isn’t good enough this year.

My computer is only a few years old, but the world is telling me that it isn’t good enough any more. If I get a new one, it won’t be good enough in a year or so either. We had grandfathers here in the Ozarks who lived with one pair of overalls for twenty years, and a whole lifetime with one shaving razor.

Could our grand children survive if they were to have to live as those people did almost 100 years ago? Up here on this wooded ridgetop where I live I could survive without any modern technology if we had to go back in time. It would involve working a lot harder, but it feels good to know that I still have some of my dad and grandfather in me. I couldn’t make it in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles.

In the midst of those wonderful places men have made, we have insured that the masses cannot survive a catastrophe which removes our technology. If those cities had no gasoline and no electricity for a few weeks, men would be killing each other in an attempt to survive. Just think about that! We are living with the assumption that we will not ever have to live without electricity or gasoline!

If we get to a point where computers control us enough, we are way out on a big long limb that can too easily be broken. And truthfully, I don’t think anyone knows how fragile that limb might be. We climb out on the end of it and forget what is behind us. It seems to me as if, while we clamor for change, no one can see the value in some never-changing things. As rivers shrink, as forests decline, and tornadoes and earthquakes and droughts and natural disasters increase and climates change, we just can’t figure it out. You keep hearing, “I wonder what is happening all of a sudden”. It hasn’t happened ‘all of a sudden’. And some of us know exactly what has happened, you just don’t dare say it in this modern world.

I know that my grandsons will learn more than I can ever know, but I know too that they need to retain what my grandfathers once knew, things like growing our own food, and knowing how to live without oil and electricity and water which comes from a faucet. I hope it isn’t too late to teach them to live from the land, to go back to a way of life and values that ensured our survival.

I still believe the key to man’s survival in the future is not intelligence, but wisdom. I don’t remember if there were many really intelligent men out in the rural Ozarks where I was as a boy, raised so far from the changing world. But I knew about wisdom. I saw it in them. I don’t see much of that today. It doesn’t take wisdom to run a computer. Still, I don’t think the computer will be here forever, as everyone else seems to think it will be.

Man will be here, I think, in some form or another, as long as the earth survives, as long as God wills it. But to tell you the truth, I am not at all sure that some generation centuries from now will not be made up of people who are living more like our grandfathers than our grandchildren. When I was very young, I watched a sidewalk being poured, and an old man told me, “Son, you don’t know it now, but when you are my age, that sidewalk will be crumbling… broken apart by little soft blades of grass.”
It sounded crazy to me at the time, but thirty years later there were weeds growing out of the cracks in that sidewalk.

I know there are those people reading this column saying, “This guy is crazy.” But what I hope this column might do is to cause a few people to turn off the computer and go out into the woods somewhere far from civilization, looking at things around them just like it was when their great grandfather was their age… realizing how important it is that some things do not change.

If you have kids or grandkids, teach them to catch sunfish this summer. Teach them to hunt squirrels, how to skin one, clean it, then fry it and eat it. Show them how to plant a little garden with tomatoes and green beans. Hunt mushrooms and arrowheads, explore caves and pick blackberries. Keep them outside and maybe you can keep away from the computer and television for awhile. It’s called diversity… and change!

My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail lightninridge@windstream.net