”In the dew of little things the heart finds its
morning and is refreshed.”
—Kahil Gibran
Ah yes, I remember it well.
My parents had a cherry orchard in Oregon, it
was not a big farm, only a few acres of cherries, along with a couple acres of
peaches and apricots. Most summers, I was sent to pick. (Cherries are too small
to fill up a box fast. Peaches have a fuzz that sticks on moist skin and
collects in the creases of the elbows. Peaches must be handled carefully as
they are delicate, but are big and so are fast to pick. We had Elberta
peaches that my dad said were the best, and I agree with him, for I have never
tasted a better peach. Now Elbertas are hard or impossible to find. Apricots
are just right to pick, as my mom thinned the green ones so the ripe ones were
as large as a small peach, and they have no fuzz.)
I was not a good picker—but did make a little
spending money. Other kids picked too, neighbors I presume, but we liked
throwing cherries at each other more than picking. One summer, we let someone
else do the cherry picking. My parents hired migratory workers.
And I played with the Cherry Picker’s kids.
The family was as nice as they could be, and one day, I don’t remember how many
kids they had, three sounds about right, we were playing in an old pickup truck
that my folks inherited when they bought the property. The truck was away from
the road, not one of those horrid wrecks we often see parked on farms, but
hidden amongst some scrubby Oak trees. We kids climbed into the pickup, some in
the bed, someone was in the passenger seat beside me. I was the oldest, and
decided to see if the truck would start.
It did.
I was totally shocked. The trouble was, it
had no breaks, and the truck rolled down the hill and into a tree. Nobody was
hurt, it was a gentle roll, but the jolt of hitting a tree scared us and we
beat feet out of there.
Probably that truck stayed pinned to that
tree until it decomposed.
“What if” my daughter asks, “it’s all
the way it ought to be?”
Well, that’s a radical thought.
Most of the world’s people would not agree
with that. “What if, you might ask, I break a leg, or get in an accident, and
why in the world did we have a pandemic? Why did we lose our job? For heaven’s
sake, people are living in tents under the freeway.”
I just completed The Four Winds, a
novel by Kristin Hannah which featured the Dust bowl of the Texas panhandle.
Dust states included Colorado, SW Kansas, the panhandle of Texas, Oklahoma, and
NE New Mexico.) A newspaper in Oklahoma on April 14, 1935, a day dubbed as
Black Sunday, stated that approximately three hundred thousand tons of Great
Plains topsoil had flown into the air that day. More soil than had been dug up
to build the Panama Canal. The dirt had fallen to the ground as far away as
Washington DC—which was probably why it made the news.
People from the dust bowl lost their farms,
the old folks and children died of dust pneumonia, their animals filled up with
dirt, and starved. Formerly rich wheat farms died, farmers were starved out.
Many of those former flourishing farmers moved to California where they
became riff-raft and presumed to bring disease. Many sold their soul to the
Company Store. Dumb me, I’d heard of selling your soul to the Company Store,
but didn’t know what it meant.
Owners of large industrial farms would
sometimes build cabins for a “lucky” few workers and their families. (For every
one that got in there were hundreds waiting in line.) The farm owners would
provide water, toilets and laundry facilities…and a store. The store’s prices
were higher than any stores in town, but with no money, and no gas, how were
the workers to get to another store? So, they bought on credit. This would
theoretically be paid back after harvest…but not in cash, only by working for
the owner. The trouble was, the people still needed food, and they couldn’t
catch up as harvesting is only seasonal. They were enslaved.
Little by little we clean up the
messes.
I don’t know where the migratory workers are
now in their plight. I know they were looked down upon even in my day. “Cherry
Pickers Kids,” they were called. These people who by the sweat of their brow
provided fresh food for the rest of us.
I know Cesar Chavez fought for worker’s
rights, and formed the United Farm Workers Union.
Chavez modeled his methods on the nonviolent
civil disobedience of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. — employing
strikes, boycotts, marches and fasts — to draw attention to La Causa.
Even in the face of threats and actual
violence — be it from police or other unions, such as the Teamsters — Chavez
never wavered from his commitment to passive resistance.
At the end of his first food fast — which
ended in 1968 after 25 days — Chavez was too weak to speak, but a speech was
read on his behalf:
“When we are really honest with
ourselves, we must admit that our lives are all that really belongs to us. So,
it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my
deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced
that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice
ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice. To be a man
is to suffer for others. God help us be men.”
I know we can go into the ills of the past,
or the ills of the present, and it knocks us off-kilter. We wonder about the
injustice of it.
And then someone comes along and offers a solution,
“We Can Make America Great Again,” and some get sucked in believing he was the
man to do it.
Last night I watched the film, “Unfit, Is Donald
Trump fit to be President of the United States? And it scared the pants off
me.
Hate has popped up in our culture like I
never knew was there, so I can’t say the world is as it ought to be, however,
little by little we clean up the mess.
I have to praise the people who do champion
the right to stay free, to govern ourselves, to speak their minds, and to try
to do better.
I prefer not to be a protester, for I’m of
the mind that the more we push against something, the more it pushes back, but
taking to the streets, non-violently, does work, for it shows the world that
people care and want to make a difference.
I wanted to champion the case of the little
lady from the assistant living community, because she showed up on my trail,
and I believe that she was, and still is, being mistreated.
You begin, you start doing what you have set
out on your trail, and you fine tune as you go along, trying not to embarrass
yourself as you do it.
I’m still alive, so I guess my mission on
earth isn’t over. All along I have championed the idea of working on oneself.
If everyone did that, the majority of the ills of the world would gradually
soften their hold on our culture, and people would be happier.
Be kind to your fellow man—what a concept.
Do good to the earth.
Notice that however you were treated as a
child–now much you were loved or not loved, isn’t who you are today. Accept
yourself.
Think about how you can do tasks that will
make you happy. Yep, as far as whistling while you work.
It’s okay for you to be happy in a suffering
world. Suffering along with them doesn’t raise them up, as getting sick doesn’t
help a sick person.
You are your own job.
How about finding that thing you said you
wanted to be when you were a child?
Am I whistling Dixie?
“To damage the earth is to damage your
children.”
—Wendell Berry, Farmer and Poet