When the Homily is about Immunology

Liberty to end us, or equality to protect us?

How I hate to dwell in these accumulated and crowded cities! They are but the confined theatre of cupidity; they exhibit nothing but the action and reaction of a variety of passions which, being confined within narrower channels, impel one another with the greatest vigour. The same passions are more rare in the country; and, from their greater extent and expansion, they are but necessary gales. I always delight in the country. Have you never felt at the returning of spring a glow of general pleasure, an indiscernible something that pervades our whole frame, and inward involuntary admiration of everything which surrounds us?

J. Hector St.John Crevecoeur
Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America
~1782

I'm forced to wonder what he'd think of today's accumulated and crowded cities?

VDH has a chapter in his book The Land was Everything entitled "The Great Divide" in which he contrasts not only rural and urban living, but also the rural living that is fast vanishing as it is being steadily overtaken by urban life. The family farm is vanquished and become the newest subdivision (cruelly and ironically often named after that which once was: e.g. "The Orchard") and the food it once produced is now cleverly marketed and packaged at some far-away factory farm - safe from our eyes and knowledge. It's efficiency sufficient to earn our blind eyes.

He laments: The day is upon us where the eater of a plum, drumstick, or ice cream will have never seen once in his life a fruit tree, chicken, or cow, much less an orchard, henhouse, or dairy. Tell him his steak is made of sawdust and his raisins grown on trees, and he will be as likely to believe it as he will be unperturbed.

Should we give much concern to corporate factory farms as the producers of our food? I think so...why on earth would we wish to have those products soon to become us treated with the same contempt one would expect from a factory worker producing McDonald's Kid's Meal Toys? Consider the care differences involved in working land that has been in your family for generations as opposed to land recently acquired through a merger from one massive division of one massive company into another massive division of some other massive corporation?

I'm not being anti-corporation here. Corporations are just people doing what people do. If we wish for something better, for something purer, for something more local and personable then we (meaning you and I) must change our habits and expectations. Our tastes have grown decidedly unnatural and we don't think much about what it takes for corporations to get the natural to yield up the unnatural.

I work in the corporate world...at least a semblance of it. I rather find the "professional" life distasteful and it is decidedly different from what I perceive to be real life...or perhaps I should say real rural life? It is very much like the difference one experiences in shopping at Home Depot or the local feed store. They are less than a mile from one another in Poulsbo and yet worlds apart.

Most professionals in America always suspect that a farmer and his ilk are either ignorant or crass, and surely not professionals. The farmer, in turn, believes that you would have to be crazy to live in town, crazier still to wear such garb and endure such reproach at the office, where the sleek and stupid can as easily excel as the more real and intelligent fail. Each is the antithesis of the other, the agrarian requiring action above all, the professional anything but force and audacity. Absolutes versus nuance; natural ill manners at odds with studied refinement. The former of the outdoors, values independence and commitments that are ironclad, the latter, inside, often sees those very ideals as sheer recklessness and obstinacy...The rank world of the farmer says "Don't back down." "Go around," orders the tame cosmos of the urban employee. Is it to be "Let's settle it right now" or "Let's be sure at least to do lunch sometime"? The farmer on his own lives concretely for liberty that can end him, the professional in town for equality that protects him.

I love that last line, it seems to me to speak to more than just VDH's notion of "The Great Divide" but also to many divides in American culture and politics today.