The End of an Era, or the Return to an Earlier One?

American Thinker.com ^ | April 7, 2021 | Harold Harrison

[Kaslin]

There is a latent fingerprint being revealed across this country in the sparsely populated Red Counties. Nearly all these areas were claimed by settlers both before and after the Homestead Act. That baseline condition back then was a solitary life, initially with larger families, that remains endemic to farmers and ranchers to this day.

I experienced that growing up on ranches in Montana in the 40s and 50s. At the edge of our spread was a one-room grade school built around the turn of the last century where I attended with about seven older kids from the neighboring ranches. It was better than homeschooling in that I got to listen to lessons far beyond my level which resulted in my being well ahead of my peers when our family eventually moved to a small town with a normal school.

If you look back on that solitary life, mingling with neighbors and with strangers in town was minimal. Often, a trip to town was limited to intervals of many weeks or even months to get supplies you couldn’t grow or make on your own. My own ancestry had a taste of that: mom’s dad was a plumber who along with his dad, a Civil War vet, helped build a new town in NW North Dakota in the 1890s. Grandad’s future bride grew up on a farm a ways out of town where her dad (a transplanted Swede) came to town once a year to settle up his accounts after the crops were in. As the story goes there apparently was no love lost between those two families despite a subsequent marriage, due to that annual ‘settling of accounts’ practice.

[redgolum]

Except those blue refugees quickly turn the area into the same cess pit they left.

[rlmorel]

This is something that has been long on my mind.

I don’t think this is healthy. This “Balkanization” that is taking place at the individual level.

Not the family level. Not the town or state level.

The individual level.

I have been noticing it for a long time. As Americans, we have lost the things that tie us together.

Things that range from singing Christmas Carols and kids from a whole neighborhood playing games, to family meals around the table, to Church.

Even eating breakfast on vacation. I saw a family of four in a hotel having breakfast one morning, and all of them, instead of talking to each other, were all engrossed in their smart phone. Mom, Dad, Brother, Sister, all silent, with their heads down.

I have come to regard the Internet and cell phones as a pox. Sadly. I think those things, as wonderful in many aspects as they are (including allowing discourse like this on Free Republic) great, but I think the negative contribution outweighs those things.

But that genie is out of the bottle.

And now this “pandemic”. It is nearly as if it were part of a master plan, to drive people even further away from a “society”.

I don’t like the trend over the past fifty or sixty years.

[sauropod]

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