All this wealth produced by them goes out of their hands and reduces them into welfare recipients from the government. All this great wealth has no meaning for them.
By Jaspal Singh
The vastness of landscape forces one to feel insignificant but one with nature. It is hot as hell, yelled my friend. The temperature was 105 degrees Fahrenheit. As the sun set, beautiful colors emerged. One sees the most beautiful sunsets over the wheat fields. Seems like as if there is gold all around you. In fact there is. Wheat is the local gold.
They Came to Stay, close-up by Franklin B Thompson (From Creative Commons).
This winter wheat was brought to these plains by the Russian Germans from the Volga area, when they came and settled here. My friend was telling me about his great grandfather. He came from the old country. They were very poor. He always wore black woolen clothes and hardly bathed. He was too poor to afford tobacco, so he would smoke dried up cow dung. And since there was no running hot water, he bathed once a month and stunk up the place rest of the time. On Sundays, he would sit near the radiator in the church and the whole congregation had to cover their noses.
These folks built elaborate churches in the area. Each family queried limestone and brought it for the building and contributed labour. They also named their communities after the villages and towns from where they had come from. Liebenthal, Herzog, Volga are among some of the names of these towns. There are still few people who speak German and they are the ones who organize Oktoberfests, with a lot of beer, sourkrouts, knockwurst and off course polka.
This is also the season of summer storms. Last night we saw two big storms and we decided to drive into them. It was an incredible experience, to be surrounded by lightning and thunder and nothing else in sight for miles. Driving through the storms felt like as if we were on a different planet.
There were several nations and tribes of the native peoples in this area. Kansa, Cheyenne, Sioux, Lacotas, Cherokees lived in these vast plains with millions of Buffaloes in the prairie fields. With the coming of railroad and expansion out west after the Civil War, a campaign to exterminate the natives and Buffaloes was started. One feels the energy of this genocide in the landscape, in the eerie silence of the plains.
It has been a great joy to see some of my old friends that I have not seen for close to 40 years. They all talk about number one problem here, which is water. For more than a century, it has been pumped out and the aquifers are not getting renewed. It is affecting many states. They all know something needs to be done, but what? Nobody seems to know. In the meanwhile plains are drying up.
Most of the farmers are either in debt or just live hand to mouth. They get huge subsidies from the federal government to keep them afloat. That also traps them into a condition of dependence and road to nowhere. They cannot think of alternatives.
They think of themselves as very independent but they are so dependent on government subsidies for survival. All this wealth produced by them goes out of their hands and reduces them into welfare recipients from the government. All this great wealth has no meaning for them. Wheat, corn, oil, cattle, all goes out and leaves them in debt and terribly dependent on the government. What an irrational situation? Great wealth of these plains leaves the farmers, who produce it in debt and at the mercy of government.
(Jaspal Singh is a philosopher based in Cambridge, Massachusetts)