When Will the Revolution Begin?

     Just as I reached my annual apex of feeling overwhelmed by our self-created flood of produce and somewhat resentful of the time it demands and guilt it instills when so many are hungry, I stepped out of my world and into another for a day.
     I spent that day listening to hundreds of people from all over the U.S. and Canada who deal with hunger, homelessness, health, agriculture, labor and other sectors where injustices are becoming more pronounced. It was the last day of a 3-day conference called "Closing the Hunger Gap,"  hosted by the Oregon Food Bank.
     I knew I'd learn a lot, but the thoughts provoked by the people I met and listened to that day led to something more profound. My feelings are coalescing into anger. That's probably a good thing as we move inexorably into another election season that has as much substance as a vat of cotton candy.
     From the breakout sessions I attended, I both regretted--and was glad--I had not attended all 3+ days of the conference. It would have been more overwhelming than my measly flood of produce and probably more than my brain could absorb - not because of negativity, but because of myriad inspiring conversations, ideas and keynote speakers. They coalesced the frustration I've been feeling for quite some time, but hadn't voiced with others. This was an opportunity for me, an outsider, to learn from people who deal with issues that are altering our communities and our country.
     

I suspect most who attended the conference would not be disappointed to find their work no longer necessary. Unfortunately, it's not likely to happen any time soon.
What You See and What You Don't
     The "face" of the problem is the increasing homelessness in many communities. But that's more like the scab on a sore that's festering below the skin, unseen. We can ignore it or try to cover with "band-aids" to ease our consciences and make us feel better, but it does nothing to solve the problem in the long run. In spite of years of charity, the numbers are increasing. Is the help offered by armies of well-meaning volunteers and non-profits only exacerbating the situation by taking pressure off our politicians and titans of industry?  The symptoms are being attended to but the root causes are not.
     The visible homeless, with and about whom we feel most uncomfortable, are often those plagued by unattended mental illness or addictions. Surviving as best they can must only exacerbate the symptoms. A bowl of soup and temporary shelter in winter won't change their situations.
      There are also "invisible" homeless all around us who show up for work and school every day.  A shocking number of children in our own community have no real home; they may still be with one or both parents, but sleep in cars or constantly change locations (hotels, couches or floors of family and friends). They have no place to call home, let alone a room of their own in which to study or play or temporarily escape the fear and frustrations in their lives. How will that affect them as adults?
     Universities now have food banks for students barely scraping by. Work-study jobs are designed to give them just one hour less than the number that would qualify them for employee benefits, saving the university money. However, that one hour also makes them ineligible for SNAP benefits (food stamps). Add this Catch-22 to the fact they'll likely graduate with debt they'll be saddled with for decades and their futures don't look as promising for having played by the rules and gotten an education as it did for previous generations. What does that portend for our future society?
      Just as we judge all homeless by the most visible, we often judge all who use food banks as somehow failing as good citizens. Truth is, many of them work not only a job, but two or three, and still can't make ends meet because of high housing costs, a temporary or chronic health condition, abusive family situation or some other crisis in their lives. Why should low-wage earners who show up to work every day (they can't afford a sick day) feel shame in not being able to feed their families? Do their employers (especially those whose CEO makes millions) feel shame their employees need food banks? Are stockholders aware of it?
Situational or Generational?
      Some who rely on food banks are infrequent users who feel shame in using them and thus avoid them. Many who qualify for SNAP (food stamp) benefits don't apply. Others are generational users for whom it is their way of life. They know how to work the system for their long-term advantage. We tend to judge the former by the latter, making their situation all the more uncomfortable. Hence, we rarely hear their stories. If we did, they might reveal more of the root causes of growing need.
     In our increasingly global and investor-owned world, it's hard to put a finger on the root causes of food insecurity, lack of affordable housing, non-living wages and all the other injustices that are stewing at and just below the surface. There are many and they've been growing for a long time; the consequences are becoming increasingly visible and tangible. Our daily news shows where the scabs are being ripped off. The report may seem to be "just" about racism, health/obesity, labor strikes, housing starts, immigration, etc. but they are all related to access to jobs that pay a living wage, food, healthcare, housing, and education.
     We were all brought up to believe that if you just get an education and work hard, you can achieve anything. It's still true for some, but an increasing number are exhausted from the treadmill that leads to nowhere. Someday there will be enough of them with just enough energy left to start a revolution to abolish the growing inequities - again. History does repeat itself and we must heed lessons from situations eerily similar to those in our history books. The civil rights movement did not settle racism, the women's rights movement didn't bring pay equity, wars have not brought world peace. Labor unions were formed when a few enjoyed great privilege and the masses got the crumbs. Laws to  counter the inequities of the previous century have been steadily diluted to benefit the few again. Democracy can't be entrusted to the rich to dole out to the rest of us.

     One day soon, the well-meaning folks will put down the bags of groceries they're carrying to the food bank or put down their ladles at the soup kitchen and join those in long lines at the doors to take to the streets to demand justice. We can't call ourselves a democracy when power and wealth is concentrated among fewer and fewer people while the rest see waning opportunity for future security.
     Keynote speaker at the conference, Nick Saul, told the story of an event in Canada where a cabinet minister commented that the happiest day of the year for her family was when they shopped together for food for the local food bank. A recipient whose family had to rely on such food while she went to school and worked several low-wage jobs spoke truth to power when she said, "There is no justice when your children get to choose what my children eat." That recipient, Nadia Edwards, was also part of the keynote session, along with Janet Poppendieck. Nadia not only got a degree in social work and initiated new educational support programs in food banks, but returned to school to become a nurse with the goal of working on the streets with the homeless. She's been on that tightrope; she understands. But she won't just be applying band-aids, she'll be poking at root causes and speaking more truth to power.
    She's both inspirational and revolutionary.
    

Parade and County Fair

     For a small town these were quite the events. People came from other towns, even friends and family from cities. It was pure small-town Americana and the highlight of the summer for kids in the 1950s.

The Parade

     Towns still have parades, but they don't seem as elaborate. Or, am I just remembering them through a kid's eyes? No, I don't think so.

     The main difference between then and now were the floats. They were elaborate examples of excess and waste (through my adult eyes), but I don't think anyone—least of all us kids—thought of them in such terms then. They were beautiful and somewhat magical. People on them threw candy to kids. Girls were dressed in formals and long gloves (how hot those must have been!), others in costumes befitting the float's theme.

     The excess was the result of the design and size. Most were built on a big flatbed truck or long, flat trailer, the kind used to haul huge equipment. Chicken wire was molded into a form (rural scene, waterfall, covered wagon, church, etc.) then stuffed with gazillions of colored paper napkins – all told, the town must have gone through truckloads of them. Hidden in large spaces, such as equipment shops, barns (near town, they couldn't be driven too far or too fast or all the napkins would blow out) or Quonset huts, it took a week or more to build each one. Part of the fun was keeping them hidden while the members of the given organization built them. Then, they'd be revealed the morning of the parade to oohs and aahs. What a nightmare if it rained or a wind storm arose, but I don't remember that ever happening. Prizes were awarded and the floats stayed on display for a while after the parade, then they were disassembled and big loads of napkins would be hauled to the dump (it wasn't called a landfill back then and recycling wasn't a word or concept yet). I doubt much of the chicken wire was reusable after being stretched and shaped either. It was rendered frustratingly unwieldy, but kids had no clue.   

My brother's Boy Scout troop (Note small float behind them)

 

Floats weren't the only things in the parade. The high school marching band (which often won top prizes in state competitions), Boy Scouts and American Legion drum and bugle corps marched. There were lots of horseback riders, and some kids decorated their dogs or brought pets in wagons. 

Nieces and nephew ready for parade in 1980s

      Others decorated their bikes, trikes or wagons and took part too, usually dressed in a costume. There was always a Grand Marshall and other dignitaries, often politicians, carried in the backs of convertibles. Not many people owned convertibles so they must have been on loan from the car dealers. 

     One wonders where all the creative ideas for floats and kids' costumes came from in that era before the internet, Google, Pinterest and all the electronic idea-sharing sources and photos. There were plenty, though, and it was great fun to see it all in one big festival of our own making.

  

There were so many in the parade it's amazing there were people left to watch it in this town of about 2,000 inhabitants.






  

 
The Fair

      You could find the fair with your eyes closed, just by the unique aroma: a combination of greasy hamburgers, cotton candy, manure and dill. And dust. Afternoon winds would always stir dust into the mix.

Every kid with a dollar in his pocket was in for a day of adventure, pop bottle in hand. Carnival rides and the 4-H barn kept most kids entertained until the rodeo started. As at events today, service organizations made money by selling food at booths - the ones where you could get a hamburger or chili to counteract all the sweet junk food.

My Dad & baby sis at the fair

      Adults and kids in Scouts, or who those had 4-H projects that didn't involve animals, had entries displayed in the Home Ec building, whence emanated the aroma of dill, displayed alone or in a floral arrangement. Ribbons were awarded – purple for grand prize, blue, red or white. No one could see the last-minute panic behind them to finish on time, short tempers of frustrated parents whose procrastinating kids were up late finishing their projects. Many a tear was shed. The swiftness with which that was all forgotten was determined by the color of the ribbon (if one appeared) sitting beside it at the fair in the following days. Promises and determination to start earlier next year were as fleeting as New Year's resolutions.

      The more disciplined adults entered beautiful needlework, picture-perfect loaves of bread, little jars of pastel jellies or large ones of colorful fruits or vegetables. Those were the most fascinating to me. How did they do that? And, equally impressive, they grew whatever was in the jar! About all I knew about canning at that point was learning from 4-H or home ec lectures that it would be very dangerous if you did it wrong. People could die from botulism. That made it all the more mysterious and impressive. Little did I know that I'd be doing lots of canning in the future.

      Who knew that decades later I'd be canning lots of home-grown produce every summer, but growing it too. I've never entered anything in the fair since I was a kid, but the thought does stroll across my mind almost every summer...

Thoughts During Harvest Season

     It's curious that when I was growing up in a farming community on the Great Plains in northeastern Colorado, where grains (wheat, oats, barley, milo, sorghum, feed corn), sugar beets and cattle were the main foods produced, I was little aware of it as “real” food. It was all shipped elsewhere to be processed, never to be seen again – or at least not recognized as something local when it came back to us. Maybe I was too young to be interested, no one else seemed to be either.

     The sugar beets went to a factory in the neighboring town, about 7 miles away. Some of them likely ended up in our grocery stores, kitchens, school cafeteria and restaurants but there was no way of telling. It all went under the name Great Western sugar, just like beets from elsewhere. Still, I doubt many locals reached for bags labeled cane sugar; they likely would have been loyal to beet sugar.

     It was the same with grains. At harvest, farmers brought their crops to any of three grain elevators in town, one of which my grandfather owned. When prices seemed good (always a gamble), they were sold and shipped by rail to Denver. There they were mixed with grains from all over the region and sent to mills where they were processed into flour and returned to us in bags labeled Gold Medal or Pillsbury. Bleached white flour was most commonly used; the germ and bran were removed and sold separately. It never occurred to me (or probably most anyone else, except perhaps the farm families themselves) that some of the Wonder bread hugging our lunch meat and mayo or peanut butter and jelly together came from a nearby farm.

     A farmer friend here in Oregon said when his mother was a school teacher she realized that even some of her students who lived on farms, whose families grew wheat, didn't see the connection between wheat and bread. It's likely the same everywhere, or was more so back then. I suspect I knew it intellectually as a kid, we would have learned it in school. But, it sure wasn't what I was thinking when I put slices of bread in the toaster or made a grilled cheese sandwiche. Or, when we went to Grandad's elevator and he'd let us get a handful of wheat to chew on 'til it turned to a chewy gum-like substance - probably gluten.

     Today we live in Oregon's Willamette Valley where the dominant crops are timber and grass seed, but can name the farm behind just about everything on our plates every day, including the meat, beans and grains. In fact, I buy wheat and triticale directly from farmers and grind it myself when making bread or pastries. It's

Not your grandmother's white bread

as far as you can get from Wonder bread. White wheat (has less gluten so is used for pastry and flat breads) grows best in this climate, but some red wheat is grown too. White wheat, freshly-ground, makes excellent pie crusts and crackers – ones you really taste because of the texture and flavor. Red wheat is what was/is grown where I grew up, which is highest in gluten and used for bread.

     Much of the produce we eat is from our own gardens and much of the seed for that comes from local farms, or from seed Don saved himself. Farmers where I grew up saved their own seed, selecting the best each year to plant the following year. Today, not only is it discouraged, it's illegal with proprietary seeds, especially genetically modified ones (gmo). Fortunately, not everyone buys into that scheme and I buy from farmers who don't.

      Harvest season today is very different. For one thing, I'm far more involved in growing and preserving a good chunk of our food. As a kid, I got to go out into harvest fields with friends to deliver lunch to harvest crews and loved the whole dusty, hot, sweaty scene, but then I didn't have to be out in it all day like those men and women, in open combines and trucks – nothing to silence the noise or keep the dust out of every pore of their bodies and clothes. One time when I was in grade school, my friend, Jennifer, who was a year older than me, had to move a truck for her dad and I got to “help.” We could barely see through (let alone over) the steering wheel and I remember monitoring her progress by watching through a hole in the floor.

    Besides the grain elevator, Grandad owned a half section of land. Rain and hail would often hit during summer and could damage or destroy a crop within minutes. He paced the living room on stormy nights, along with every other helpless farmer. I realize now those storms affected everyone since it was an agricultural community and all the businesses and tax rolls depended upon a successful harvest.

Saturday Night

      Summer Saturday nights were lively in our town back then, especially during harvest. This was before farmers had their own harvest equipment so they relied on crews that went through all the farming communities doing custom harvests. It must have been a scheduling nightmare, given the vagaries of weather. The crews were composed of high school or college-age boys and Mexicans who came north specifically to work harvests. It was an intense, exhausting season for all involved.

     The downtown merchants stayed open late on Saturday nights then – grocery stores, drug stores, clothing stores, the five-&-dime, barbers, restaurants, cafes, bars, liquor stores, the library, the Hippodrome theater, even car dealerships. Farmers and their families came to town that night. So did just about everyone in town.
     During harvests there were sometimes live bands in a Quonset hut near one of the grain elevators on Friday or Saturday night, where all the teenagers gathered. I worked in a drug store all through high school and remember Saturday nights being extremely busy. It was exhausting, but fun too.

      Apparently it had been so when my parents were in high school, as well. My Dad also worked in a drugstore during high school and his boss, Mr. Cleveland wouldn't close the store "until the last farmer left town,” Mom said. By then, it was too late for her to go out. She said my grandmother, like many others in town, would park her car in a strategic spot downtown that afternoon and walk home (only about 4 blocks), then come back in the evening and have a prime spot to people watch and visit with passers-by. That was what people did on their front porches during nice weather – but the “porches” moved downtown on Saturday night. No one had a television set then and computers and social media were the stuff of science fiction.

      Today, small farming and logging communities are but a shadow of their former selves and not only are Saturday nights quiet, but most every night is. Farmers have their own harvest equipment, or have closer access to it when they need it. Small hometown stores have been replaced by the Walmarts and similar chain stores with lower prices, though people have to drive to other communities to shop them. The internet has also taken a toll since you can shop from home. Porches on houses today are more for looks. I never see people sitting on them, visiting with passers-by, though some of the fancy houses even have nice wicker furniture on their porches. Community organizations are fading, as well. We're "too busy" and connect more via a machines. We don't have time, we say. What are we spending our time on? What is happening to “community”? It's a question surely every generation has asked as their worlds changed.