Show Respect for Working People

By JIM VAN DER POL

Our idea of work has been thrust into bright daylight by the coronavirus and the not entirely unrelated urban troubles over another cop atrocity in my local cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. Our tendency to denigrate physical work generally shows up along racial lines. The current difference between lives lived confined at home complete with an array of electronic gadgets that “connect,” and lives lived out and about getting things done is not quite racial, but close enough to serve as a reminder that American racism is based upon a mixture of disdain for physical work and guilt caused by our hunch about how necessary it is to our well being. It has been my privilege as a life long working diversified small farmer, to escape some of the worst effects of the emptying of meaning from physical work.

We stand now at the threshold of a new appreciation for all of the parts of our economy, including the work that nurses us, feeds us, carries our sewage away, disposes of our garbage and delivers our necessaries to our door. Such an appreciation cannot help but to encourage a new perspective on racism; how it is tied to capitalism, and how our social systems perpetuate the whole mess. Are we up to it?

Wendell Berry wrote “The Hidden Wound” a half century ago, and in it he argued from his own experience growing up in a border state — Kentucky — as a farmer raised by farming people that the Black people working on so many of those farms and pretty largely restricted from any ownership or management capacity were wounded by their lives, having to develop a capacity for living “in spite of the circumstances.” But Berry argues that the whites were wounded as well, and even though their wounds were more self inflicted, they were every bit as real. “If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself.” When we reject the humanity of the black person we reduce and damage ourselves.

It was not possible, he thinks, for the white man, so consumed with the needs and panic connected with ownership of land in this fraught agriculture of ours, to form a real and satisfying connection with the soil that is impacted by his decisions. He did not live in the world in the same way the black man did, as a creature in a creaturely world, but rather as a boss, one bedeviled and tormented by his own helplessness in the hands of a succession of bigger and more powerful bosses.

When I was a boy on this farm 60 years ago, migrant workers spent several summer months on my uncle’s farm hoeing the crop of sugar beets. We called them Mexies. They lived for the several months on the yards of the farmers they worked for in a variety of old chicken coops, unused tool sheds, derelict school buses and barn lean-tos. The toilet facilities were behind the barn or in a cornfield if one was handy.

My younger cousins and my brother and I begged sugar tortillas from them in the hot summer evenings whenever we visited my uncle and aunt. And though my uncle, like my father, was intimately acquainted with manure and the use of pitchforks, with spade and hoe, and could and did work with the migrants when necessary, they also rode on tractors, did business at the elevator, bought and sold livestock. They emphasized the racial distinction by asserting they were more than just physical workers. A shovel was known as a “Mexican dragline.”

I immediately recognized Berry’s human divisions when I first read them so many years ago. His experience with his black neighbors was echoed in my life in some ways with migrant Latino farm laborers.

Much of farming has in the years since then figured out how to shed its dependence upon farm labor, whether migrant or owner. There is in fact a pretty straight line in agriculture since then to the situation we find ourselves in with the corona virus, where work done sitting at home staring into a computer screen seems not only necessary, but a desirable wave of the future. Migrant labor on our farms was replaced by technology. In the case of Midwestern sugar beets, that technology was mostly chemical with a supporting role for mechanical innovation. All of this came with costs to the natural world, some of them high costs indeed. We have accrued debts to the soil-chemical contamination, genetic pollution, carbon displacement-that we will not be able to repay.

We have devised an agricultural system that reduces the need for necessary labor on our farms, as well as our respect for those who do it. But we deliberately ignore the impacts of the virus on the pools of workers in our slaughterhouses and on our massive new dairy factories, forgetting that this too is agriculture, that these are agricultural workers. Their massive rates of infection barely register on the surface of our consciences while Trump blusters and threatens them back to work.

And, similar to the effects of the corona virus, the highest rates of gratuitous police violence are against Blacks and Latinos. We must notice that these are the groups we have always expected to do the work for us that we wish not to do for ourselves. It seems likely to me that the police violence, the pandemic, and more or less complete emptying of meaning from work, especially physical work, are all part of the same whole. And I think that we white people will begin to honestly face these issues when we take up the matter of our own conflicted attitudes toward work. A wound festers because it is hidden. And it is hidden because it is too painful to expose. But I think we have arrived at a point where the usefulness of dodging the issue no longer exists.

Jim Van Der Pol farms near Kerkhoven, Minn. A collection of his columns, “Conversations with the Land”, was published by No Bull Press (nobullpressonline.com).

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2020

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