A Community, Organized

Our two dogs have taught me a LOT about how a society of thinking mammals can adjust their behavior and relationship to one another when their environments abruptly change. Or when one falls deathly ill, requiring another to take on additional guardian and scent laying duties.  Seeing our Alpha and Beta dog change roles this summer when the submission but street savvy dog fell victim to a tick-borne disease and had to be nursed back from the brink of death.  This family choice… to spend the money and time necessary to save the fabulous dog that was given to us as a rescue… has bonded the three of us in a way I’m not sure many get to experience.  The dogs and our relationship with the dogs has altered my thinking. But in many good ways in addition to the obviously nutty one:  they are animals.  But, so have the chickens and rabbits taught me something. I can’t wait for the goats.

Yesterday, to rest from riding back to college with my son and driving on to the US Army base to shop in the absolutely blissful comfort of the orderly conduct within the fences of a military base* before returning home, I was reading a few articles across the blogosphere and resting up from the turnaround driving day. I suppose it was the direct contrast of the young uniformed soldiers having an ice cream together at the food court before preparing for their drills and training sessions Monday, followed by the similarly straightlaced young men and women seen lingering on the Sunday afternoon campus at the “Missouri College of Science and Technology” tucked a half-hour back into the hills down the road from Fort Leonardwood Army Training Base. The nicknames “locally” for both, are respectively, The Missouri School of Mines, Engineering and Computer Nerds and Fort Lost in the Woods.

In either case, the direct contrast with those two orderly and comfortable environments between the next environment I stepped into at the Walmart in the nearest town that sits on I-44 just a few miles north of the army base – that contrast was drastic and I wanted my son to note it as well. His having grown up in the “shadow” of military life gives him a different perspective altogether. The detour is worth it, timewise, since the interstate will get me to my exit in a shorter time than leaving directly from Rolla. It is one of the truths us country folks out here in flyover country know that some of youins city folk have forgotten about with yore geepy ess gadgets directing your path all the time.

You can get to the same place in less time by taking shortcuts.

Please read that again.

On the way back to school, my son and I were discussing my first year at Rolla, coming from a small community school where I was Valedictorian. (Out of fewer than 30 high school seniors. In this region of the country. Where a guy I went to school with made me check a buck rabbit to see if it had both its testicles. Duh, of course I was top in the class.) I explained to him that I had NOT been prepared for the level of mathematics necessary for engineering, being placed into Algebra I after my math exam and feeling completely left out of the Calculus-Physics chattering discussions from my St. Louis educated classmates. However, I could chug a pitcher of beer with the biggest rugby playing drinker and knew how to play the piano enough to impress a few late-night bar attendees, so I compensated and did that a lot. My grades slipped to levels that prevented renewing my Valedictorian scholarship, so I took my student loan to Texas and worked in an oil refinery for a couple years until that went bust and I experienced the post oil-boom crisis in Texas. I also witnessed (but did NOT participate) in the first open (female) mayor of Houston who was lesbian elected. What was HER name? It was an all-out early test of vote pandering and community organizing in the ghettos of the inner city by large scale single-issue targeting groups, I believe, sending Latino and border issue operatives into the southern areas that drew the largest immigrant crowds on street corners. Occasionally, I would drive to seen a friend whose “husband” was named Pedro. Then sending a different set; the black lives matter (now) types, into the black ghettos in inner-city Houston, where I tried NEVER to drive. It was a successful election and I don’t think her subsequent mayorial performance was noteworthy except that it had shown the success of the Cloward-Piven strategy to the Community Organizer Crowd when the Reagan years were just beginning.

Then, my life swerved when I decided working for waitress wages, going back to college and barely scraping by sucked. Joining the USAF to operate and maintain a state of the art radar system and travel around the world and see what it was that was going on while being paid a small salary seemed like a great option. That choice led, of course, to my marriage, my son’s birth and my decision to leave the USAF and return to the OU College of Journalism to complete my edumacashion on a GI Bill, for which I am grateful and never felt “entitled.”

I told him that I am proud of his excellent grades at Missouri S&T and proud of his having completed two successful internships as a Computer Scientist or nerd, whichever he prefers (when accepting a beer from my cousin at the Saturday river meet, greet and eat on the banks of a tributary to the mighty Castor River, he said he was living the “life, if your life involves being around a lot of nerds… and mine does” in a way that makes me feel comfortable with his level of understanding about how life works. But, I want him to understand that the education I got and the way I chose to live my life in order to earn it and achieve it was of no less value than his living in an apartment with a crappy property manager who doesn’t want to fix the crack in the wall because you can’t see light through it (it is UNDERGROUND in a sub-level apartment) and eating lots of Ramen noodles and home-canned broth and sauces in order to study almost all the time when not doing nerdy engineering kind of things like figure out how to make a Halloween costume out of old computer parts. It was, all in all, a nice trip back to the two atmospheres that taught me most of what I wanted to be in life and how to assess and change what was sorely lacking. My year at Rolla, seeing the young people who’d come from larger schools and understood the technology I yearned to grasp, prepared me to accept that I needed, somehow, to introduce myself to technology in some way outside of the academic environment. My ten years in the Air Force did exactly that and for that I simply had to organize my thinking in a regimented style that I find attractive to this day. My son grasped, I think, that I was explaining that the military is a microcosm of a greater society. And that changes in the structure and composition of any society is as easy to train and regiment as my country hick raised on a farm background mind was trained and regimented.

I do not know how the society at large is organized right now. I do know, however, that the community organizers have been busy since those early years in Houston, teaching people to respond in certain ways when a few dozen agitators show up in matching T-shirts or hats. And how the people had to give up their homes due to exorbitant interest rates and people were living in the public parks in cars after eviction by banks. And the normalization of abhorrent behavior in the public sphere has turned our public parking lots and mega-stores into freak shows. But here in my little neck of the woods, the Trump-Pence support is on full display on the crowded parking lots of the churches, the yards of people who own the big tractors and trucks along the roadsides here in flyover country and even at a dorky little college town in the hills of Missouri.

There is more than one path that takes me where I want to go.

I suppose if I had to add anything to my comments above after trying to go back to sleep, then deciding getting up was the only thing for my over-resting yesterday, it would be this.

While I’d hoped to make someone think about community organizing in a slightly different way, I realize reading my observations from taking my son back to college that I’ve come to see it in a slightly more familiar way as well. I see how to accomplish it even if it happens after a country deteriorates into crisis.

Those of you who’ve been invited to get a map to our little community here in the hills should probably consider taking me up on it.

*although my husband and I retired from the suburban haven surrounding Tinker AFB in Oklahoma, determined to escape the comfortable trap being set for us by TPTB, I admit that I admire and respect the regimented atmosphere surrounding the military shopping complex on the bases themselves.