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John Stark's avatar

This is soul-stirring stuff. Alas, I don't understand the insurance system you are discussing. I do know these things are fiendishly complicated, but if you could explain it, it would help many of us outside farm country.

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Mark H. Jones's avatar

Damned fine writing, Adam.

This plain-spoken elegy for the family farmer creates a certain hollowness in the gut that reminds me of the final days of my student teaching, when I realized that the profession of “teacher”- I come from a long line of teachers on my father’s side; many of them from farming communities in the midwest and the Colorado plains - had been sliced, diced, quantized, and reshaped into a packaged “product” with a distribution chain and business model. It was all about “classroom management” and test scores. And, as Adam points out, it is in this model that cheating flourishes not only as “this one neat trick", but a moral imperative for survival, and, ultimately, the bludgeon used by the wealthy and powerful to take, take, take whatever they want, from whomever they want. Farming, education … this is happening everywhere. I don’t know that this machine can be stopped, but at least we can bear witness to the destructive swath it has cut through our fields. There is some cold comfort in knowing that there are still those who see and speak the plain and honest truth of simply being human even in a deafening maelstrom of the impersonal and the industrial.

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