March 11, 2015

Where is Home?

By PETER SCHUTT

 

Americans born in the 1950s and 60s may be the last generation to understand the meaning of the term “home place” – the original home built on a family farm. Until the latter part the 20th century, most farms had home places – or at least the remnants of home places.

Some of these family farms would’ve been small spreads, the size determined as much by the character of the land as by the monetary wealth of the family. In the hills of middle and east Tennessee or the Ozarks in Arkansas, home places would’ve been more modest than, say, in the Mississippi Delta, where sprawling plantations were more common.

Anyhow, regardless of the size, home places were, well . . . home. Home to successive generations of families who, in varying degrees, had a love for the land and called it home.

I remember the warm feeling of some of these places from my youngest days in the 1950s and 1960s. My brother, dad and I would walk the fields and briar patches hunting quail, then we’d be invited in to the farmers home place to warm by the fire and tell stories. I don’t think we even turned on the TV.

During this time, unbeknownst to me, America was fast becoming urbanized; when I was born in 1950, 20% of the populus lived on farms. By the time I was grown, only 2% did. In the span of a couple decades, farming had taken on the aura of a second-class career by most “educated” folk.

And so was lost the ideal of home place.

We became mobile – upward mobility was, and is, the aim of higher education. Our economy morphed from a market of small businesses into what is now basically a financial system – the marker of success less about doing good work than making as much money as possible, with less regard about the means than the end.

Sons and daughters of farmers, then, were encouraged both at home and at school, to “go off” to college, get a degree and pursue a career. The idea of coming home, or “homecoming”, was lost. If you went to college, you pursued a career based mainly on pay, regardless of where the career took you. You probably didn’t think about your home place.

Today, as father of three sons who I have tried to raise to value home, land and nature’s economy, it is hard to compete with the teaching in high school and university that we now live in a “global economy”. That there are big solutions to “global” problems such as poverty, disease, injustice, etc., when in reality, there are no such big solutions.

On the contrary, there is need for revolution, not big solutions. And all importantly successful revolutions start at home, in local communities. The brave, truth-speaking Pope Francis recently challenged people of faith: “A Christian who is not a revolutionary today isn’t a Christian,” he said.

 

Though American history taints the word revolution with violence and bloodshed, revolutions need not be violent. Some effective revolutions today might include:

  • refuse to buy herbicides that poison the land
  • refuse to buy foods that are produced on the backs of poor people, or are grown using toxic chemicals
  • buy food, clothing, etc., produced locally – at farmers markets or Community Supported Agriculture, or CSAs
  • grow a vegetable garden, no matter how small
  • learn something about nature, every day
  • make it a point to have a family meal, homecooked, at home
  • read “The Unsettling of America”, by Wendell Berry

 

America has come to depend on a food system wherein the average serving of meat, grain or vegetable travels about 1,500 miles before it reaches our plates. Whether the disappearance of concept of “home” is a cause or effect of this broken food system, the fact remains that until we value and honor the land and our homes, we will be stuck with a system that poisons the land and our bodies; less than neighborly neighborhoods and an economy based on random consumerism and large amounts of personal debt.

We can do better, and it all starts at home.