Reaping Without Sowing

Anybody who's ever farmed can tell you how that ends and how fast.

McCarthy era memo from the National Archives

I was born in a Tennessee hospital that the city and the county owned. Morristown-Hamblen. That’s not just a clever name. It’s a symbol of the town and county bolted together, because they built it together and, for a while, held onto it. Folks in Hamblen County put up the money, put up the building, staffed it, and it was ours.

It’s not ours anymore. Some conglomerate owns it now, same as near every community hospital left.

If we had the time I’d tell you a hundred stories just like that one.

Born where and when I was, means I grew up around the evidence that we built things and owned them. TVA dams and the lakes behind them. Power lines running out to cities, towns, and farms that had been dark since God made dirt. Oak Ridge, a city built for the Manhattan Project, was just down the road, and the work it offered helped transform this whole area. I got here late, too late to see the massive effort that built my region, but I always saw the evidence that it was possible.

My granddaddy grew up in the hills, became a chaplain colonel in the Air Force, and put his body on the line in the Civil Rights Movement. He also built a factory in Bean Station that hired people and made goods. Nobody in my family thought those were two different jobs. My papaw came up one of thirteen kids in a sharecropping family and got himself forty acres. I helped in the tobacco fields and put up hay with him. My great granddaddy Clay walked around Morristown trading pocket knives and watches, bought tobacco cheap one year and did all right for himself.

My whole family, aunts, uncles, mom, dad, all agreed on a few things. They all loved this country. They loved the land and the rivers and they loved the people. But they also knew exactly what it had cost to get here, and they said it out loud at the table in front of the kids. Not a single one of them acted like loving this place and telling the truth about it were at odds.

Somewhere we lost the ability to do both at once, and I reckon I know why.

We decided we were finished.

There’s a word for it. Developed. We say “developing countries” when we mean the ones still coming along, and “developed” when we’re talking about us. But developed is a myth. When we stopped trying to get better we started getting worse.

A country that’s still getting built can fail and push forward at any stage. It can get something badly wrong, own it, and keep moving. A finished country can only be defended or attacked. So once we told ourselves the job was done, we had two moves left. Pretend everything’s fine, or decide there was never a thing here worth saving. Both moves let you avoid the work.

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They also knew exactly what it had cost to get here, and they said it out loud at the table in front of the kids. Not a single one of them acted like loving this place and telling the truth about it were at odds.

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We quit moving, and what we’ve got now is atrophy. When you watch it happen in a body or watch it happen in a country, it looks about the same. The muscle’s still technically there. It just won’t do anything.

We stopped building and improving and instead started extracting and declining. We let the wealthiest among us sell off the country we’d built. When the results got bad enough, we let them blame the most vulnerable people inside and outside our borders.

For more than a generation we’ve been reaping without sowing, and anybody who’s ever farmed can tell you how that ends, and about how fast.

Somewhere along the way we made a religion out of the market. We stopped looking at our own resources and accepted unbridled, uncompetitive, uncaring capitalism as our only option. We didn’t plan. We didn’t deliberate. We didn’t sit down and project what this country would need in thirty years, partly because we were afraid to pick wrong. So we did nothing and let the market decide, and the market always picks whatever pays out the quickest.

That gospel got into all of us. Including folks who are fighting for the right things. Including me. I want universal health care. I want universal child care. I want K through 16 for anybody who needs it. But I catch myself and near everybody around me arguing about every bit of these necessities like they’re a money problem. They’re not.

The real question is whether this country still knows how to do anything at all. Whether we could still build the hospital.

Our development didn’t just stop economically, it stopped morally. We got here on the backs of people who had no choice. The Native people we killed and ran off their land. The slaves we kidnapped and worked, their children and their grandchildren who stayed poor and stayed hunted long after a piece of paper said they were free. The Chinese men we wore out laying rail across the West. Poor white folks like mine, who we sent down in the mines in West Virginia and Kentucky and Pennsylvania. A good many of them got left down there. That’s the ground under this country. I’m standing on it and so are you.

We just stack new floors on top of failures we never named, and that’s how you get a house that won’t hold.

Tennessee’s where the Ku Klux Klan was born. Tennessee’s also where the Highlander Folk School trained organizers and civil rights workers who went out and cracked the South open. Rosa Parks sat in a workshop here in the summer of 1955. That December she wouldn’t get up out of her seat. Same state, same decades, same dirt. That’s what an unfinished country looks like. It looks like the worst of us and unsuspecting heroes coming up out of the same field in the same season. It happens when a country is still alive, still becoming.

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Tennessee’s where the Ku Klux Klan was born. Tennessee’s also where the Highlander Folk School trained organizers and civil rights workers who went out and cracked the South open.

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We’ve had good runs. The Progressive Era. The New Deal. The Arsenal of Democracy, when we repurposed factories to war against fascism and proved this country could still do hard things on purpose. Stretches of the fifties and the sixties when it looked like we might finally become the country we said we were. But every time we slid back, it was for the same reaons. Hatred. Fear. Resentment. Racism. The oldest tools around for splitting up folks who ought to be on the same side. We never dealt with with the real issues, so they festered. We’d start making progress, somebody’d reach for old tools, and we’d quit early.

I’ve got a visceral loathing for the Democratic Party and some of that’s earned. For fifty years they’ve managed a decline and called it governing. But some of it isn’t earned and I know it, because a lot of those folks are holding onto a hope they can’t put down. They still think this thing’ll deliver if we wait a little longer and tune it a little better. They’re grieving something and can’t admit that it died.

Now the ground’s coming unsettled under us. People are reaching outside the norm, voters and nonvoters both. The apathy and resignation paralizing this country for thirty years has made people so desperate they’ll listen to near anything. That kind of unrest is rife with potential and it’s rife with catastrophe. Which future we get comes down to whether somebody shows up with something real to build.

Which is where leadership comes in, or where it’s supposed to. The reason most of our leaders can’t put a better future in front of you is that they won’t say the plain thing first. We didn’t become who we were supposed to be. There’s real work left and it’s big work, not tweaks around the edges.

You can’t set a vision for where we need to go and insist we already arrived at the same time. That’s why every speech you hear sounds the same. Defend. Protect. Restore. Nobody’s describing a better version of America. Describing it would mean admitting we’re not standing in it yet.

Our leaders have to say what we’re doing isn’t working. That we’re not done building. If you say those hard things, the rest opens up.

They’ve got to say where we failed, too. Name the demons out loud and name what they cost us, because the effects ripple on. A great many still profit from our sins and a great many still suffer.

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The reason most of our leaders can’t put a better future in front of you is that they won’t say the plain thing first. We didn’t become who we were supposed to be. There’s real work left and it’s big work, not tweaks around the edges.

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The truth is that the problem’s us. We don’t want it to be, so it’s convenient when our leaders point at somebody else. Iran. China. We’d rather think the problem is someone else, across an ocean, coming for what’s ours. When that distraction wears out, they point us closer to home, and tell us the it’s the socialist. The communists. The folks who want the rich to pay their share. The folks who reckon they ought to be able to afford a doctor or a house. We’ve reached a point where wanting your kids to see a doctor puts you on a list.

The problem is us. It’s the people and the apathy we keep choosing, year after year. That might hurt for a second. But then you realize it’s the best news there is. Because if the problem’s us then the solution’s us, and we can start Monday. Cities. Counties. States. Regions. The whole country.

We’re not finished. We never were, and we shouldn’t quit trying.

My people knew that. They loved this country enough to keep their hands on it.

Corbin Trent

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