People were used to having a measure of control over their incomes or investments. They feel betrayed.
For farmers, it's nothing new. Weather's always been a a financial wild-card. Drought that keeps crops from growing, rain that keeps crops from being harvested, are constants.
This year, though, dairy prices are at their lowest in thirty years. We no longer have dairy cows, but milk prices affect us. As dairy farmers sell their herds for slaughter, our grass-fed organic beef loses its value in a glut of meat. The Amish farmer who puts his milk in our bulk tank can't pay us for the electric to cool it. His horse's hooves clip-clopping around the driveway have been part of our lives. The next door neighbor told my son yesterday that he's selling his cows, and won't need him anymore. A man who rented our barn had an auction last week. He spoke about the decision with his pain sharp, and his tears glistening.
There's sun this evening- sun the bronze of turmpets, against lingering grey skies. We're moving cows. The animals are beautiful, pelts glowing with health and sun. The sheep are little cumulus clouds of white in a far pasture. We haven't been able to make enough hay to keep most of the animals through the winter. Each of them has a history, a geneology, but economics reduces them to commodities. We'll have to sell them cheaply, at a loss, then pay capital gain taxes on the money we supposedly made.
Rocky, a Belgian work horse, rumbles by, radiant and backlit. He weighs a ton, and the earth shakes as he passes. In the winter, he races at us, the, spraying snow as he breaks. How do we choose between hay for him, or a pregnant heifer?
I finally got my bachelor's degree last December. I make no more money than I did before, but, in middle age, it's a hedge against unemployment. I'd paid the last few years taxes with student loans. Now, I'm trying to pay them off, and FSA payments and taxes go unpaid.
I thought having a bachelor's degree would mean middle-class perks. I signed the kids up for piano lessons, which they loved. I thought I'd get braces for the girl that needs them so, on the cusp of adolescence. I bought a used car, that gives me wonderful automotive anonymity. No more rustbucket noise- just innocuous invisibility. We'll live without those trimmings. Sneakers for school, a restaurant meal, entering a store- I try to regard it as a Zen exercise in shedding excess. It feels, however, like deprivation.
I'm aware of my luck in having choices to make. The people on my caseload, just out of jail, whose only dream is priavcy or peace, would love to take my place. The mothers in Darfur whose children don't live long enough to have crooked teeth, or families in Sudan with no freezer full of lean beef or peanut butter for the winter humble me.
Is the degree of acceptance a coping mechanism that makes sense? Is it a function of my class, bred into me- the forelock- tugging equivalent of false consciousness? Is acceptance a reasonable reaction to something I can't change, without savings accounts, pensions, fall-back finances?
Value-added beef- humanely raised, healthy and local. Kids- witty, and concretely compent, but cultrually feral. Farm, failing despite best intentions. Where do I put the emphasis- how to choose?
The herd thunders by, crosses the road- steers, bull, calves, horses. Angus, Hereford, Highlanders, Charalois, Limousin. The landscape is drenched in a rainbow as the skies open. The kids belt out old country songs, barefoot in hand-me-downs, moving the cows. My love for it all pierces me. The pavement is rough and warm. The cows have passed, and I move aside for a car to pass.
