PLANTED PLANET
In 1790 this nation of our was inhabited by one occupational group. Records clearly show that ninety per cent of all early Americans were into agriculture in one way or another. Think ahead to 1970, for instance, and you can clearly see how we have shifted in an occupational sense.
In more recent timers, it has been altered even more radically until the work of the farmer has become a lost art, and agriculture is low-rated as a lifework; rural persons seen as second-class, even comic citizens.
We laugh at what we once were.
I bring this up again at this time, because another occupational sphere of American life is rapidly departing in a similar manner and we are allowing it to happen - even encouraging leave faster.
Those individuals who did not prosper as well as they thought they should moved westward and opened up vast news areas of agricultural development. There were few individuals left to fill the jobs such as lawyers, teachers, ministers, storekeepers, bankers, carpenters, stonemasons, innkeepers- only ten percent of the t total population total population was available for such jobs and, in truth, many -even most of them, did “a little farming on the side. The minister of our church in the 1700's made his, living buying and selling cattle and by investing in lands which he, then, re-sold to full-time farmers or cattlemen.
Inventions, too, changed the needs of the times. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin which caused changes in the need for field hands. In 1834 Cyrus McCormick patented his reaper which reduced the workload of framers harvesting grains. John Deere and Leonard Andrus, in 1837, began marketing steel plows and, that same year, a new,more efficient reaper was patented. We can see how such a flow of innovations -often from part time farmers, oddly enough, brought about radical adjustments and outright changes in farming.
Such a list could be continued endlessly touching on all branches of agriculture, but that smattering should be sufficient to show us that the same sort of thing is taking place right now as we continued to shift our manufacturing capabilities to foreign soil.
You can, if you wish, if you wish, show how development of our communications skills and equipment are at fault. We have, in one sense, soft and hardware ourselves to critical points of no return.
We have not yet come to realize that the concept of world trade is a reality. Our Congress needs to rid itself of old-fashioned political party mental quirks and stop pushing the “slumber-on button so often and so freely
A.L.M. February 24, 2006 [c454wds
