Craig Common Sense

“To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart.”

J.D. Vance – Best Selling Author and Yale Law School Graduate

It is continually surprising to me how I see things differently now than I did in my youth. I am 68 years old, not exactly at death’s door, but it now matters to me where I will be buried. I first moved from Rushmore in Nobles County, Minnesota where I was born, in 1970. I returned in 1975 and left again in 1983. I have lived in the Minneapolis – St. Paul metropolitan area since, a period of over 35 years, 40 years if you count the years between 1970 and 1975. I have lived in the house that I live in now longer than any other place in my life. I am anchored to this community. I know thousands of people here – co-workers, members of my church, neighbors, service club members, business people, government officials and so on. I graduated from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. This is where we raised our children. Why do I have this irrational sense that I need to be buried in a little cemetery east of Rushmore, Minnesota – to go back to where I came from?
In his New York Times best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance talks at length about his ties to his hillbilly roots. The book is widely thought to be a descriptor of the angst being experienced by working class white people and as a partial explanation of the election of President Trump. (This is a related but separate discussion.) Vance’s grandparents were part of the migration from the rural South to northern industrial centers. In Vance’s case, the move wasn’t geographically far from his native Kentucky, only to Middletown, Ohio. The cultural distance was much further. Vance’s family’s jobs at Armco Steel gave them economic gains that they could only dream of in Kentucky. But their second-generation family’s American Dream has been shattered. The loss of American manufacturing jobs and the downturn of local economies in the Rust Belt have been a big part of this. But there is more afoot than economic woes – Vance articulates it by telling his life’s story.
The “more” still is with Vance, even in his life as a successful investment banker living in San Francisco with a Yale law degree, a beautiful wife, a New York Times best-seller and more money that he could have ever imagined. The “more” relates to the feelings within him (and in me) that question whether we will, or CAN ever be more than where we come from. Will he always be a hillbilly? Will I ever be more than a poor farmer’s kid from the wind-swept prairies of Southwest Minnesota? Will the part of me that is inextricably tied to where I came from ever allow me to be a part of another world? But it goes beyond that – do I WANT to be a part of another world?
It is easy for me to not-miss some of what my first home has become. There are NO family farms like the one on which I was raised. Agriculture has become corporate, high tech and competitive. Huge livestock confinement factories foul the air for miles around with a stench that I never smelled growing up on our farm. Small towns like Rushmore are dying and children still leave for better opportunities elsewhere. The closely-knit churches where every mother felt entitled and responsible to take care of and discipline every other mother’s kid are getting to be few and far between. Backfilling the losses are problems we normally associate with large cities – drugs and violence. The culture there will evolve, and no doubt survive, but it is a different culture than I grew up with. So, what is the allure?
I suppose my family growing up was like most families – a mixture of positives and negatives. I am sure my vision is clouded by time, but my family was still the source of my core values:
• Hard work is a virtue – anyone who works hard is inherently valuable and anyone who doesn’t is not respected and of diminished value. For whatever other flaws they may have had, my people worked hard. They were industrious and fiercely independent.
• Family is first – friends are wonderful, but they may come and go. Your family is always your family.
• We live in the best country in the world. We can complain and criticize, but we wouldn’t trade it for ANYWHERE.
• Our children will be better off than we are. They will be richer, smarter and more successful than we are.
• We trust in God. To us that means that we go to church and support the church. Sometimes we fall away for a time, but we ALWAYS come back because our belief in God makes everything else make sense.
• When friends or neighbors are in need, helping them is not optional, it is required.
• We are common people – we are nothing special – we are of value only because we adhere to our other values. We never should think highly of ourselves.
• We are frugal people – waste is inherently bad, no matter what the situation. Fix it – don’t throw it away until it CAN’T be fixed.
• Its OK to not be financially successful as long as you were honest in your dealings with everyone. My Pop said, “the first law of business is that the other guy has to make a buck too”.
I think maybe what bothers me is that because I cling to these values that I don’t “fit in” here. I am too unsophisticated – I haven’t achieved much status and, in many ways, I haven’t tried. My values are not in keeping with what it takes today.
• Take care of Number One, no one else will.
• Work smart, not hard.
• Get ahead no matter what it takes.
• Your ARE something special (whether or not you have ever done one thing that is worthwhile) and people need to treat you that way.
• My country OWES me things and I am angry when I don’t think the government has treated me well enough.
Things aren’t all that bad and I might just be a cranky old man. And it is probably irrational and things might change, but something inside of me says I need to be laid to rest next to people who saw the world in the same way as I do and lived their lives in that manner.

“A ship is always safe at the shore – but that is NOT what it is built for.”
― Albert Einstein

Or: “Take a chance – Columbus did.”
– Les Ebeling

Virtually all Americans are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. My father’s family came from Germany in the early 1890’s. My great grandfather owned a commercial ship. One of his jobs was to ferry produce from the fertile plains of Friesland to markets in England. His older sons came to Chicago, America earlier in the decade. He and his wife planned to bring the younger children (one of which was my Grandfather) later. They planned to leave after the completion of his last voyage which was a mission to bring a load of peas to London. Unfortunately, the ship was lost at sea. (I always believed that Great-grandfather was lost in great sea-battle, valiantly going down with the ship. Reality can really be downer sometimes can’t it?) So, my Great-grandmother was faced with the prospect of traveling to the New World on her own, transporting several small children while grieving the loss of her husband.
A portion my Mother’s family emigrated from London after the Great Fire of 1666. He was a vicar whose church was burned to the ground. He struck out on his own heading for Massachusetts and settled on the banks of the Charles River. I have often wondered how all of those “vicar-skills” applied to that wild part of the world once he arrived. But apparently, he survived or else I would not be here.
It would have been so much safer for them to stay home. I am certain that somehow, they would have gotten by. Travel was so risky, there were so many unknowns, and how would they live in this new country called America?
American’s are inherently risk-takers. That is our genetic make-up. If courage and risk-taking weren’t in our blood, we wouldn’t be here – our ancestors would have stayed in their homelands where it was safe. How did all this work out? How did they overcome the odds to make it here? How did they make America great? I think that these factors were critical:
• They came to a land truly laden with milk and honey. The natural resources compared to where they were staggering – timber, minerals, and the most fertile farmland in the world. But those natural resources still had to be captured and utilized by PEOPLE – hardy, industrious, optimistic people who worked hard and sacrificed to make their dreams come to fruition.
• They came to a land with a system that made it possible for us to become the richest and most powerful country in the world. This was a system that rewarded risk takers but preserved order by the force of reasonable laws. By the way, I don’t think that this was the system glamourized by the “Tales of the Old West” – fierce, unyielding cowboys who single-handedly carved out a living with their six-shooters. I’m not anti-cowboys; I just think that our real heroes are shop keepers who invested their last resources to set up shop and then patiently worked long and hard to make their risky adventure have a successful end. Or homesteaders who set out to till the land on the prairies that had never been cultivated braving the dangers of weather and starvation.
So, what is my point? These people who are coming to America now – are they vastly different than us and our ancestors? I would argue that the vast majority of them are not. (I am not naïve – I believe there are some who come here with ill intentions. We MUST vet our new citizens to separate this pernicious minority.) But the vast majority is coming from poverty and war and discrimination just like our ancestors. And by the way some are coming with the idea that they will return to “the Old Country” as my Grandfather and many other immigrants thought. And let’s be clear about this. We NEED them just as the land needed our ancestors. Simple demographics tell us that our birthrates will not supply the human resources needed to power our economy in the future. But beyond that we need their spirt – the willingness to risk EVERYTHING – their fortunes and their very lives – to have a chance to live in this country. And when they are here, they will invest their sweat and blood to make their way here as our ancestors did. And then they will never leave as I will never leave, because America is the greatest country in the world.

This nation was built by men who took risks — pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, business men who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.
– Brooks Atkinson

“I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”
― Flannery O’Connor

This is the first entry to my “blog”. I hear about people writing blogs and wonder why. How do they find the time to do this? Why do they think anybody cares? And yet I feel compelled to write. Why????????? It is amazing how over life’s span you learn some things about yourself. Maybe those are the most important things we ever learn. One of the things that I have learned about myself is contained in the quote from the novelist Flannery O’Connor. I love her quotations. This one hits me dead-on. “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Or as I rephrase it for my own use: “I don’t know what I think until I read what I wrote.” Of course, that is paradoxical and leaves people sometimes shaking their heads. That has happened to me a lot in life – people shaking their heads at me. Writing forces me to sort out my thoughts. It tests me. And to be honest it often times indicts me, because I don’t live up to my own ideals and some of my thoughts are not valid. So, I am going to write – from time to time – when I think there is something to be said and can’t figure out what it is that needs to be said. And this might be the weirdest blog that there ever has been. I am not seeking any sponsors. I am not necessarily worried if anyone in the world reads it. I am writing for me. I need to do it – for me.