The Former U.S. of A.

Michael Ventura takes a look back at how the USA might be remembered 100 years in the future... in three parts: one, two, and three.

And since I'm sitting here in Holton, Kansas, I'll include this quote:

Let us take, as just one example, agriculture. By 2007, technological innovations in agriculture were so efficient that a Kansas farmer with 7,000 acres required only two full-time year-round employees. For the farmer, this was profitable, as it was for the speculator in agricultural commodities; for the farmer's community, it was ruination. No permanent agricultural workforce meant no permanent support-structure – stores, services, etc. Gradually, farming towns across the country looked like ghost towns, or ghostly towns, with streets of boarded-up stores and crumbling infrastructures. "Profit" was defined simply as money, not as quality of life, and, in that definition, communities were no longer necessary to agricultural profit. In fact, cohesive community was no longer deemed necessary to any means of profit.

That is what I have seen... the town I grew up in in the 60s and 70s is no more. People still live there, but the once vibrant downtown--with every kind of shop that the average person needed--is boarded up. Maybe small towns like Burrton are the proverbial canaries, dying off first. People like me who moved to the coast thought that they'd escaped, only realizing years later that community might be measured by something more than how many people lived in a place or how quickly it was growing.

Earlier tonight when my cousins Michelle and Kim were in my motel room, I read the story of Cain and Abel as recounted in the Gideons Bible in the drawer beside my bed. Such a very short story... what are we to make of it? Why was Abel's gift worthy and Cain's not?

And what choices are we to make to have our own lives count for something more than the "individual gain" described in Ventura's column?