I headed outside early to get a jump on the spring day. The sun came out and hundreds of feet of row awaited crops like cabbage and chard, hopefully finding ground before the rains start.
It’s always a bit iffy as to how the spring plays out. Some years we’re in the ground mid-March, this year it’s mid-April. Mother Nature has her own plan, regardless of how we prepare on the farm. Lots of snow still up on the hill.
We’ve been doing this work for three decades. It’s become routine, though nothing on the farm feels much like normal these days. Between the predators and today’s unrelenting weather, it’s a miracle farmers persist. It’s our life and the outdoors are fantastic.
Farm life is far removed from politics where the daily objective seems about arguing and passing laws which only help half the people. Today’s winner-takes-all politics are devastating to anyone who works for a living.
We want lawmakers in Helena who work to make life easier for the folks back home in the towns across Montana. It feels like too many politicians are not working to make our lives better back home, rather improving their own standing and power. Helena politicians seem in it for themselves, giving themselves big raises, good retirements and free health insurance.
The young man carried the concrete forms over his head and stacked them neatly onto the flatbed. It was heavy work, he smiled as old-school country rock filled the air. Having done that work back in the day, I knew the long-term consequences of physical, hard work.
Down the street the sound of a backhoe bucket echoed toward the farm as it clanked to empty the dirt. A young operator was digging a trench to install a power gate to the neighbor’s driveway.
I marvel at the local people across the Flathead who go to work every single day and provide a home for themselves and family. Flathead locals work hard and value an honest day’s effort.
Back in Helena, lawmakers are quarreling about decorum, procedures, and who insulted whom best. The supermajority is using it’s elected power to squash the minority voice, much like what’s occurring throughout our nation’s state capitols.
The state’s breeding grounds of democracy have produced many bans on the constitutional rights that Montanans have taken for granted and held for decades. It’s a bleak time to be young in the Treasure State.
Not only is there no place to live that’s affordable to local wages, our lawmakers in Helena are gleefully repealing and banning the very freedoms they swore under oath to protect. It’s a weird world, one where kindness has left politics.
Many locals have an aversion to the militant attitudes of today’s puritanical politicians. Give us that good old-fashioned compromise that helps all fellow citizens do better, regardless of political affiliation.
The 100 feet of onion row stared back at me. The white-fleshed quack grass remained rooted in the soil, waiting, just like decades past. I pushed the fork deep into the soil and felt a familiar tinge in my lower back. Slow and steady, I thought.
All the local people I see around town work hard, day in, day out. About the only people who seemingly aren’t working are the politicians themselves, in places like Helena where the beer and feed is free for the taking. Politicians blather loudly, but trust me, most eagerly take the free refreshments and then willingly condemn others as less righteous in their daily rhetoric.
The young construction man carrying the concrete-soaked plywood forms took a break, smiled, downed his root beer, and then continued earning a living. There’s no free lunch, except for self-righteous politicians in Helena during our biannual Legislative sessions.