Well, if ever there was a blog title to discourage readership, I think I found it - "Morality of drowning kittens". The proper thing seems to be some warning of the subject matter on the relativity of "cultural morality", and giving the proper weight to the moral decisions of the rural and unempowered. I don't want to lure a reader inside and shock them. The alternative title to Cultural Gulfs #2 was "A Load of Clue".
When I was four or five years old, I lived in Columbia Missouri, a college town. My dad and mom were both from Taney County in the Ozarks (Land of Taney, Elmo Ingenthron now $55-210 on Amazon), both studying at the University of Missouri. Each was the only person in their respective high school classes to go to college (though my mom, a female valedictorian, did not get a scholarship to MU. The rotarians gave her one to a secretary school in Springfield. She married my dad instead, at 18 years old, and left the county).
We lived in the basement of my auntie Maude Freeland (dad's aunt), who grew up on Indian reservations in the southwest with her father, a teacher in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. My great grandfather was a onetime liberal converted to Republican newspaper editor by the "unintended consequences of charity". He disliked FDR and the TVA, thought government bureaucracy was always worse than private sector development, and he basically fought to keep the TVA out of the Ozarks. One year, my mom's brother Eddie lived in the basement with us as he went through his freshman year at MU. It was cozy. Auntie Maude never married, worked as a photographer for the newspaper and wrote editorials for the Taney County Republican.
Columbia Missouri was the "big city". Well, really St. Louis and Chicago were not that far away, but for people whose parents grew up in homemade shoes, Columbia had electricity and running water and was a symbol of American progress much earlier than Taney County. I imagine it wasn't that different from a rural Chinese family moving closer to Guangzhou, living in the basement of an aunt's house, putting up an adult brother from the farm.
(there's a great video posted at the bottom of the blog, John Jacob Niles singing over old film of mining, stay tuned).
When I was four or five years old, I lived in Columbia Missouri, a college town. My dad and mom were both from Taney County in the Ozarks (Land of Taney, Elmo Ingenthron now $55-210 on Amazon), both studying at the University of Missouri. Each was the only person in their respective high school classes to go to college (though my mom, a female valedictorian, did not get a scholarship to MU. The rotarians gave her one to a secretary school in Springfield. She married my dad instead, at 18 years old, and left the county).We lived in the basement of my auntie Maude Freeland (dad's aunt), who grew up on Indian reservations in the southwest with her father, a teacher in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. My great grandfather was a onetime liberal converted to Republican newspaper editor by the "unintended consequences of charity". He disliked FDR and the TVA, thought government bureaucracy was always worse than private sector development, and he basically fought to keep the TVA out of the Ozarks. One year, my mom's brother Eddie lived in the basement with us as he went through his freshman year at MU. It was cozy. Auntie Maude never married, worked as a photographer for the newspaper and wrote editorials for the Taney County Republican.
Columbia Missouri was the "big city". Well, really St. Louis and Chicago were not that far away, but for people whose parents grew up in homemade shoes, Columbia had electricity and running water and was a symbol of American progress much earlier than Taney County. I imagine it wasn't that different from a rural Chinese family moving closer to Guangzhou, living in the basement of an aunt's house, putting up an adult brother from the farm.
(there's a great video posted at the bottom of the blog, John Jacob Niles singing over old film of mining, stay tuned).
