"Stop leaving and you will arrive, Stop searching and you will see, Stop running away and you will be found."
-Lao Tzu
When the boys were little, I'd read to them every night from the Disney book of Uncle Remus stories. I grew up on those stories myself, and delivered the lines of Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear in the Southern dialect I heard all around me as a boy. They'd probably trundle me off to woke reeducation camp if I tried that today.
This morning I found myself thinking of the story that culminates in Brer Rabbit being thrown into the infamous briar patch. You know the one. He decides to run away from home, to leave his troubles behind, only to find bigger troubles when he's captured by Brer Fox and Brer Bear, who are on the cusp of skinning and cooking him when ol' Brer Rabbit (there I go again) tricks his captors into throwing him into the briar patch, his home and the place where he feels most safe. He begins his journey running from trouble, and is redeemed when he's tossed back home.
The notion of fleeing from our problems struck me as I read a couple pieces this morning. The first was from back home in Taylor County, where the full impact of the mill's closing is starting to sink in. That mill directly provided 28% of the county's tax base. Who's going to pay those deputies and road crews now? Our neighbor Benjye employs sixty-five loggers who'll now be given the chance to explore different vocational opportunities. TayCo may have a bright, shiny future ahead, but the short term is looking to be pretty grim.
And the locals, staring down a closure announced only three days ago but set to take effect in November, just in time for the holidays, focus their blame on . . . wait for it . . . Joe Biden. Because it would never occur to them to cast an accusing eye at the CEO of Georgia Pacific, who makes a cool $12.5 million a year, or the comic book villain Koch Brothers, whose companies own the mill. They're worth $1.2 trillion. None of those folks make the Fox News bogeyman list. Better to blame the immigrants or the libtards.
But I digress. The actual focus of my attention this morning is upon that notional kitchen table conversation taking place all over the Big Bend this morning. What do we do when Dad, or Mom, is suddenly unemployed, with a skillset that doesn't readily translate into employment in this little town? Based on what I've seen before among the bright and ambitious there in the Tree Capital of the South, they leave. We know one couple who earn their living nomadically moving between power plants as the facilities are shut down and subjected to periodic maintenance. Others take their medical training in search of the highest bidder as locum tenens.
On the other hand, none of these folks who come to mind have school-aged kids, or mortgaged houses they'd need to sell in a market that's lost its biggest employer.
Nope, leaving isn't an option for most, unless they follow the path of their ancestors flowing through Ellis Island, leaving behind everything but the shirts on their backs in search of a new life. It's possible, but hard to picture.
Peg and I have our uptown fantasy of running from trouble that crops up from time-to-time. This morning the trigger for me was the shocking news that the polls between Biden and the Orange One are dead even.
I don't think I'd be able to live in a country where around half (certainly not a majority--the Rs and the ghosts of our Founding Fathers have rigged the system such that maybe 47% will suffice to win back the Oval Office) of my neighbors are okay with placing an authoritarian demagogue on the throne. If that happens, screw 'em. We'll pack up for . . .
Well, that's the rub, isn't it? The Canadians have their own problems, and don't want us anyway. Heading south means relocating into the jaws of the climate change disaster. Issac's lobbying hard for Greece. Maybe. We'll go there in the spring for P's birthday and see for ourselves. Right now I reckon my first pick would be the Azores, a place I've never seen but is dear to P's heart.
Sure, the Portuguese have their own authoritarian streak, and being on an island means we'd better like each other a lot, seeing as how there won't be anyone else around who's fluent in English. But it'd take years for Generalissimo Benedict Donald and the IRS to find us out there in the middle of the Atlantic. Plus, for me as an old military pilot, the Azores has always been a metaphor for sanctuary, that patch of runway God dropped miles from the nearest continent as a refuge for a fighter pilot with a sputtering engine. Maybe it'll be where we call "gear down, full stop" for what's left of this life.
Thankfully, we're unlike most Americans in that we've saved and avoided buying things that diminish in value as we've approached this golden age of senescence. I read today that the average American my age thinks he or she will need $1.56 million to retire (sounds pretty optimistic to me, unless you smoke and drink enough to make sure it's not a long coda to life), but has in fact only saved $110,000.00.
We're not there yet, not by a longshot, but if we were in the financial situation of most of our neighbors, there wouldn't even be an option of selling our stuff and fleeing. So we'll keep working, keep watching the polls, and keep our passports current just in case we decide to irresponsibly flee the political crisis in this country and join the ever-growing diaspora of progressive Americans who have the "cran", as the French put it, and wherewithal to explore other options.
Speaking of wherewithal, I need to get to work. Our bedding's in the washer after P's three days of ick seems to have subsided, we have the HVAC guy coming at eleven to aid us in our ignorance as we try to figure out how to turn the furnace back on (it was 45 this morning when we woke up, and is 47 now), and I have a big deposition at two that involves packing lots of content into a very small time slot. Which, in turn, means hours of careful preparation.
Off we go.
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