What American Heritage?

**Just briefly, I would like to congratulate everyone on surviving the primary season here in Ohio, to those who are reading this in states that are yet to vote in their primaries, you have my sympathy.**

I was driving around today with friend today and we stopped in to see one of her friends and neighbors, who happen to be Amish.  I have no intention of discussing the Amish, their society, or their lifestyle, but I was given some food for thought from their heritage.  Their family is the basis of their communities and their way of life is passed generation to generation, they possess a living heritage that has stood the test of time.  This observation lead me to wonder about my own heritage, or lack their of.  What will my parents entrust to me, that I must maintain and pass to my children?

The obvious answer to the question is my family name and the history of that name.  I bear the great name of Campbell, with ties going back to the Scottish clan and rich history both in fame and infamy.  But certainly I will inherit more than a name.  I received a set of morals and beliefs, but those have shifted somewhat and are not the same that parents gave to me, and most assuredly the morals and beliefs I give to my children will shift in their lifetimes.  There must be something tangible to tie myself to those morals and beliefs, a place where I was taught right from wrong, a table where we learned to pray and eat.

I don’t want you to think that I am urging materialism, but try to teach a child about freedom, democracy, or other such abstract ideas. They will struggle to understand, because children don’t do abstract, they just haven’t matured enough for that, so we use objects to teach them to take care of things: teddy bears, plants, or pets.  But how do you teach a child that you care for the things that are old?  Certainly you would not just give a person a priceless object without first teaching them to care for it, a knife, a gun.  But with so little standing the test of time, there isn’t a lot to pass on.  I think this is as much a problem with our society’s sense of value.

I had a Scottish friend make an observation about America that I found quite astute, though she said it only in passing; America doesn’t have anything old.  I will jump right to the objection, yes we have government buildings, documents in museums, and pieces of art that have been preserved.  But what will pass to me personally to care for?  In the ‘Old World’ they seem to revere their ruins, they love what is old but don’t see in the point in preserving it, and one day it will be gone.  In America, we don’t even care that much for what was in a place last year, let alone a century ago.  Our cities are full of people who will comment on places as they drive, “That is where the old church sat,” or “That used to be Mr. Johnson’s farm.”  These narratives grate on our sense of progress, we often sit in the car with these people wishing they would just get with the times.

In America when something outlives its usefulness we tear it down and rebuild over it, trying to wipe it from the collective memory.  Buildings whose only fault was that they didn’t perfectly fit our purposes.  There is no reverence for the labor of those who built it, there is no respect for those who occupied it, and it just needs to be torn down.  More than preserving what comes from my father, I feel it important to preserve what comes to me from our collective past.  For our American Heritage is more than parchment in hermetically sealed containers or buildings maintained by taxes.  It is the places and the people who teach us who to care for and maintain our way of life.  It is the bits and bobs of a life we never lived that tell us the stories of those who came before and teach us how to live our own lives.

Perhaps our sense, as a society, of needing to find ourselves comes from this lack of instruction of who we are, hence, so much money spent trying to find ancestors whose names should be as sacred to us as Washington, Lee, or Patton.  There was some unspoken law passed that made it wrong to tell a child who they were, and explain it in such a way as to give them pride in who that was.  We went form a society that was putting men on the moon to one who spent their lives trying to figure out “who they really are.”  This is energy that could be better spent making actual progress like those who pioneered the last century.

In a world of eternal progress, please, stop and teach your children who they are, where they come from, and where they should go.  It does not benefit them to go and find themselves if they don’t know where that journey begins. We are all deserving of a proper heritage passed father to son, mother to daughter, generation to generation.  And Ideals, while important, need to grounded in the physical.

A Bit of a Catch-Up

Hello Again!

        I know, it’s been a little while since I last posted, and that won’t happen again.  A little life update is in order, not to explain my absence, I got distracted and didn’t post, that’s on me.  Anyway, I was at a place in life where I needed divine intervention and lo and behold, it appears.  A couple of friends of mine own a small farm in eastern Ohio and were in need of a set of hands to help out.  Here is the divinely inspired bit, they remembered a post I made in December on facebook, yes, two months later, and gave me a call.  So here I am, sitting on their little farm writing to you.  

        I should point out that I am a trained welder (yes, it’s true, yours truly is no professional author) and should not have had as much of a time finding a job as I did, but that is where my friends come in.  I am not a big believer in coincidence so when someone calls offering a deal like this, you don’t pass it up, and once you’ve got it, you don’t screw it up.  My responsibilities around here aren’t extensive, but they are the type that lead to other things.  Case in point, we started cleaning out the grapevines, (a job they have been wanting to do for a couple of years but hadn’t had the time/help) and that turned into clearing out the tall ornamental grass and hauling all that, plus the prunings from the apple and pear trees to the burn pile.

        I have always seen the world as having two types of work, the works that sucks your soul out of your nose as you watch the clock tick ever so slowly towards your eventual death or the type of work that gives you life.  I went into welding because I like working with my hands, it gives me a sense of accomplishment to look at something that I have worked on and see that it is really done, (no stocking shelves for this guy!).  The type of work I am doing seems to be a good fit; I enjoy going out to haul stuff to the burn pile, and while it sucks being winded from hauling lumber up into the loft to finish drying, I would rather do that than sit at a desk all day.  

         When it comes down to it, I would prefer to be sweaty and tired to comfortable and bored.  We will be starting the plants this week, I believe, and soon it will be into the garden!  The spring is a busy time, and I am looking forward to many warm days in the sun.

The Democracy of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

      We Americans seem a bit fixated on new things, probably because we have, relatively, little history.  There is nothing wrong with looking forward to tomorrow, tomorrow is where our children will be born, our businesses will grow, and where our nation will prosper.  There is no problem looking forward tomorrow as long as you don’t forget how to live in the present and learn from the past.  All too often we want to live for the now, shrugging off the problems of the past, and leaving the problems of tomorrow until we get there.  Not to mention living in the past.  We can’t abandon any for the one, we have to be conscience of all three to thrive today and build for a tomorrow, based upon the lessons and traditions of the past.

A true democracy will take into account the traditions of a people when it seeks to govern those people.  You can’t, for example, rule Catholics and tell them that they must provide contraception for employees, when the Church has taught against the use of contraception since it became feasible.  Ignoring the traditions of a people has proven problematic for many governments, it is a lesson that America is learning in the middle east, it is a lesson we should have learned when we dealt with the native tribes here in America.  The old maxim says, if you fail to learn from history, then you are doomed to repeat it.  For a democracy to flourish, it must recognize its traditions and the history surrounding those traditions.

Another way to look at it is to see the living history in our daily lives.  It was a common practice for young people to seek the council of previous generations when they sought to make a decision of any import.  They leant on the experience of those who had lived longer than they had to guide their decisions so that they could make the best one.  Today it is far too common to see those same elders that our generation should be seeking out being abandoned in “retirement centers” or “villages.”  We have ignored our responsibility as children to care for our parents when they grow up.  If we throw away this experience we will never get it back, how do we govern if we never learn from those who have governed.

Just as we should make account of what has gone before, so to, we must look where we are going.  Anyone who has ever tried to navigate over an open space where the horizons are flat, it can be hard to keep a true bearing.  Not being able to see where you are going, not to have a landmark by which to head we will inevitably loose our way.  The easiest landmark to guide ourselves is our own blood.  Just as we are guided by traditions our those who came before, we should be guided by the needs of those who have yet to be born.  It is, after all, them who will pay for our mistakes and reap the rewards of our successes.

When we place the well-being of our children at the center of our worldview, and aim to make the world a better place for them, we will loose the bad habits of the past and shed the self-centeredness our culture currently promotes.  We can’t, honestly, continue spending like there is no tomorrow, if we are planning to leave anything for future generations.  As the saying goes, you can’t plan for a tomorrow if it’s not there.  The selfishness of our current generation and the ones immediately before that taught us to be this way, seek to ruin the world for our pleasure, and immediate gratification.  If we want to learn from the mistakes of the past, and plan for a better future, we have to stop ignoring that there will be one.

What does it really mean to live in the moment?  Can we as a society really live in the now and not heed the past and anticipate the future?  I would say that a healthy society does heed the past to plan for the future, while recognizing the needs and desires of the now.  We shouldn’t live lives of insufficiency because it could put the future in jeopardy, but there is no need to live to any great excess.  Any person who seeks to live healthy must find a balance between nutrition and taste, and so we as a society, seeking to live healthy, must find the balance between the past and the future.  The natural balance between the two is the present.  By seeking that balance, we find a place to live in the present.

We can find that balance by embracing the traditions passed to us by those who came before and teaching them to our children.  By learning from the mistakes of the past so that, by our example, our children learn to do better than we ourselves.  By looking forward and preparing the world for our children that they deserve because they are our children, we fulfill the hopes and dreams of our parents.  It’s not to far fetched to say grandparents love watching their grand-babies growing up and succeeding, the mind-blowing bit, comes when you realize that you are someone’s grand-baby as are your parents.  We are all someone’s grand-baby we are the future they prepared for, and we will be the past our children look to.  This is what it means to live in the here and now, to be tied inexorably to the past and the future without being stuck in either one.

An Admission of Guilt

       I am a firm believer that you shouldn’t tear the house down until you are prepared to build it up again.  Pretty straight forward approach, don’t pull your finger from the dam, unless you have something else to plug it with.  I don’t think many would argue me on this point, but I am guilty of not doing it this week, I complained without offering either constructive criticism or an alternative.  Right, from the beginning.  Nearly four years ago now, I got involved with the Royalist Party, USA (yep, I am one of ‘those’ people) and had high hopes that I might be represented in politics.  Alas, my hopes were dashed when, before the website really got off the ground, things just stopped.  And I did nothing to prevent it or to pick up the ball.

Earlier this week, I did something stupid, I went and checked out the old website, knowing that it hadn’t been updated since 2012.  I allowed myself to get all worked up about how things weren’t going the way we planned and I should have stopped there.  I began to complain to my roommate in search of commiseration but instead found disinterest which only fanned the flames.  This sense of distaste culminated today when I came to the realization that I was capable of alleviating my own complaints.  If no one was going to run on the ticket, I would.  If no one was going to take the lead on speaking out on issues close to our platform, I would.  And if no one else wanted to do the dirty work and get the strange looks, I would. All that being said, I don’t want to.  

I understand that I can’t really complain if I don’t actively seek to change that which I am complaining about, so I have decided that I am going to start doing those things, maybe not the whole running thing but I would seriously consider it when it gets a little closer.  But there are a lot of things I can do to push the party, the platform, and myself along the path to accomplishing something.  To that end, I am formally announcing my possible bid for the state house in a couple of years.  Is that non-committal enough?

So how does one become politically active?  I know some would say that you just get out there and do things, which I would point out is incredibly unhelpful.  More to the point, what things should I do.  I have decided to take the first step.  The Tuesday before the primary elections, I am planning to host a conversation for anyone interested to just discuss the issues that the candidates have been talking about.  Hopefully it is a civil conversation. From there everything is up in the air.  

I would love to have more conversations about particular issues and I will post here with some of those thoughts and ideas.  I would also love it if those of you reading this wanted to jump in and share.  To that end I leave you with a question:  What concerns you most about our country?

Meatless Fridays and I am Catholic but...

Almost a year to the day...

Abstaining from meat on Fridays, fasting and abstaining are different things, that are often confused.  Fasting means to reduce the amount of food while Abstaining means to go without entirely.  Now, Catholics and many other Christian denominations abstain from meat on Fridays, but few enough know the reason why.  First off, we are abstaining from the meat of an animal that could be used for a religious sacrifice (including pigs).  These animals are all warm blooded, which fish are not, hence the fish.  Some claim it’s a conspiracy between the Pope and the fishing industry.  Though the first pope was a fisherman, there are no ties between the fishing industry and the Catholic Church.  Christ was our sacrificial lamb, and to show honor and respect for that we abstain from eating the meat of animals that could have been similar sacrifices.

“I am Catholic but...”  I heard this mentioned in a talk Fr. John Riccardo gave a few years ago, as it was replayed on the Catholic radio station, and I can’t count how many times I have heard it in my life.  The point Fr. Riccardo was trying to make was that people are happy to be Catholic as long as it means they don’t have to change.  I am Catholic but don’t think that looking at porn is a sin; I am Catholic but don’t agree with the Bishops about abortion; I am Catholic but I think men and women should be allowed to marry whom they wish.  I have heard these things come from the mouths of people who have claimed to be Catholic, yet what they believe removes them from the Church, not physically of course, they aren’t excommunicated or anything (except for those who help procure abortions, but that is a separate post), but they have chosen to believe what is contrary to the teachings of Christ through His Church.  I would love to hear someone say, I am Catholic but I am trying to be more faithful to the Church; I am Catholic but I still fall and I am trying to amend my life so to be more pleasing to God; I am Catholic but I am always seeking to find God where ever I go.  

This lent, try saying these things, I am Catholic but... Let us grow in our faith and love for God, and through that love, find mercy in our hearts for ourselves and those who hurt us. Amen.

Day Hike #1 1-31-15

This trip came together at the last minute. I was wanting to get out on the trail and stretch my legs. It had been a long winter and I was feeling a little closed in and heavy from all that holiday food, I could hear the trail beckoning to me. I arranged with a friend, Allison, to pick me up at the little town of Lockington, Ohio and drive me back to my apartment where we would start the hike. That Friday I was chatting with a classmate about the hike and he expressed some interest. We were now three. Derrick met Allison and I at my place at about 0800, and, after a bit of repacking, were on the trail by about 0830. The three of were all at different levels of experience, but we all started off on the same foot.

The trail de jour was the norther third of the Troy section of the Buckeye Trail (BT). I have been reading a lot about the BT in the last couple of months and was excited to learn that the sleepy little town I had moved to for school sat right on the trail. There will be more on the trail later, but the basics go like this; The BT wraps around the state of Ohio in a big loop about 1450 miles long, touching all four corners of the state.

This part of the BT consists of the Greater Miami Recreational Bike path, a wonderfully paved path that winds north from South of Dayton all the way up past Piqua. It's path for a good part of today's hike shadows I-75 and I was pleasantly surprised that you really can't hear it through most of the hike. Most of the road crossings were easy enough to follow, with one notable exception, the Eldean Bridge. The Eldean Bridge, built in 1860, is one of the longest covered bridges in not only Ohio, but the nation at 224ft. The bridge is situated on the South side of Eldean Rd, opposite the park, where the trail picks back up after crossing US-25 (mildly annoying, but the bridge was so nice we crossed it twice).

We made it into Pigua around 1200 and took a short break before heading into the town proper. There is a nice little overlook just South of town near an old red brick building (looked like a factory of some sort). Piqua is one of four "Trail Towns" along the BT (coincidentally all are in Southwestern Ohio) and the folks there were friendly. I was expecting more odd looks from people as I was carrying my full pack, but I think Piqua has gotten used to seeing the packs. We chose to leave the trail and walk down Main St. where we came across Mulligan's, a golf themed pub but the grub was very good. I chose the Chicken and rice option, better than the trail rations I had packed. We cooled our heels for about an hour while we ate and digested, enjoying the company and conversation.

I have to admit at this time that after Allison falling a couple of times on the ice, (there was plenty of ice for us all) and Derrick nearly going down a time or two, it was me, solid as a rock Will, that got hurt. I wore my work boots, Carharts, which are clearly not for hiking but I figured they would do better than an old pair of tennis shoes. Before we stopped in Piqua I had developed hotspots on the balls of both feet and was walking to compensate. This is what I believe did me in, at some point I rolled my ankle and the nice long break gave it the time needed to become painful when I put pressure on it. Lesson learned, wear the right boots, and should you get a hotspot/blister do not change your stride to compensate.

After lunch, we hit the road again. It was here that we inadvertently left the BT. The trail cuts further through town and out on the bike path, but we crossed the river on the bridge at Main St. and turned left on Piqua-Lockington Rd. From this point on we were on the side of the road. The trail said fairly level the whole way north to this point, we began to get little rises as the road pulled away from and dove back at the river. Just before we crossed the river again, we began seeing the Blue Blazes of the BT, it's path jogs back over to where we were to head into Lockington, we had skipped about two miles of the trail, just to have it come meet us, sounds like the nicest trail ever, you get lost and it finds you!

Across the river, the little rises became little hills. All told, I believe that the total elevation gain on the hike was around 150 ft over the 15 miles. The last uphill part of the road lead us straight into town, there is a sign at the top of that hill declaring that you were now in Lockington proper (photo to be added later). After a brief attempt at a group selfie (I am rubbish at selfies of any size) we marched up the hill to the little park at the center of town. To be fair, Lockington is not a metropolis, it has a fire station and a park, the rest of the three roads in town are houses. But we had made it back to the truck, alive, if a little sore.

All in all, it was a great day, yeah my feet hurt, Allison's pride was a little bruised, and Derrick was ready to run off to his next adventure of the day, but we all had fun and learned a bit about ourselves while we were at it. I am planning the next little hike, and hopefully the weather will be nice enough for an overnight.