The Price of Leaving Behind

My grandfather’s grandfather mustered out of the army after the civil war in 1865 in Virginia. Like many others of his time, he was lost. The scale of loss and change in the country was enormous. (2.1 million men, 10%, served in the Union Army  and 1 million in the Confederate Army during the four years of the war). Nelson and Sheriff in the book  Civilians and Soldiers in America’s Civil War 1854 – 1877 noted that “the War Department required states to contribute regiments in rough proportion to their populations and states in turn often required that towns fill their own quotas as result, few communities escaped the cost of war”. Many found that the war was not over at Appomattox; life could not resume as before. My great, great grandfather faced the utter dissolution of his family. The family farm had been sold, his parents were both deceased and his brothers and sisters were scattered across the country.

He re-enlisted in the Army as a scout. The Army was refocusing their concentration on protecting railroads, immigrant wagon trains, and cattle drives. In the case of my grandfather’s grandfather, the focus was on the railroad. Most specifically with the Kansas Pacific Railroad to safely bring it through this part of the country. One of the other scouts was William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. While Cody was hunting buffalo my great, great, grandfather maintained the horses and mules for the Cavalry and that experience eventually led him to owning his own teams of horses.  Often the Army  was short of cash, so at times he took land as payment for his work. With these two resources, he turned them into a living for his family. He was one of the lucky ones.

Which is what brought him to Hutchinson, Kansas, a railroad town. He settled here around 1872, opened a livery stable and dray delivery service just north of the tracks he had once guarded. When Buffalo Bill brought the Wild West show to Hutchinson, he stayed with my great, great grandfather. The horses stayed close to the livery stable while the other acts and Indian camps were set up just south of the tracks. The Wild West show was a showcase of a way of life that was fast fading away. It was also, according to Cody, a way to help those who were being left out and who would not find usefulness in the “new times”.  He brought the show to town for the last time in 1915, the year my great, great grandfather died. The plains would be forever changed…. leaving some people behind.

Another major transition in our society was occurring just a few years later as electric lights replaced lamps and lanterns, the telephone was replacing the telegraph, and automobiles were replacing horses.

Ive often wondered what it was like to live in such a changing time? But it is a scenario that has repeated itself many times and is in full operation right here, right now in today’s world.

My grandfather’s grandfather and his family made the transition, but many people didn’t. Their means of making a living just….went away.

His grandson, my grandfather, started a magazine and book wholesale business in the 1920’s. It provided a good living for him, his family and then my father and our family. It was a middle-man-with-a-guaranteed-territory type of business. About the time my father began his management, society and world of business began to make another significant change. It was the late 1960’s and I can remember my father sitting me down at one point to reveal he was thinking of becoming a dentist and we might have to move. I don’t think I realized at the time that my father was describing a transition that would affect not just us, but many others who operated as wholesalers and their employees. Stores were buying direct now and protected territories were already obsolete.

My father sold the family business to another much larger distributor in 1992. Two years later what had happened to smaller distributors happened to the larger ones. The new owners lost their business and the people who had transferred to work at these businesses lost their jobs. The future beckoned, and some people made the transition and some didn’t.

About the time I graduated high school, I remember a young person could go to work at one of the major industries in town such as Cessna and know that a good living with great benefits was possible. You could purchase a house, send your kids to college, and have a retirement plan with good health care coverage. At the apex of this time, one major industry employed as many as 4,000 people here in our median sized town in Kansas. That way of life changed too. Slowly one-by-one those employers were gone, leaving only a few where many more had been. Some people could move or follow the jobs, but some couldn’t. Some took jobs that didn’t provide the wages and benefits that had been available before, which lowered their standard of living, thus leaving their families with fewer and fewer resources.

This was again a transition from how we had been doing things to a new way of doing them. I think we all understand that change is necessary for growth and is how society evolves (or in some people’s estimation de-volves). But each time this happens we leave people behind. Those who are too old, too sick, too unskilled or trained, to poor (without capital) to transition forward. They join the families who were previously left behind and their numbers grow from one generation to the next, increasing generational poverty.

Once again, we are in the middle of a societal shift, a transition. The internet and other types of technology are making huge inroads into how we do things, buy things, learn things, and sell things. Recently I was reading an article that predicted one-in-six people would be out of a job in the next generation due to technology; and I head a disc jockey read a list of 30 types of jobs that would not exist in less than 10 years. This was particularly significant to him because being a disc jockey was one of them.

Many of these shifts have been society wide but they have directly affected individual lives each time, leaving many of them shattered. Each shift required change and the resources to adapt. Those who couldn’t were set adrift, left totally behind; their lives living footnotes to a bygone era.

And here we sit in 2017 just after an election whose outcome many don’t understand. Things are poised to radically change again. But this time it may be different. Recently, Michael Moore said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine that some Trump voters could be considered legal terrorists. “You can go in there (voting booth) and even though you’re not necessarily in favor of Trump and you don’t like him that much and you know he’s a little crazy, you also know he’s going to blow up the system. The system that took your job and house away from you. You get to get back at the system now and blow it up.”

Many are these people are those who have been left behind.

What my family history and my experience has taught me is simple: to build community and community wealth we need everyone on board. We cannot leave anyone behind. The margins are too slim in today’s economy. Any small business owner knows this.

We need to help re-build lives so everyone can participate in a shared economy, to pay taxes, shop in local stores, educate our children, and create demand for more production; to create an environment where each person can contribute their own gifts.

We need to help people through these transitional times whether caused by personal catastrophes or changes in our society. We need to find the heart of the community again and make clear that there is hope for a second chance.

A new beginning…..