The Next Year People

Most often, I don't have a clue who reads my blog.  I am not tech-savvy or market-minded; I just write and post.  When I sign-in to compose a new post, I naturally take notice of blog views; however, I don't understand what makes one post really popular and another post less successful.  If I over-think the process, I start to second guess my purpose ~ which has always been to write today's big story for The Tomorrow Trunk.

Still, I do know the identities of a few of my readers; they are my friends and family. They are the followers who don't technically follow me at all.  They simply read my blog on occasion and then call me afterwards to ask a question, make a comment, give a compliment, or correct my punctuation. After my most recent post about My Last Best Nest, one question was on the minds of everyone who called:  When and where are you planning to build?  While I am still unsure about the where part of the question, I am hopeful that the when answer is next year.   "If everything goes as planned, we hope to start building next year," I replied again and again.

That post dated November 15th. Three days later, on November 18th and 19th, I watched the Ken Burns' documentary, The Dust Bowl, which aired on PBS.  To my knowledge, I have never missed a Ken Burns' documentary on PBS, and I have never been disappointed.  I am convinced that great storytelling is not just telling a great story.  To me, great storytelling is the ability to transfer ownership of the story so that a shift occurs.  Any storyteller can assimilate and deliver facts, interviews, and images through a  medium of choice; however, the great storyteller understands the conductivity of the story.  The great storyteller uses his medium as a conduit ~ a connective channel that harnesses the power and potentiality of the story and streams it through the corridors of time.  Ken Burns has an amazing ability to bring a present-day relevance to a historical past ~ at full strength.

I always watch a Ken Burns' documentary with a journal or notebook at hand, and I have pages of quotes from each one.  The Dust Bowl tells the story of great ambition, a great drought, and the great suffering that followed during the 1930's on the Southern Plains. So much of the story revolves around the unwillingness of the farmers to accept their situation as hopeless, even though their money-making wheat crops turned into monster-making dust clouds. In the first episode, these farmers referred to themselves as "next year people" ~ so nicknamed because they were steadfast in their belief that the rain would come next year.

In one interview, Ken Burns states that "next year people" portrays a sense of sort of stoic American frontierism.  It also represents a kind of stubborn resistance to change....I think "next year people" is a double-edged sword.  I like the ambiguity of  it. The hard-core "next year people" who stuck it out endured and survived a cataclysmic drought which lasted ten years and which also included plagues of rabbits, grasshoppers, black blizzards, and death.  Driven by a false assumption of plenty, the farmers held onto the belief of perpetual returns no matter how much they overworked the land. Ken Burns calls the dust bowl "the greatest man-made disaster in American history."

In a National Geographic interview, Burns addresses their denial mentality. We always think, "My house value will always increase. The stock market will always go up. If I just make this deal, if I just expand here, everything will work out fine."  And then we have this foolish thinking that "rain follows the plow" ~ that the act of cultivation actually increases rainfall or that (the climate) has undergone a permanent change ~ which is just insane. It's the same idiotic nonsense that we tell ourselves to convince ourselves that our hopes for the future are the same as the reality of the future.

I have never experienced a dust bowl; but I have endured many of my own man-made storms. I am one of those "next year people" who, at times, has "hoped against hope" ~ which is to hope for what we can not see. The philosopher Frederick Nietzche denounced  this kind of hope as a malady ~ an affliction of the worst kind.  According to Nietzche, "Those who suffer must be sustained by a hope that can never be contradicted by any reality or disposed by any fulfillment ~ a hope for the beyond."  He references a lesson from Greek mythology which teaches us that "hope is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of Man and because of its ability to keep the less fortunate in continual suspense."

And yet...I always have hope; I am afflicted to the core.  No matter what Herculean task I face, I do so with a Herculean hope.  Just this past weekend, I heard my Herculean husband express hope with one short phrase, "Maybe next year."

I understand the "next year people" and their denial mentality.  While Ken Burns calls it the "idiotic nonsense that we tell ourselves to convince ourselves that our hopes for the future are the same as the reality of the future", I tend to side with Merriam-Webster who defines hope as "to cherish a desire with anticipation; to expect a certain outcome with confidence."  Mr. Webster also reminds us that the antonym of hope is despair.

Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson, a professor at the University of North Carolina, states that "hope literally opens us up...removes the blinders of fear and despair and allows us to see the big picture, thus allowing us to become creative and have belief in a better future."

That's exactly what happened to the "next year people" of the dust bowl. They survived because of fearless abandon, unrelenting tenacity, and creative solutions.  They experienced nature's harshest punishment upon this country, and they feared at times that God Himself had unleashed His judgement upon the entire Southern Plains.  As they waited for the rains to return, their losses were all-consuming.  Still, they did not lose hope. The Bible proverb states, "Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life."

One of the earliest references to hope is found in the story of Pandora's Box (or Pandora's Jar).  The story of Pandora is a fascinating Greek myth which tells of the "pithos" or box that contained all the punishment of mankind for stealing the fire of Zeus.  Even though she receives the box as a gift, Pandora is instructed to never open the box.  Unfortunately, her curiosity could not be tamed. In the end, she opens the box and unleashes great evil upon the world ~ hate, anger, poverty, sickness.  Yet, at the very bottom of the box, Zeus had placed a small hope.  Because Pandora hastened to close the box, hope remained trapped inside.

I have my own version of that tale.  I am confident that in years to come, my children or my children's children will also have the curiosity to open The Tomorrow Trunk.  In the trunk, they will find many stories of  struggle, survival, success, and selective insanity; however, if they look deep enough, at the very bottom of the trunk, they will find hope. Cartoonist Charles M. Schulz once wrote, "A whole stack of memories will never equal one little hope."

So...when do I plan to build My Last Best Nest?

Next year...I hope.

Dianne ; )