When Our Neighbors Wish Us Dead or Broke, We're in Trouble with More Than Our Health Care System

[Jackpine Radical]

130. Actually, I think rural life as it was lived prior to, say, WWII,

was actually pretty communual. People relied on each other a lot. In 1911, after their first Wisconsin winter, my family's house burned down (actually, it was just the cook shanty of an abandoned lumber camp that stood on the land they had bought), and the neighbors rallied around to build them a new house. Although I didn't grow up on a farm, I remember being recruited to work on farms in the community during haying season as a kid. There was no pay, but everyone got together for a big picnic-style feed afterwards. Also, farmers pooled their equipment and labor together and went around to each other's farms in planting and harvest seasons. No single farmer owned all the equipment needed to farm, but various members of the community did. You may have heard of "threshing crews;" a threshing crew was just the band of neighbors going around the circuit to each other's farms, getting in the crops.

I actually don't particularly know who Nugent is, other than via references to him on sites like this, but I somehow doubt that he has much in common with the people I'm talking about. For example, although most of the people I knew hunted and fished to supplement their larder, none of them had any game trophies. That wasn't what it was about for them.

Incidentally, the most of the people I grew up among--mostly the children of German and Scandinavian immigrants--were not particularly religious in any conventional sense.

And certainly exposure to nature is no panacea. I would never claim otherwise.