Sustaining Hard Work

Hang on to your seat now, as we turn the train of our thoughts away from soil biology back into some sermonizing. Today’s lecture is about the blessing of sustaining good ol’-fashioned hard work.

Our nation was built by men and women who knew what it was like to labor from dawn to dusk. And they were not sitting in an air-conditioned, carpeted living-room pecking at a computer keyboard and sipping a cool Coca-cola.

They were digging stumps with a mattock and churning butter by hand. And picking up rocks, and felling timber with an axe, and digging ditches by hand, and sweating like crazy...

Sad to say, our nation is turning into a bunch of lazy smart alecks it seems. Obesity is now a national problem, with about one quarter of school-age children being diagnosed as “obese”. And, folks are chasing after the burger-makers and ice-cream sellers, trying to get them to make food healthier.

But I have determined that the problem is not so much the food, as it is the eaters. They have lost the virtue of good ol’-fashioned hard work.

When one digs stumps all day with a mattock, he finds no need to worry much about eating too much ice-cream that evening before he hits the sack. And he will not need any sleeping pills!

I am talking about sustainable virtues; specifically the virtue of a solid day’s physical labor.

Is there any more virtue in digging a ditch by hand than by using a backhoe?

Consider my friend, whom I will call Ed to keep him anonymous. He is the father of a pack of boys. He told me some years ago that when it is time to dig a ditch, he has two options: 1. Grab some shovels and get at it with his boys. 2. Rent a backhoe and get it done, while his boys watch.

While the backhoe digs away, Ed basically sticks a roaring muffler between the relationship of him and his sons. His sons, while at first enchanted with this great machine, soon get bored at watching the arm go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and wander off to look for something more exciting to do. Often, since Dad is busy on the machine, the bored boys find something “exciting” to do; something Dad would not permit if he were watching. Or worse yet, they sit themselves down in front of a TV and fill their little minds with the garbage that originates in Hellywood. (And yes, I spelled that right!)

If Ed always chooses the “easier” route, his boys turn into teenagers that do not know what it means to get a blister from a shovel, nor the “stick-to-it-iveness” to stay at a boring, hard task until it is finished. They will then go looking for a job that is “exciting”, easy, and high-paying. If the going gets tough, they whimper and whine and go on welfare.

But thankfully, Ed has chosen to dig ditches with a shovel and pick, with his boys. Some of these boys are now grown boys, and have a reputation of diligence and fidelity. Employers pay premiums for those qualities.

I have one more story to tell. Williard was a distant relative of mine, something like a great-great uncle. Williard grew up in Missouri, back when Missouri was still a bit on the wild side. There were trees to fell, stumps to dig, and rocks to pick up. To Williard and his siblings, the lot fell to picking up rocks.

After a breakfast, the children went to the field to begin the arduous task of gathering out the offending rocks. But Williard decided that since Dad was not looking, he would spend the morning having fun. He picked up a total of three rocks all morning.

Lunch time! The children returned to the house. “Dad, Williard only picked up three rocks all morning” one of the siblings reported.

“Three rocks?” commented Dad, “Then that means three beans.” And he carefully put three beans into Williard’s dinner plate.

I need not tell you how many rocks Williard picked up that afternoon.

Some would call that “child abuse”. But it was upon this virtue of sustained hard work and diligence that our country went from a stark wilderness to a beautiful land covered with waving fields of grain and fat cattle.

But we as a nation are not sustaining these virtues, and I fear for our future. Instead of building values and virtues in our children by giving them something meaningful to do, we abuse them with the trash from Hellywood.

Moral of the story? Transplant those children out into the garden. Those long sighs they give at the sight of that loooooooonnnnnnggg row of beans to weed and that blister from the hoe-with the waiting bicycle, begging for a spin, parked in sight to add to the woes- will be a good dose of compost in their character. Children grow better working in the garden than planted as couch potatoes!