On March 15th, after a nearly two week absence from the ranch, I returned to the Cheyenne River, where the Badlands meets the Black Hills. I had been in Oklahoma, mostly with family and in somewhat atypical, dry, warm times. By the time the Ides of March had arrived, South Dakota had been blanketed by about a foot of snow, but on that day the roads were dry and clear. For obvious reasons no rural person that I talked with was complaining about the snow. Well, they (that ambiguous and amorphous they) call this “next year’s country,” meaning next year will be better. Next year the crops won’t be hailed out; next year it will rain at all the right times and water will once more fill the stock dams; next year we’ll make some money; grain and cattle prices will soar; nest year all manner of thing will improve. So, if the present snow is any indication, this is the beginning of next year, the year for which the eternal optimist has long been waiting.
I, too, am anxious to see the prairies once again turn to green, accented with the flowers of cactus, yucca, bush morning glory, crested prickly poppy, phlox, sunflower and violet. I also want to see the grasses flourishing, the trees and shrubs budding and leafing out. I want to see the buffalo grass and sideoats grama, the blue grama and western wheat grass, emerging, flowering and maturing. I love seeing what nature does on its own–even when it is not nice or good from a human, nature-using perspective. A drought in itself is interesting to watch, even if the results to the human being are detrimental and difficult. That is what nature can, and sometimes does, throw at us.
What we do to ourselves and to each other frequently has a longer lasting and more devastating effect. We quite readily believe that overt conflict settles issues between contentious parties, even though we remain hard-pressed to see many wars that did so, Perhaps those conflicts that opposed wars of aggression and oppression, for example the Allies resisting the Axis in W.W.II, the American Revolution, the first Gulf war) have done any good at all. In my cynical moments I believe that killing is what human beings have always done, continue to do and will always do, best. We, human beings, spend so much time, energy, money, and more importantly, self in the pursuit of destroying others that we seldom even recognize the damage we do to ourselves; we don’t recognize that our logic, however faulty, our rationalizations, and justifications for that destruction are merely excuses, however feeble, that allow us to continue on our chosen path of destruction. By the way, “human being” here is not just North American; it is a world wide entity.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in a peaceful world, one in which disputes were resolved in a mutually respected and selected court of international law, a world in which insult is not arbitrarily followed by injury, and in turn followed by vengeance and revenge, a world in which insult and injury can be rectified and resolved by a lawful process that generates forgiveness and humility and achieves a reciprocity of respect based on a conscious acceptance of crime and punishment by both parties and leads toward an enlightened commitment to an ethos that is viable for humanity, that furthers a creative act rather than generates a destructive one.
We build a fence. Neighbors on both sides of that fence use it equally and respect it. We may have disagreements, but the fence remains essentially neutral; it is a creative act, perhaps, that allows us to strive toward a new dimension of humanity. We are optimistic; maybe we just want to be next year’s people.