Cool evenings, chilly mornings, and Indian Summer days make a good combination for work, leisure, play, and sleep. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But the world doesn’t just roll on endlessly, it carries, drags or pushes us with it.
Once, years ago in my professorial life, I posted a note on my office door. It read: I don’t know what reality is, but nobody escapes it.” One morning, shortly thereafter, I found half of the note on the hallway floor. Someone had stabbed a pencil through it. I taped it back together and replaced it on my office door, where it remained. Soon afterward I would find anonymous definitions of “reality” taped or tacked to the door for me. The definitions were interesting but not very helpful; so the end result of all of this essentially remained the same. “I don’t know what reality is, but nobody escapes it.”
I suppose the original assumption concerning reality involves the question as to the nature of reality. Is it fixed and permanent, an element, is it changeable and relative, an opinion or a tradition, or is it a belief? Could reality be both personal and relative as well as universal and fixed? For example let’s say that my income from whatever source is real; and let’s say that the bills that I pay with that income are real. Now let’s say that I am of the opinion that the imbalance between the wages I earn and the bills I owe have been foisted upon me by some third world government as have yours. Does that make my opinion real? Ludicrous, isn’t it?
Several weeks ago I attended a meeting in Hot Springs SD, with U.S. Senator Tim Johnson to discuss his proposed Grassland Wilderness. Representatives from the U.S. Forest Service, the ranchers who hold grazing permits for the three areas and others, like myself, who work for an invited rancher or who are an immediate family member of an invited rancher.
The guests at the meeting numbered perhaps as many as thirty. The areas included in the senator’s proposal are: Indian Creek, Red Shirt, and Chalk Hill grazing allotments, which involves about 48, 000 acres of native grasslands and the grazing permits of perhaps fifteen ranchers. Each person was given the opportunity to speak his or her piece relevant to the question of creating a permanently designated wilderness area.
No more than six of the guests invited to that meeting spoke in favor of the proposed Wilderness designation. Resistance to the proposal includes several opinions, traditions, and beliefs. I believe that the primary and underlying reason for resistance is a fear that grazing will be eliminated and, therefore, have an adverse effect on the economic and financial ability of these ranchers to survive in this harsh country.
I am not here to argue the pros and cons of this issue. Personally I am in favor of the SD Grasslands Wilderness Proposal, but I can see and understand some of opposing views, even though I may not accept them. The outcome of the proposal has yet to be decided, and what I know now, I knew then: I [still] don’t know what reality is, but nobody escapes it.
Comments 2
The modernist Rene Descartes stated, as reality, that we cannot know, with absolute certainty, the truth about objects beyond ourselves, as sensory perception is both faulty and individual and knowledge is open to interpretation – which involves sensory perception.
Now if that isn’t enough to warrant the comment “it must be five o’clock somewhere,” I don’t know what is.
Another thought-provoking coumn, Gervase; thank you.
Sincerely,
Georgene
I too can understand the passion and fears from both sides of the issue. In a related issue from a while back was the idea a buffalo commons stretching from Texas panhandle north through parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and on northward. On paper it was a most interesting idea with a lot of merit but the reality of the proposal was at what cost this would be to land owners and other assorted interest. I still wonder how that might have been if it had indeed was able to work.