Solstice sunset, longest, darkest night of the year, and the big rigs on the big road are lit like Christmas trees in the cold. Orange and red and yellow lights frame big rectangles of American freight racing at 80 miles per hour, mile after long Missouri mile, into the night. The whine of a big truck is characteristic, eerie and I love it, the sound having served as something like a lullaby in my first years. Others crowded into airports for holiday travel, matching luggage in tow. My family hit the road instead. I still do.
Cultural and geographic crossroads of America, the Ozarks are a hub of sorts, crisscrossed by our nation's big roads, I-44 (and before it Route 66) being the most recognizable. Roads are strange things in that they are infrastructure so assumed as to be taken for granted and thus not considered in things like culture or — often — history. We do not record the names of the men who build our roads, our bridges, our nation. The American mythos is often called a foolish thing these days, the American cowboy passé. We are too ignorant of the reality that blue collar men are forever working, building this nation over and over again for each new and increasingly disconnected generation.
The strength of myth is not in its falsity, but rather its truth hiding in plain sight. The strength, the ethic and the depth of character of our middle-of-nation working class is lost in the shuffle of shouted headlines and glitzy retail, even more so after turkey day. TV personalities, media pundits, glamor celebrities all are far removed from our foundational ethos, an ethos somewhere in the intersection of family tradition, enduring cowboy and hard-bitten old European warrior.
"Where do cornflakes come from? A box?" It was an educational TV show from my toddler youth, ostensibly teaching us that food does indeed come from, well, a farm, and doesn't magically appear on our store shelves. Only a child, I ran outside, angry that the TV show would expect me to be so stupid. I knew how and where corn was grown! Little did I know my contemporaries should have been paying attention. The supply chain panics and poor eating habits which spooled out during 2020 were proof of that.
A family's heads are bowed before Christmas, thick-mudded chore boots slowly melting brown onto old newspapers across dirty linoleum kitchen floor. "Oh, the weather outside is frightful," sings someone from a glitzy New York City stage on the TV in the living room. "Frightful" ain't the right word for it, not until you've pulled on your boots and waded in freezing manure up to your knees, slipping and falling in mud beside a cattle trailer, hoping the truck will make it to the sale barn — then praying the resulting check will pay for next year's insurance and also groceries for your family.
"Just learn coding." "Just move to town." "Just get another job." "Just" is a hateful word, a word of condescending patronage spoken by people in nice clothes with nice jobs, people who stop by nice stores to buy that nice rump roast for Christmas dinner. There's no freezing manure in their lives, that's for sure, or wondering if there will be enough money to last into the new year.
I pass by another dark and abandoned ranch house, yard grown up in frozen grass, paint peeling from two-car garage, barn out back a silhouetted ruin. The heartland's American dream began to die some 30 years ago, picked off by the snipers of globalism, lobbyists and a legacy media too-paid off to blow a whistle. Unbeknownst to us, the equality of all Americans was something like a whitewashed lie. The canaries in this particular coal mine were blue collar men and their families being told to shut up and just go do something else.
The solstice sun has set. Only three more sleeps until Christmas. As darkness falls, I hope for a better tomorrow and I lift a modest glass to the men of rural middle America who — along with their families — have been belittled, shoved to the side, and told they don't matter by an elite class untouched by the quiet devastation I have watched unfold these past three decades. Here's to Christmas, to big trucks, and to farmers all.
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