Fresh Produce

Our clan recently spent some time in northern Michigan, relaxing, spending time with extended family, and doing outdoors summer-type things. Saw a lot of farms; hay, corn, and fruit of all fashions. Spent a lot time watching tractors, patrolling acreage like sentinels, really more like drones, with their circuitous patterns, sometimes giving to the soil, sometimes taking away from it, always plodding and always wringing a crop from the land. This farming toil was not the slightest bit glamorous, is not likely to make one wealthy, and requires knowledge of the craft to be successful. And it is a classic example of the dwindling portion of our population that actually produce things.

So few of us now directly manufacture or otherwise produce things that people use. By "use", I'm excluding things such as food handed out at a drive-through, because that's just repackaging of food other people made; and things like newspapers, because that is the circulation of an idea that could come across through primitive means like face-to-face conversation. There is still a contingent of men & women in the United States with leathery skin, gnarled hands, stooped backs, bad knees, and all manner of scars and illnesses from the time they spent or are spending making things. I think this is an easy thing for many of us to forget if our days consist of writing traffic tickets, administering vaccinations, pumping gas, flipping burgers, tracking corporate accounts, writing legal documents, setting up computer networks... or any of the other trades the service-based economy we live in requires to keep growing, or even surviving. All of these service-based jobs function to improve the efficiency of fundamental production trades, like the corporate accountant who tracks expenditure on a factory floor or the computer ace who facilitates online ordering. But our lives, generally speaking, are growing more remote from the mining, farming, and building of things. There is a chicken and egg riddle about this and the outsourcing of so much of our nation's manufacturing capacity to other nations. Have we become the way we are as a society because we outsourced, or was outsourcing possible because we had already turned in the direction of not making things?

Consider the things we attend college for, or what the college students we know may be studying at this moment. How many college study disciplines can even remotely be considered to be involved in the production of things? I say this knowing that, as a mechanical engineer, I am surely near the top of that list, but I am still only tangentially a part of the manufacturing and installation of parts for ships. I make decisions about what is acceptable and what is not on the shop floor on on the boat, but I certainly cannot say I am making things.

If you get the chance, make something. Grow a garden. Make a bookshelf. Build a go-cart. Whatever it is, you have my applause.