Does the Farmer Retire?

The beach, the cabin in the mountains, a boat. Our national dream has become the escape from work. This wistful Shangri-la culminates in retirement where we do little or nothing. A hammock, perhaps, or afternoon television or all day sports channels but really nothing.

It starts early when children take time off from school. Imagine an assigned holiday from learning, a defined period where you turn your back on education. We must have strange priorities--or very ill schools--where such a notion would be even considered.

It appears to be modern, this search for rest. We see ourselves as men of machines, miners and coke plant workers who are ground down and compromised until we are physiologically impaired. Unions have arisen justly to protect us and ease us coughing and limping into rocking chairs. But thankfully those days have come and gone, a tiny period in our development. We are more the victims of lions than Robber Barons. And the miner's crushed pelvis has been replaced by the athlete's artificial knee and the surgeon's hepatitis.

We are not battered by work, we are defined by it. Our self image should not be a cringing cog in a great machine; we are of farming stock. We are planting, tending and growing the products of creation.

The important thing is to find a landscape you love, a place from which you would never seek to retire.