Wednesday, November 21, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
Thanksgiving blues
Sunday morning we killed
the turkeys.
This is an important fall
ritual because it brings us a
level of intimacy with our
own lives that we find sorely
lacking in the Age of Robots
and Artificial Intelligence.
It’s the same impetus that
drives our effort at grow-
ing vegetables, and hunting
for protein when we can:
Because it moves us off of the
crass and mindless consumer
X and comes with a refresh-
ing dose of participation and
personal responsibility that
are continual teachers.
But killing our own
Thanksgiving turkey and
raising a few carrots and beets
isn’t the life for everyone. It
will never be easier, and in
the history of the world it has
never been easier, or cheaper,
to drop in at the corner mar-
ket for a frozen turkey and a
20-pound sack of potatoes.
The produce comes in from
that giant supermarket in the
sky almost without fail, fresh
even when it’s out of season,
and in ridiculous abundance.
Mostly, we don’t know
how any of that happens,
because the systems that
prop up our super-abundance
of consumer goods are a
complex and fragile mystery.
But we expect the shelves to
be stocked, and when they
aren’t, when the veneer of
convenience gets rubbed off,
the ease and independence of
modern living are suddenly
reduced in frightening ways.
This year, the Camp Fire
in Paradise, California, is a
stark reminder of just how
much we rely on those sys-
tems, and how grateful we
should be for them. Without
them, because of the way
we’ve settled up the country,
many towns in the modern
West would roll up like an old
rug. In Paradise, where most
of the city’s 27,000 people
are now displaced, many of
them suddenly unemployed,
schools destroyed, vehicles
melted into the asphalt, res-
taurants, businesses, and offi-
cial buildings reduced to ash,
and with more than 10,000
homes burned and nearly
80 people (probably more)
killed, the scale of that catas-
trophe is hard to contemplate.
That sort of horror is
likely to get worse, not bet-
ter, as we settle up every last
fold in the land with people
and their stuff.
And that horrible fire was
on our minds as we gath-
ered with friends here on
the Figure 8 to kill turkeys.
That’s because, like so many
others, we have a personal
connection to Paradise, a
school in my high school ath-
letic league where I played
football and wrestled in
countless tournaments. The
quarterback on our football
team one season was Kory
Honea, who is now the sher-
iff of Butte County, a man
doing an admirable job in the
face of unfathomable horrors.
We lost every game the
year Kory was our quarter-
back, which wasn’t his fault
— we just weren’t very good
— but if you’ve ever lost
every game in a season you
know how that sort of adver-
sity can expose and harden
certain aspects of your char-
acter for years to come.
It was also on our minds,
as we scalded and plucked
our birds on a cold, bright
morning down by the barn,
that here in Sisters we are
subject to many of the same
forces that produced the
Camp Fire tragedy. We live
surrounded by forests that by
some combination of man-
agement practices and cli-
mate change are in a constant
state of peril. That’s true even
though I still see morons
tossing cigarettes from car
windows, which is a behavior
so utterly stupid and reckless
it serves as the perfect meta-
phor for ingratitude.
I don’t care if you smoke
— burn down a carton of Pall
Malls every day for all I care
— but at least have the cour-
tesy to swallow your filthy
butts.
There were other trag-
edies in the air too, of course.
Yet another mass shooting,
this time in Thousand Oaks,
where Sgt. Ron Helus and
10 young people were killed
by another nutjob — prod-
uct of our throw-away cul-
tural temperament. Which
produced yet another aching
personal connection because
I was born in Thousand
Oaks, back when they still
made Westerns in the Conejo
Valley, and like Sgt. Helus I
graduated from the Ventura
County Sheriff’s Academy.
The clamor for more laws
isn’t going to prevent this
sort of thing in the future. It
will keep happening because
we aren’t addressing the real
issues at all, which have far
more to do with the kind of
disposable culture we are
building, and the kind of
sociopaths we are filling it up
with. And as we spend even
more time conditioning our
youth to talk to robots, invit-
ing them into our homes to
turn off the lights and share
our conversations with AI
“Fulfillment Centers,” we
7
can fairly expect that kind of
disassociated lunacy to keep
getting worse.
In the end, we killed four
turkeys. We kept one for us
and gave three away to our
friends to enjoy at their own
dinner tables. We kept one
back because over time a
little bronze hen penetrated
my cold heart and I was
moved to spare her. Probably
forever.
That hen serves as a
reminder, I think, of the
Biblical adage that warns us
to be mindful of where we
store up our treasures. In the
good book we are told that
where we store up our trea-
sures so will our hearts be
also. But it’s more than that.
It’s also a warning to be care-
ful about what those treasures
actually are.
Which remains excellent
advice in the season of giv-
ing thanks.
BE READY FOR
ANYTHING.
Thanksgiving!
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Have a safe
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