One thought on “One Hand Clapping

  1. I have looked but have been unable to find a women’s auxiliary to the Grange, and so I am likely mistaken, but when I was visiting up your way last summer and waiting for a pizza I read the local paper cover to cover. In Greene one of the old women’s organizations, I thought tied to the Grange, was closing down for good and turning their remaining funds over to the town for disbursal under certain requirements. It saddened me to read that, one more place where the wisdom of experienced people would not be passed on to younger people.

    Greer has often pointed to the Grange as a successful model of small-scale local organization that took care of its own. In the days before the government owned health insurance (and that goes back to at least the 1960s), local Granges signed contracts with town doctors. If one of their members took sick, the local doctor was already covered for it. And because it was local, if one of their members was a slacker and not really sick, the doctor knew it and the membership knew it, too.

    This is truly a theme worth following. Why is it that we’re supposedly so magnificently connected, unprecedented in human history, and yet we have only a fraction of the clout that farmers scattered across the nation in a loose federation of local organizations once did?

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