Community & Intentional Living: Merging the Hand Tool and Technology

At my church we spend time talking about community, specifically how do we live in community in our current society? There is agreement that community is fostered more where people live in close proximity and spend more time together. Today, I thought about the communities which the Mennonites and Amish have created.

These communities, though varying in degree, have shunned most of modern technology for the sake of community: not because it is evil. Some use telephones for emergency communication and many use modern medicine. By shunning technology these sub cultures have chosen to use handtools for field work, building of dwellings and barns, and for most other chores. Because handtools cannot do the same amount of work as machines, a need for help from others is created. People who work together in situations where all have had or will have the same need, where the need deals with the ability to survive, will live more in community.

Another point is that the Amish culture also is an intentional culture, one in which there is a code of living that one must live by to be Amish. It is a choice. In some Amish communities, the teenage children are allowed to experience the outside culture and make up their own mind as to whether they live a traditional Amish life or move out.


I do not want to become Amish or Mennonite. However, there is a good deal to be learned from these peoples. How can we in live in our society and set up a camp of community within it? Is there a need for a code of living where everyone understands that it must be followed to be part of the community? How is this code set up without a governing system? Is there some technology that should be done away with? If not, how will the community use the technology to enhance the community?

We, at our church, believe that community is an intentional choice. The hard part has been to discover what we are intentionally choosing to do.

Has Progress Been Good For the Roles of Men and Women?

Before I begin let me state plainly that the following opinion is not one which is meant to put women down and suggest that they return to a state of "barefoot and pregnant." I believe that the strides that women have made in society is great and in our society are ones that are needed. Moreover, I believe that women are equal to men. However, I also believe that men and women are very different.

The reason that I chose the Appalachian site to address this issue is because it is in the old ways of Appalachian life that I am most familiar with the traditional roles of men and women. Now on to my observation.

Most of us will say that women have come a long way over the past century. They are competing in most traditionally male vocations and in some are in higher ratio than their male counterparts, pharmacy to name one. College enrollment reflects a female majority. So women are on the move. There are many who continue to argue that unfairness still exists towards women in the marketplace in pay and harassment. I have nothing to say about this: I must plead ignorance and it is not the point of what I am trying to say. My point is that because women have moved out of the home and into the workplace, we have lost some of our identity as men and women. Or at a minimum the identities are changing.

Women can now do what men traditionally were supposed to do. They can earn a living, support themselves, pay rent or mortgage, and raise children without needed a man for provision. I'm not saying it is easy, but single moms are common place in our society. Many women, even when married, want to work outside of the home. They want a fulfilling career. And to boot, this increases a families standard of living. In many cases it is the only way a couple can raise children in our society. The problem that I have is that men and women do not need each other any more.

There is now an overlap of identities. As women redefine the roles of what it means to be female, there is by default a simultaneous undoing what it means to be man. In some cases there is a reversal of roles, such as the stay at home dad phenomenon (I did this for a while and it is not easy). My hypothesis is that this has created gender confusion. Moreover, it has increased our tendency to be selfish. Maybe it has contributed to the rise in divorce. I am not trying to lay the blame of all of this on women wanting more than being housewives. I am saying that our society is such that we do not even want to need the opposite sex, and this bothers me.

Contrast this to how people grew up a century ago in rural Appalachia. To live life men and women needed each other to live. The roles of women were not meant to demean, they were for survival. Men worked in the fields and women worked in the home because both places needed attention. It would be very hard for me to believe that centuries ago women did the outside work and men stayed inside with the kids and made the meals. Then what happened? Was there an uprising among men who refused to do housework! Of course not, men and women worked where they did because each gender did what was best for the family to survive. They needed each other for food and to continue the species.

Now, with the advancements in technology and machinery there is an equal playing field for men and women. The one thing I see that really separates us now is that women have the capacity for being pregnant and men do not. This may always be true, but not always needed as research is now underway to create the artificial womb. I think this is a shame. We do need each other.

The Mountain Toothbrush

One day when I was a young boy Graddaddy and I were walking in a familiar stretch of woods. We walked in the shade of the trees between two tall hills. About a third of the way up on the left hill Granddaddy shows me the flat remnants of an old roadway. A little further up on the left there is a deep-cut ravine that he says is where iron-ore was mined in the early 1900s by the Chamberlain mining company. In about an eighth of a mile we came to a small open area that is the meeting place of two small valleys and three hills. Over the left hill is a iron-ore strip mine and a pond. To the right is where bleached skulls of cattle lie: the "graveyard of bones"--where dead and diseased cattle were dragged to decompose.

I do not remember why we were in the woods that day, but we took the hill towards the strip-mine pond where I had fished before. About halfway up the hill Granddaddy stops and shows me a small sapling tree about four feet tall. He broke off two small, but stiff, twigs, gave one to me, and put the other in his mouth. He then told me that this specific type of tree, a black gum, was what he used to brush his teeth when he was a boy. He would strip off about an inch of bark on one end and chew on it until it was broken down into strands. He could then make a paste of sodium bicarbonate and water in his hand for toothpaste and brush his teeth.

Anticipating Fall

From now until late November (when the holiday bustle takes over my life) is one of my favorite times of year. The summer solstice has passed and with its end the earth's angle to the sun has shifted and causes the trees and clouds to empty beautiful long shadows on the East Tennessee hills. In this time of year the sugar cane is at the height of converting the last bit of sunlight to glucose to be made into delicious sorghum molasses. Tennessee Fall Homecoming comes to Museum of Appalachia and the Norris hills are filled with bluegrass music, the pinging and chugging of old restored tractors, the smell of fried apple pies, the buzzing of an old style saw mill, the hacking of log hewers, the sound of sugar crane crushing down to a green syrup, and the harmonies of old time gospel singing in a restored country church.

Fall in Appalachia meant the close of another year of hard work as the harvest was brought in. It also marked the time to slaughter, smoke and salt-cure the hog meat. It is the time to store winter food. You have to understand that nothing was convenient. Every mouthful came from hard work and good weather or it did not come at all. I have tried to identify with this by going to the museum, killing, pit-roasting, and salt-curing a hog, and working in the fields. But it is impossible with all of our modern amenities to understand the life lived by people like my grandfather. Can you imagine that the only thing sweet that you would have would be jam or molasses boiled down to the candy stage and put on a stick to make a lollipop.

This time of year always reminds me that there is more to life than the hustle of work, school, family, and friends. It reminds me that we are part of the earth and dependent upon God to provide for us through it; and, that we must take part in gratefully reaping what God has given, in whatever form that may be.

Here are a couple of poems I wrote in a creative writing class about Appalachia and this time of year.

Claw and hammer
banjo
fades while four-
lane roads
split corn fields
like gaps
now between grist
mill stones


The raised hoe glossed
with hot
glassy cane
trickles
syrup streams
into
pools of polished
amber

Hunting for Survival

Hunting and Fishing is part of the current East Tennessee culture, though it is more for sport than for survival. I grew up hunting small game such as dove, quail, and squirrel. My father, Alva, and oldest brother, Todd, are now deer hunters. My other brother Mark and I occasionally break out the 12 gauge Browning shotguns for a dove hunt to remember old times.

However, there was a time when one hunted to eat. My grandfather, Rufe, told me a couple of stories which fascinate me to this day. Keep this in mind, resources were so limited that they did not take weapons or ammunition with them, but waited until they found the game.

Once when Rufe was a boy, he and his father were hunting for food in the cold winter. His father, Poppy, spotted a covey of quail huddled together under one bush. Rufus ran back home, got the gun and ammunition, and returned to give them to Poppy. Poppy shot and killed all twelve or thirteen birds with one shot. Needless to say this was a rare and memorable event for the large family.

Granddaddy was able to do something that I have never heard of anyone else doing. His brothers would send him out to find rabbits sitting. He would come back to the house and tell his brothers where the rabbit was hiding. They would then go and kill the game for a meal.

It is easy to dismiss small stories such as these as trite and even cruel to the animals. We must remember how blessed (or cursed some would say) we are with material goods. Who can say that these skills will never be needed again for survival?

Where to Begin?

Few things in life can pull my heart strings more than thinking of my Appalachian, East Tennessee foothill heritage. The intention of this blog is to simply share my thoughts, memories, and stories that surround the rich culture in which I have been raised. The following is an excerpt from a paper that I wrote for a human development course I took in June.

I am American by birth, southern by the grace of God, and East Tennessean by the hand of God. When He made me it was from the rock-studded red clay dirt of East Tennessee. I tell people that at times I feel like part of this region. I ate the vegetables from the garden and the meat from the cows that were raised on Granddaddy’s land. It has made my physical body. From playing in the foothill creeks and mountain streams as a boy to taking a long hike on the old mountain pass from North Carolina as an adult, the geographic beauty here is home and like none other. The culture of this region I proudly consider my heritage. It is wonderful to be in a region where people remember living off the land; TVA as it came and gave them outhouses and electricity; Oak Ridge and the bomb. It definitely effects how my attitude towards community and its importance in life.