Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

Suspicious Machinery

For months, I’ve been trying to puzzle out why/how so many of my neighbors continue their stubborn insistence on all things Trump. I have good friends who tell me the nation’s being taken over by immigrants—and these are the same people who in the past sponsored Vietnamese immigrants and who today hire Mexican men to work their fields.

One dear friend, the owner of a construction company that does a lot of work on my farm, told me that, as a white man, he’s in the most discriminated group in America. I didn’t make fun of him, but tried to gently tell him he is full of you-know-what. The conversation went on for a while and I finally said his feelings are his own and I’m open minded. He looked a little shocked. Maybe he wanted a fight.

I have neighbors that swear climate change isn’t real, even though the chilly rain means they can’t get into their fields to plant and it’s already May. They’ll refuse to get COVID shots, and even refuse to admit that they know people who have gone to the hospital with COVID. No one has told me the Jan. 6 riot was justified, but plenty of people are still waving their Trump flags and if I asked they’d say the election was stolen. This casts a long shadow on the elections of the future, very troubling. But where do these feelings come from?

Then, about a week ago, I spilled the tiniest micro-drop of coffee onto my computer keyboard. The tiniest micro-drop, and I caught it right away, wiped it up. But, guess what, I was too late. The left side of my keyboard was toast. First, the “a” stopped working, then the “s” and then the “d”. I was into two important documents, had spent a lot of time on them, and immediately saved, then tried to e-mail them to myself so I could pick them up with another computer. No dice. Without “a,” I couldn’t type my e-mail address to send them. I scrambled for a jump drive, got lucky and was able to save my work on the drive before the whole computer went down.

Next day, I drove to my favorite computer repairman, feeling completely stupid and planning to say the computer just stopped working, but I didn’t have time to open my mouth. “Spill something on it?” he asked. Well, yeah. I guess it’s happened before. Lots of times, to other people.

He described what they’d have to do to clean it up and his summaries seemed to say that I’d be better off with a newer model, reconditioned and loaded with stuff from my hard drive. OK, I had to retire the oldie, and wait a few days for them to load my stuff in a newer one. Which is how I’m typing this column. But, at the same time, my new-ish machine has weird glitches; documents get huge in front of me, or shrink to unreadable size. The sound card seems to be AWOL, or maybe I don’t know how to hook into it correctly. And my headphone plug doesn’t fit the hole made for headphones.

And here’s my new insight into the beliefs of my neighbors, and once I’ve said this, it will seem obvious, so here goes. All our social problems, from protests on Jan. 6 to denial of climate change to refusal to get vaccinated can be traced back to one systemic theme in American society: Our suspicion of progress. We’re suspicious of machines. We’re suspicious of chemicals, even while we happily use them. To overcome our fear, we shoot something. Or someone.

It’s a theme as old as science fiction, a genre that popped up after the American Civil War. Like the war, that introduced technological wonders to the general public—the submarine, iron-clad ships, the long-range rifle, the gatling gun, the telegraph and hot-air balloons—the public was terrified and fascinated by the future. Jules Verne, the French writer often credited as the first sci-fi author, used many of those machines in his books. H.G. Wells took over from Verne and a terrifying genre was born.

Today, as we give more and more of our lives over to machines, there are more ways that they fail us. It may be coffee on the keyboard, or a cable that fails to connect the machine to a printer, or a sound system that doesn’t work. Or something bigger—house lights that don’t come on when switched, a microwave that won’t turn off and heats leftovers until they catch fire, brakes that fail on the interstate.

So, my neighbors, who are fairly good people, after all, are terrified of the world we’ve created. We want to be in control, or believe we are, but the world seems intent on busting our myths.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. She also is a co-founder of CAFOZone.com, a website for people who are affected by concentrated animal feeding operations. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.” Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2022

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