Alfredisms

The Polk Progress was a Nebraska treasure that ceased publication in late 1989 after 82 years as a weekly newspaper. From 1955 until its last issue, the editor and publisher was the late Norris Alfred. In its last few months, the Progress had 900 subscribers in 45 states. Alfred was a remarkable Nebraskan with an uncanny eye for connecting the present with the future. Prairie Fire has collaborated with the Alfred family, the University of Nebraska School of Journalism and the Nebraska State Historical Society to locate and archive many of Norris's writings. We are capitalizing on our good fortune to present many of the Norris Alfred writings to our readership. We believe that his observations are as fresh and relevant to today's world as they were when originally written.

Jan. 9, 1975
"Kicking the can"

The late Rev. J. F. Balzer of Crete once preached a sermon on “Things” beginning with “Not long ago, while we were having our kitchen remodeled to make more storage space, one of the painters entered the room and set up his ladders. He surveyed the room critically, and then peered into the new cupboards. ‘It’s the same everywhere,’ he said, ‘too many things: the more cupboards, the more things. It doesn’t pay.’” Balzer recognized this as a “contemporary version of the Emersonian dictum —Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”

Much of our lives are spent taking care of things—dusting, polishing, fixing—providing the space, whether a building, a room, cupboard, shelf, or for a car, a garage. There is an approved orderliness in having things properly stored; a place for everything and everything in its place. This need for order is caused by the multiplicity of things. Things tend to be overwhelming and we quickly lose control by allowing innocent clutter to grow into massive litter.

One necessary strategy for keeping things out of the saddle is to limit possessions. As the Progress Swedish Philosopher states it, “I hate having things stand around. They just fall down.” Things also fall apart, don’t work, blow up, pollute, destroy and drive man further and further from his natural beginnings until the question arises: “How Human Is Man?”

The question is the title to a lecture—one of six—in a book “The Firmament of Time” by Loren Eiseley, anthropologist, naturalist, science professor (this was written before his death): “…modern man is being swept along in a stream of things, at such a pace that no substantial ethic, no inward stability, has been achieved. Such stability as survives, such human courtesies as remain, are the remnants of an older Christan order.”

That condemnation of modern man was made in 1959 and the Balzer sermon was probably written in the 1930s or ’40s. We quote these men because the growing problem they point out has become more acute and potentially disastrous during the intervening years. One more Eiseley quote and we’ll kick around some thoughts it inspires, as a boy kicks a can ahead of him on a walk.

Eiseley wrote: “It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open up in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals, sucking down lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world’s heart, something demonic and no longer planted—escaped it may be—spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant’s game against its master.”

We read that while on the plane returning from a Christmas visit to New Orleans. Certainly, the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the jet roar of rapid travel—proof of the rightness in the writing. Behind us, in New Orleans, we had seen the incredible crud of the city, allowed to accumulate by a noncaring people, who speed past the litter in shiny automobiles hearing only the muffled roar of the motor as it effectively drowned out the cry of the land.

The whirlpool Eiseley writes about is the result of something called “progress”; not necessarily meaning a bettering of man’s prospects. Man’s progress is marked by an increasing of his power. Ever since he first picked up a stick and marveled at his reach and thrust, man has searched for more power and found it. The potential power has always been there—in the wind, the water, the oil, the lightning, the seams of coal, and in what now is being increasingly utilized, the atom. Man is looking longingly at the ultimate source, the sun, and scheming of harnessing some of that power, though it may destroy him as it can destroy his sight if he looks at it too long.

The demonic aspect of this “progress” comes when control of the power is lost or misdirected, plus allowing our admiration for power to replace our love for the earth. Power is treacherous and too much glorying in it can be fatal as many a speeding automobile driver has lived only long enough to realize. There is only tragedy in store for those who regard power as superiority.

If it is not already too late, we must become increasingly wary of the superiority power nurtures. We have conquered distance and lost our awe of faraway places. We no longer marvel at nature’s power but scheme to subdue it. Casually we destroy marshes, pollute swamps, bulldoze forests and groves, level the hills, ditch the wetlands, pave the surface of the earth until it seems credible to refer to “the asphalt man” as Eiseley does when considering the humans who will populate the future.

Giving the can another kick, we consider what Balzer wrote: “But man is more than tool maker (maker of things). Aristotle speaks of him as a ‘political animal’ for he makes not only things but institutions as well. He creates the state, the church, the school, and the community.” Here is the stability Eiseley refers to when he writes: “Such stability as survives, such human courtesies as remain, are the remnants of an older Christian order.”

We are destroying that order by our fascination with power. Institutions are people and the more we depend on power, the less need is there for people and their institutions. Power isolates us from each other and the isolation fosters hostility which can only destroy.

With a final kick, which sends the can into the litter of throw-aways in the paved street gutter, we consider the nostalgia in letters we receive from former Polk residents, who recall a more comprehensible, if not simpler, time, when man was more natural. Their nostalgia is a form of protest. No longer can we depend on the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink to ALWAYS be available, and to always be wholesome. There is no thing to substitute for air, food and water no matter how we care for it. What the painter meant, when he said: “It doesn’t pay”—life isn’t sustained by cupboards.

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