Last night I got back from an energy conference at Crystal Mountain Resort at which I was a speaker, having cut a diagonal across Michigan, in my “American” Chevy Impala. Being mid-summer and sunny, I indulged myself by taking the smaller, less-traveled county roads, adding a couple of hours to my trip. I saw economic decline: mostly mobile homes and hovels (as compared with the McMansions of Livingston and Oakland County). The train tracks have long since been removed from Thompsonville, leaving a town, sad, damaged, troubled but magnificent in its modesty.

I couldn’t help making the comparison with the open land of south Central Denmark which is rather similar to mid-Michigan’s — the Slesvig-Holsten of Bismarcks desiring. (Denmark is also a low country peninsula). Not much has changed in the farm land since, say 1863. You see barns and small outbuildings a hundred years old but the fields look like they haven’t been farmed in decades. Where are the cows? Are they all in the barns now on robot-milking machines? If the EU allows them to exist at all, they get government subsidies for the machinery so that the farmers can produce the same amount of milk with fewer workers. (The machinery manufacturers lunch frequently with the Eurocrats in Brussels) Farmland without cows is disturbing on many levels…And the beautiful children of farmers have long since fled the farms for cities like Flensborg and Copenhagen.

I get home to find that my Danish farm-girl-PhD-wife just bought three containers of tasteless Green Giant strawberries (“at a great price”) — not the strawberries we could have bought from the local farmers in Belleville. It was a matter of convenience given how little time we have to pick our own.

So we have two stories of globalization. And globalization is a long, broadening discussion in Michigan and in the world at large. Do we go with it, or resist it? Shall we re-invent ourselves, or do we need to first re-invent invention? Mixed with the feeling of heartbreak for the people left behind in Michigan, I had a fleeting thought that our Department of Education ought to require a half-semester course in preparing a patent application for an invention of any student’s choosing. (Because of the legacy of the auto industry, there are a lot of people in Michigan who hold patents) But I guess there are a lot of other political agendas competing for the hearts and minds of our high school children.

So I, like you, simply contemplated the moment of divinity I saw in the mother working the cash register of the gas-station-video-store-grocery at Evart Junction.

I have known many Katherines in my life and I will cherish them as you do. For they represent the brave, the strong, the best in us all.

Cheers,
Craig