Table Of ContentOBSCURED AMERICANS
LINH DINH
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Don a Retired Farmer
2. Jimmy the Cook
3. Eddie the Housepainter
4. Dan the Cheese Counter Man
5. B.B. the Bartender
6. Katy the Bartender and Nursing Student
7. Patrick the Ex-Computer Programmer
8. Amanda the Ex-Nurse
9. Rose the Mistress
10. Shane the Fighter, Heroin Chipper and Ghetto Teacher
11. Hank the Small Business Financial Advisor
12. Peter the Food Service Worker
13. Hank the Christian Constitutionalist
14. Michael the Philly Jesus
15. Noam the Straying Hasid
16. Lindy Morelli the Carmelite Nun
17. Eileen Walbank the Ex-Insurance Company Employee
18. Marty the Electrician, Plumber and Ex-Mortician
19. Felix the Artist, Ex-Grocer and Ex-Hospital Worker
20. Tod the Professor, Writer, Musician and Artist
21. Don the Retired Building Contractor
22. J.J. the Ex-Pizza Man and Young Lord
23. Rudy the Retired Math Professor
24. Rudy Dent a 9-11 First Responder
25. Benny the Landlord, Casanova and Covert Operator
26. Melissa the Iraqi Refugee
27. Manon the Aspiring School Counselor
28. Anna the Retired Teacher, Cab Driver and Computer
Programmer
29. Amanda the Film Editor
30. Vern the Vietnam Vet
31. Helen the Writer and Aspiring Prepper
32. Chang the Owner of Jenny’s Place and Dollar City
Don a Retired Farmer
I’ve prowled around Gary, relaxed in New Harmony and
explored downtown Indianapolis after midnight. There is a
bronze statue of John Wooden. Kneeling and suited, the
basketball coach is surrounded by five young pairs of male
legs, their bodies disappearing above the pelvis. It is very
creepy and gay. One of these days, I must barge into the
dismal looking Whistle Stop, just across the street from
Indianapolis’ Greyhound station. I need to see more of Indiana,
that’s for sure.
In New Harmony, I ate a brain sandwich at the Yellow Tavern,
then gave a talk about utopia at the opera house. Out of
towners and locals were equally receptive. I concluded, “Why
this fear of the unmediated experience, the direct experience?
Maybe we can’t stand how beautiful life really is. I think the
way to move forward is to say no to these interruptions, to
these barriers. It might not be utopia but it’s better than what
we have right now.”
The one friend I have in Indiana, I haven’t met in person. On
July 31st, 2015, 62-year-old Don Hensley emailed to say he
appreciated my articles. Then, “Our family farm is gone and I’m
the last from the old homestead. Dad made me and my twin
brother promise to find any other job but farming. He used to
joke that the only certain way he knew to become a millionaire
farming was to start out with $10M... You’ve made me shed a
tear more than once, but I’m left feeling that I’ve met people I
never would have. Home, a job, family and food on the table is
really all most of us hope for out of life.”
Our subsequent email conversation has revealed a world I
know so little about, being a city dweller for most of my life.
With automation, fewer farm hands are needed than ever, and
most of those who are still bent over under the sun are fresh
arrivals from Latin America, Jamaica and even Thailand.
Indoctrinated into the semantics of cement and asphalt, most
Americans are entirely divorced from animal logics, fresh
manure and plant husbandry. Even growing tomatoes has
become a mystery, much less plucking and gutting a chicken.
Don is retired and lives with his wife, Deb, in Huntingburg, six
miles from Dale, where he was born. His remembrances are
too interesting not to share. With a pair of dollar store scissors
and Elmer’s glue, I’ve cut and pasted them into this
configuration:
Some of my fondest memories are of the little tin-roofed log
cabin Dad let us build back in the woods. We built a small
sandstone fireplace outside, the pot-bellied stove was just for
cold weather.
No honor could be bestowed on me to compete with the feeling
of sitting in my favorite spot with beans & franks simmering
near the fire while reading a book and listening to the baby
squirrels run up and down the tree at my back while a mama
rabbit and her little ones watched from just a few feet away.
I’ve never been in any religious institution that felt more
hallowed than that little woods during a heavy snow. :)
Heavy lifting for me started at the age of 10. During the winter
Dad kept the cattle’s access to the water trough penned off.
That was so that they wouldn’t get hurt in the frozen muck
around it (that’s what you have kids for) so that meant we had
to water them at night when we got home from school (Dad
worked swing shift at ALCOA). At that age I only weighed about
70lbs. A 5 gallon bucket of water is about 40lbs so that meant
that each trip I was carrying about my body weight to the barn
through about 12"-16" of a mixture of slush/mud/cowsh*t that
wanted to pull your boot off with each step. Dad always kept
around 100 head of cattle, that’s a lot of thirsty animals when
they’ve gone all day without water. Since my brother was the
‘chosen twin,’ you can imagine who pretty well always made
the most trips.
Picking up hay, I was on the wagon handling every bale while
my brother walked along with the guys from town grabbing
every 6th or 7th. Back at the barn it was the same. I fed the
elevator while Danny was in the loft. On a 100 degree day the
peak of a hayloft is about 7 degrees hotter than H*ll!
Every time I ever brought up getting any kind of pay, I always
got the same smart-*ss remark, ‘You ate breakfast this
morning, didn’t you?’
I’ve lost track of how many malignant skin tumors I’ve had
removed, as well as two basal cell carcinomas and three
squamous cell carcinomas on my scalp and face from all the
years in the sun.
My nose was broken three times before I started the first grade
at 5 years old. Dad had told me early in life that I wasn’t
welcome when he and Danny left for the day to go to farm
sales and auctions. That left me at home with a psychopathic
b*tch many times my size that always said that if I wasn’t
going with my father and brother, I d*mned sure wasn’t sitting
on my lazy *ss.
Mom used to stand behind me as I washed dishes and critique
every piece before it was allowed to go into the strainer. A fleck
of food between the teeth of a fork or on the back of a plate
got me a mixing spoon or whatever was handy.
It’s taken me many years to come to grips with it. Knowing that
you are messed up is one thing, knowing why is another... I
really AM a spiritual person, so when people heavily into the
Bible want to give me words of encouragement, I accept them
because of the intent in which they’re given...
My last breakdown (my 3rd) was considered a medical miracle.
It kept a 5 or 6 man team working around the clock to try to
figure out. My wife Deb was under tremendous pressure early
on the third day to sign the papers and let them turn the
machines off. They kept insisting that once you go to less than
5% brain stem function, there is no coming back. My only
prognosis was as a vegetable... Then, once again, I came back
after six days of being ‘brain dead.’ The lead doctor made the
remark that, since they had no answers as to the beginning of
the episode or the recovery, he was totally fine with the word
miracle.
The years of beatings and physical and emotional abuse left me
damaged, absolutely... Under periods of great stress I go into
what they call a dissociative disorder and the change is so
subtle that only a very few that know me are even aware of it.
You ask about animal cruelty. The general public is unaware
that what is seen in the mainstream media is almost always in
connection with ‘factory farming.’ Sometimes, religion is also
partly to blame. A man who holds the conviction that we are to
have dominion over all the animals of Creation isn’t going to
form emotional attachments to any of his livestock. By the
same token, an employee at a factory farm holds no more
value in a turkey/hog/cow/horse than a furniture factory
employee does a center drawer or a modesty panel. It is the
slow death of the family farm that is creating the kind of
environment that leads to incidents like what you’ve seen in
the news.
None of the cattle on our farm had any way of knowing it, but
they all lived on a ‘Cow Country Club’ in comparison to most
other farms. During warm weather they were cycled through
three different pastures each with fresh water from a creek and
plenty of shade. They could still come to the barn to take
advantage of the salt block and mineral block as well as use
the back scratcher apparatus that had a large hemp rope
saturated with an oily insect repellent to deal with the spots
bugs like to bite where a cow couldn’t reach with their tail.
There was also always some kind of hay in the mangers. For
instance, to them, the stubble left after soybeans have been
harvested was like a candy treat. Dad would bale it so during
the summer they had variety in their diet that they also
happened to love (unlike factory farm beef which has little
room to move around and is only fed corn). Two other things
they looked forward to were the ground corn cobs Dad would
buy at the mill in bulk (& which I got to help shovel onto the
truck) and, believe it or not, they loved to see that Deb and I
were coming down to camp. After we’d packed up and gone
home, Dad would let them into the woods for a day or two and
every bit of ashes from our camp fire would be gone. There are
some kind of minerals in the ashes that cows crave to the point
of fighting over!
The news footage of factory farm abuse is much more
upsetting when you have first hand knowledge of just how
intelligent some livestock are. We had one heifer we named
Curly because of her forehead and she was far too bright for
her own good. Dad had one of the old electric fences that are
illegal now. They called them ‘weed-burners’ for good reason.
The hair on my arms is standing up as I type this just at the
memory... If you pulled up something green that was long
enough to drop over the wire and still have one end grounded,
it would sit there and sizzle until it had burned all the way
through your weed.
Dad sent Curly to market because she figured out that after a
driving wind with rain she could walk the electric fence and put
her ear down by the glass insulator on the metal post. If she
heard buzzing, she knew the wire was still ‘hot.’ When she
found one that was silent, she knew the fence had shorted out
and would walk down a bit and then just walk through the
fence knocking it to the ground. After one too many times of
rounding up his cattle in a neighbor’s crops during a summer
storm, Curly lost a good home.
Just something to think about the next time you see a news
item about livestock abuse. They are far more self-aware than
a lot of people realize.
Farmers have to be a combination of
veterinarian/accountant/lawyer/weatherman & have a
working knowledge of a slew of other fields that don’t come to
mind at the moment, yet they’re held in such low regard. A
foreman I used to work under insisted that ALL farmers were
much more wealthy than they’d ever let on. A direct quote...
‘I’ve never heard a G*d D*mned farmer admit that he’d had a
GOOD year!’
People would steal from farmers and think nothing of it.
Anybody living in town would go nuts if a farmer parked out
front and stripped an entire row of vegetables from their
garden or carefully selected blooms from their landscaping to
put together a bouquet for his wife’s birthday or their
anniversary, but each “corn on the cob season,” 8 to 10 rows of
corn would be stripped from the nothern edge of Dad’s field.
People from town would fill an entire car trunk with ears of
corn and feel no guilt because Dad obviously ‘had plenty.’
I’ve had a deep dislike for Bill Maher after the night (several
years ago) when he quipped on CNN’s Larry King Live, ‘I’ve
never understood why farmers should get special treatment
just because they happen to live in the middle of a big garden.’
Guess he thinks all that happens by itself, just like magic. If he
had to buy the building, furnishing, media equipment and all
the other necessities in order to get paid to sit and smirk at the
camera, I might have a little respect for him. As it is, I just
figure he’s not getting enough fiber in his diet...
We have a nationally known poultry processing plant just
outside Huntingburg. Over the years I’ve heard some pretty
gruesome stories from guys that have worked there (like
sticking gross things inside the giblets package, spitting phlegm
or tobacco juice into the body cavity). The worst, though, is
something that the ‘hangers’ (the guys that take the birds out
of the truck and hang them by the ankles on the brackets on
the chain feeding them into the plant) know is impossible to
get caught at unless someone in authority sees you do it. If a
bird fights back and the hanger is mad at it he will grab it by
the wings with it facing away from him and jerk back, breaking
its spine and making it impossible to carve. If you get one of
those turkeys all you can do is pull the meat off the bones with
your fingers. The ribs will be splayed outward in some places
and in at others.
I’ve never hunted and the only fishing I enjoy is catch and
release. I have never been in a (physical) fight in my life. There
have been shouting matches and times that I was pushed and
threatened but I’ve always found a way to somehow either
defuse the situation or vacate the area. One of the reasons all
the present day violent talk gets to me so much is the idea of
having to seriously hurt someone else in defense of myself or
my family.
At graduation (1970), I enrolled at United Electronics Institute
in Louisville, KY. You did the first six months by mail and only
those who met the grade requirements got to finish out the last
year and a half down there. My grades were near perfect, but
Dad informed me that he not only didn’t believe in college but
didn’t believe in going into debt to go, either. So I lost all of the
money I’d saved up by picking up hay for other local farmers
for 50 to 75 cents an hour. I would have been perfectly
positioned for the coming tech revolution.... :(
I worked for Insight Systems. Part of the reason I was hired was
because of all the modding I had done on my Atari computers.
At a time when a new IBM compatible only came with 256K of
memory and a monitor that let you display two colors (as long
as one of them was black [Big Grin], I’d already heavily
modified my Atari 400. I replaced the membrane keyboard with
a third party, full-stroke keyboard and tripled the internal
memory (16K to 48K). Once I proved to my boss that even the
first little 16K Atari could put 256 colors on a TV by running a
simple little ten line BASIC program, he offered me a job.
Other than about 4 years when I did IT support, I got trapped in
the furniture industry much like those in Detroit fell into the
black hole of the auto industry (without the benefits of
anything like the UAW...). Now I just get by on SSD with too
many physical problems to mention. It isn’t as if I wasn’t
industrious or hungry, I’ve been a lead-man, a foreman and the
Customer Service Manager of a local Value Added Reseller.
What it comes down to is something that I was told about 30
years ago... ‘Your Life will be much simpler once you accept the
fact that we are all Dixie Cups. Nobody in their right mind ever
patches a Dixie Cup. They are a dime a dozen. Throw it away
and get another...!’ :(
My wife’s cousin and her husband both have taken bus routes
to supplement their farm’s income. Around here drivers are
locked in at the beginning of the school year and there have
been times when, because of fluctuations in fuel prices, they
have lost money every time they start a bus. My wife and I
don’t know anyone who isn’t struggling in one way or another.
Maybe that’s why I appreciate your articles so much.
The recession during the Carter years was brutal. Many people
today don’t know that the country went through a financial
crisis during the late Nixon - Carter years that the country has
never recovered from. Double digit inflation is something that
doesn’t reset after a recovery. I am much more than sad for
