America Drifting Off Course
February 5, 2010
Preface
Life doesn’t come with a set of instructions. Like this brand new Made in America Apple computer, it too came right out of the well-crafted box without any manual on how to open it up, plug it in, or turn it on. You just have to open it up, look it over, and push the button and get started, and find out what it can do. For the duration of my life, I will never know all the things this marvelous machine is or could do.
My life, my brain, and this much broken body are like this computer. We will never know what we were fully capable of. We just have to push that start button and discover where life will lead us.
I am just beginning the 60th year of my life. Over the past six decades I have seen much of the very best and some of the worst that America has to offer. I am the youngest son of a youngest son. I made a very deliberate choice not to have any children of my own. If you decide to stay with me, you will discover why. I know that if I were to die right now, I would very soon be quite forgotten as have most of the multitudes that have gone on before me. I hope my life will mean more than just an inscription on a stone that over time will be worn away to sand.
I only know of great men like Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt, or Robert Frost because their legacy has been left behind in the libraries of the world. This then shall perhaps become the legacy I hope to leave behind. I have known evil men who deliberately left many pitfalls in my path. I have known friends who far surpassed what was expected of them. If I can in any way help others to avoid a pitfall, if I can help anyone remove the blinders of the illusion of what America has become, if only I can share with you a philosophy that you too feel in your heart, and you can discover that you are not alone, then I can fulfill a supreme goal of leaving this world a better place for me having been here.
Follow me then if you will, and I will take you on a journey that begins as a young farm boy growing up in rural Iowa who was expected to follow the Lutheran German immigrant farmer path laid down by my grandfathers. The trail will lead to a rebirth in war torn Vietnam. There I discovered that I and America were losing its way.
The history I learned in school was glossed over and very one-sided. America has an evil side that nobody seemed to think and certainly not spoken about. I was brought up to believe with great pride that America was the greatest country on earth. America has long gotten off the great path of do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you. If you really believe that America, The United States of America, has become the ideal and greatest nation that she can be, then you need to wake up like I did that fateful day off doing my country’s bidding in Vietnam. Wake up your America and help her get back on her path to honor and never live in a blind illusion that there is no shame in what we have done and continue to do. We can and must strive to do better. Let this tail of one man’s trials to find the good path for himself, his country, and the planet begin.
Chapter 1
I Am Not Like You
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I…
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
ROBERT FROST, “The Road Not Taken”
December 17, 1949
These are the facts as I know them to be. Of course, I do not remember tumbling out of my mother’s womb all slimy and wet, expelled out of the safe dark warmth into the light, but I know it to be true.
My official Certificate of Live Birth, State of Iowa, birth number 114-49-059306 by the Iowa State Department of Health, Division of Vital Statistics says I was born in Kossuth County at the Sabin home 2/3 mile north of Burt. The certificate goes on to say I was born a single male (not a twin) on December 17th, 1949, at 9:25 PM. It says my father and mother were both white, and my parents were farmers living on their own farm at Lone Rock, Iowa. My father was Robert Edward Schmidt, Jr. and was 34 years old. My mother, Verona Helen Luedtke was 29. It goes on to say my mother had three other living children at the time.
It also said mother had no other live children who had died, and none stillborn after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The official signature was one Bahne K Bahnson D. O. Later in life I came to know this small-town doctor as I had him stitch up a wound or two, and I remember his unusual vaccination technique. He would pinch the target area and hold the hypodermic needle like a dart and literally throw it like a dart followed by the injection.
At any rate, I have no reason to suspect that the official record is anything other than the truth. Now if you are of an astrological bent (which I am not) your astrologer can tell you the rest of my story. The rest if you read on. If you are a birth order believer, you can further pigeonhole my fate, but I am not impressed with birth order fanatics either.
So now you know I was born a statistic, a number among numbers, but you can already see from the very beginning that I am different from you. I was not born a native American Indian, although I always wished I had been. I was not born black or poor. I was not born to wealth or privilege.
I cannot tell you whether I was naturally nursed or a bottle-fed baby. I have no memory of those early days, and I never asked my mother about it. If I had asked her, she would likely have not told me anyway. Such things were never discussed in her home. By the time I came around, a baby was old stuff, and I knew of no baby pictures ever taken of me.
My parents were responsible providers. I never went hungry, was adequately clothed, and always had a sound roof over my head. My father was a hard-working farmer who had just made the switch from farming with horses to tractors when I came into the family. Dad raised corn, soybeans, alfalfa, milked a couple dozen Holsteins, raised hogs, laying hens, and beef cattle.
We had a big garden and apple trees and did our own butchering and made smoked sausages. We usually raised 100 roosters for butchering. Mom canned meat, fruit, and veggies.
This was the environment I was born into. My parents were both of German descent and brought up in a Lutheran tradition. Mom was particularly religious and did her best to instill it into us. I was taught not to question, but to accept things, and one day I would understand. Until that day I was to believe unquestionably what my German ancestors had been taught.
So much for what I was supposed to be, but now for who I was and eventually became. I became a loner. I was for a long time the “baby” of the family and hated being called that as I grew older. I was brought up in an environment where love was rarely shown. I do not recall any occasion where my folks told me they loved me or ever heard them say the love word to each other. Hugs and kisses and affection were not as a rule shown in our house. Keeping busy was the rule of the day.
The rural community I grew up in was a wonderful cooperating neighbor helping neighbor society. Today it is nothing like that. The world and way of life were undergoing rapid change. World War II was over, and the baby boom was on. I will tell you a bit about the great country life of my youth, because that way of life is gone, and you should know what has been lost.
The Schmidt’s and the Marlow’s were the dominant names in the neighborhood. My dad lived within a few country miles of Uncle Fred, Uncle Leo, and Uncle Martin (Meyer). Uncle Tom had moved to Minnesota around the time I was born but initially farmed in the neighborhood too.
Today most farmers are individualists, but not so when I was growing up. Dad and my uncles had one bailer between them. During haying time, we went from farm to farm getting everybody’s hay in. It was a social as well as working event. The ladies would cook up feasts for the working men. There was one silage chopper between my uncles, though they each had their own tractors and corn planters. At butchering time I have fond memories helping out, being a part of stuffing the casings, and tying off the ends, and taking turns cranking the stuffer. It was hard work but fun at the same time.
Everybody was telling tales and catching up with gossip while they worked. We worked long into the night until finally the rings were put on sticks and hung in the smokehouse. It was often midnight when the smoke fire of corncob and apple wood was finally lit. Then there was cleanup. All the grinders, stuffers, tubs, and knives had to be spotlessly cleaned. We ate lunch with fresh products and played cards as the meat smoking took place. Then my cousins and I were free to play “kick the can” in the dark. Great fun. Hard but important work, and great socializing. Belonging.
Today it is nothing like the days I grew up in. Few of the local farmers milk cows or raise hogs. They have been delegated to factory farms, and assembly line milking. Most farms in what my neighborhood was no longer raise livestock, and hence few pastures, and not much haying. Now it is corn and boring soybeans. That and CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) being paid not to farm or graze land.
Now to dig deeper into who I was as a kid. My grandfathers never took me fishing or hunting or hardly ever spoke to me directly. Both of my grandmothers had passed on before I was born, so they were totally out of the picture of my upbringing.
Dad was a very busy man. He worked hard at farming and began renting more land than the 120 acres he had been working. He was on the coop elevator board, president of the school board, an elder of the church, and a very good pool player with the Lone Rock pool hall gang.
And that is where his book ended. Maybe I will find more of it somewhere in all these boxes of papers. My fear is that it was lost in one of his computer crashes that were unretrievable.
Rodney Schmidt Legacy 