Fields or Hutches?

When I was small, living on a small farm near a college town, my father fell for an idea proffered by the Ralston Purina Company of Checkerboard Square in St. Louis.

Purina’s idea was that there was big money to be made by raising rabbits for food. These rabbits, of course, would grow from little fluffy bunnies to full-grown edible size through the application of large amounts of Purina Rabbit Chow.

It came in big bags and there was a skill involved: the bags were sewn shut, and once you had the knack you could grab the string at one end, give it a pull, and the whole seam would unravel, leaving you holding a piece of thin, useless, red string and a strip of paper that had been folded over the seam and sewn through. And a now-open bag of greenish-brown pellets of rabbit food.

My dad, being a very handy fellow, built a large rabbit hutch. It had three tiers of cages in rows of 10 on each side, with a sort of aisle down the middle. It had a good, sturdy roof. It was a modern apartment house for rabbits.

In short order it was stocked with many New Zealand white rabbits, a red-eyed albino variety. Most were does, though there was also a buck (named “Chet” because I thought it bore facial resemblance to the NBC newscaster Chet Huntley), and a busy rabbit he was!

Each morning — time had passed and I was in school now — it was my unhappy duty to feed and water the rabbits. This was especially unpleasant during the winter, but it allowed me to make important discoveries: There is no such thing as warm gloves, and if one is overly enthusiastic about filling the bucket in hope of reducing the number of trips to the faucet on the east side of the pumphouse, pants wet below the knees will result and will freeze stiff as a board. I hated the rabbits.

We took very good care of them. In the summer, we’d take extra vegetables from the garden to them, and they were happy about that. But then came the time for each (except for Chet) to be taken away by my father, next to be seen in cut-up, packaged form, ready to be cooked, the skins inside-out on stretchers for later use.

On farms, one learns not to become attached to the product. If one is smart, one also learns not to put too much faith in promises of flowing profits.

We had other rabbits, too, little gray cottontails that gamboled in the fields. We did not look after those, nor for the most part did we eat them. They had to come up with their own food, they had to work out their own romantic arrangements, and they were not protected from predators by a sturdy hutch. On the other hand they didn’t get taken away to be butchered and packaged.

If they had been given the choice, would they have swapped their circumstances?

What brings this to mind is the state of our country and the assumptions that supposedly thinking people are making and the choices they make.

We, too, live in hutches or are free to roam the great outdoors. I’ve done both and have learned that as with rabbits each has its advantages and disadvantages. In the end I chose the latter.

For the longest time, the question writ large has been easy to ignore. About half the people live in big cities. About half the people don’t. The news is focused on the cities, because the news people have for their entire careers aspired to cover the news in and from big cities. The cities believe they deserve such coverage. Those who live in the country are generally glad to be left alone.

(Because they cover news as if it were sports, one of the leading stories this year was whether New York City would choose a communist, a crooked mass killer, or a beret-wearing clown as its next mayor, as if the result mattered to anyone who doesn’t live there. Which it doesn’t, beyond the recognition that New York is a silly place.)

A couple of days ago, the trees in the countryside and the cities’ people hutches were shaken. That’s when the reporter Rod Dreher published a long column about his recent trip to Washington, D.C. It painted a very ugly picture of the situation among young people in our country, in this case young people who in an earlier day would have become conservatives. They now are, as is our politics, free of principle. Their goal is not to help build a better nation for themselves and their wives and children but instead to exact revenge.

Revenge for what? Dreher spoke with several.

“They don’t have good career prospects,” he wrote. “[T]hey’ll probably never be able to buy a home, many are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out, and the idea that they are likely to marry and start families seems increasingly remote.”

So they went to Washington, as do many who have never done an honest day’s work nor been exposed to reasons they might want to. They flocked to a place where people engage in useless pursuits, whence they complain that their lives are unrewarding.

We’ve come to expect this from leftists, but the idea that those from a different part of the spectrum — I’ll not call them conservatives, because they’re not — would fall for the same nonsense is alarming and disappointing.

In addition to an aversion to work they seem to eschew thought, or their lives would be unfolding differently.

They went to college, many of them, and studied something from which no career worth the word could be fashioned. In the course of it they assumed debt they can never repay, certainly not while practicing whatever they studied. Then they headed to big cities where they demonstrated their failures and became embittered. Now they want to tear down the country because their poor choices have left them, well, useless.

Like these unhappy specimens, I, too, fell for the lure of the big city. I lived in New York (and nearby environs) for 28 years. The difference is that I knew what I intended to do when I got there, and that’s what I did. Yes, I made more money there than I had elsewhere. But in that everything was more expensive I was no better off but for the alleged prestige of . . . being in New York.

When it came to pass that there was nothing for me to do there, I left. I packed up and departed the land of hutches for a place out in the country. I paid less for my house and little farm than a person in the big city would pay for a parking space. My annual property taxes are less than they would be for a month back east. I do not make as much money but I also don’t need as much money.

Instead of pastimes formulated to disguise the emptiness of city life, I get to have an authentic life. Is is endlessly easy? Of course not; I do not live the life of the comatose. There is work, but it is satisfying. Life is satisfying pretty much every day. And the fruits of my labors are mine, to do with as I please.

I’m neither rich nor influential. I have learned some skills, and they serve me well. They are not complicated. Anyone could learn them. But I have principles rather than wandering in aimless despair. Those aren’t complicated, either.

Don’t buy things you can’t afford. Be kind to friends and to those you don’t know. Say your prayers and remember that they are not a letter to Santa Claus. Help where you can and ask for help when you need it. Learn to consider your day at day’s end and do what you can to be glad of the way you spent it — our days are not unlimited.

And remember that the fondest dream of many city dwellers is to live someplace else that isn’t a city. When Chet Huntley left NBC, after all, he moved back to Montana.