Herding redux: What lies beneath
Yes, the photos are repeats of Thursday's, but bear with me, the words are new.
Swamped by the poisonous wake of the election, I tried to cheer myself and you with Thursday's post of a few pretty, pastoral pictures. No such luck. On reconsidering, I'd like to add what lies beneath.
That picturesque rail-thin Indian woman likely lived in poverty, her few cows, her "herd," probably constituted her whole wealth. The load of sticks she so gracefully carried was precious fuel for cooking her family’s scant food.
In the 1980s, when I took that photo, the child mortality rate in India was approximately 200 per 100,000 people, 5 times the US's, 10 times Europe's. Today, India's child mortality rate is 25 per 100k. A key factor in that good news is greatly increased vaccination. (Meet your future chant: Hey, hey RFK, how many kids did you kill today?)
Below is a bucolic, picture-perfect summer day. The migrant dairy worker herding other people's cows is part of the large workforce that buoys the US economy with cheap labor and adamantine endurance. Even on better farms, and this is one, workers often put in 14-16 hour days haying in summer heat and milking in winter cold on barn floors slick with frozen shit.
America's farms and industrial meat industries are built on the backs of undocumented labor. They face high injury rates and an ever-looming threat of jail and deportation; they are isolated from family and culture, investing years in raising the living standards of families back home with remittances that help educate children, buy a small plot of land, or help relatives simply survive.
If they are deported en mass, there is no possibility that local labor could fill the gap and provide America with safe, affordable food, even if they were lured with a living wage and decent conditions.
These are pretty pictures, and I probably should have left it at that. But this election takes some getting used to. So bear with me, please, for a few more sad and angry posts. Next up: The Plague of Quaint. (Then, maybe some kittens.)
Well said, Terry, as always. Thank you.
Dear Terry,
The beauty of these photos in no way diminishes the reality they present, nor does the hard reality portrayed diminish the exquisitely beautiful world.
As ever, thank you, for capturing both.
Health.
Zara