Has America gone lazy?

Last week, President Obama shared his thoughts about complacency in America over the last two decades – and he used the word lazy. The words were barely out of his lips last Tuesday when Republican presidential candidates pounced on the morsel and regurgitated it on their blogs. Buried under the ludicrous salivations is a huge cache of truth.

From 2001 to 2003 while I was in China, I was questioned over and over by workers, college students and business leaders – whenever people gathered to practice their English on an American. The question they asked was so repetitive that in time it became nauseating – "When do you think China will overtake America?"

"In what?" I learned to counter. Sometimes I queried further, "In good will and civilized behavior to ethnic minorities?" They always had another agenda.

Beneath their anti-American rhetoric was the same truth. Chinese citizens know how to work with their hands, and Americans have forgotten how. However, this is nto the result of laziness. It's the result of a service-based economy and a focus on information jobs instead of growth in industrial and manufacturing positions that are more hands on.

It's true that the economy of China is rapidly overtaking that of the U.S. in practically every measure. It's been that way for almost a decade. Some measures indicate China is already ahead of America.

In September, an article in The Economist predicted China's economy would surpass America's by 2016. We have outsourced our "blue collar" jobs out of our borders. Actually, the wealthy one percent have outsourced our talented labor force. That doesn't make those of us who are out of work lazy, but it has almost fatally damaged our nation's economic engine — workers.

All this should give pause to the naysayers on talk radio defending the few skilled technical hand laborers left in this country in the face of computer driven and information technology skills. It's true, as Romney and Perry proclaim, that the working few of this nation are still the world's best. But those jobs are becoming more and more scarce.

Meanwhile, our children grow up not knowing how to use their hands.

It's not just because automotive technology has advanced to the point where tools and technical know-how are now too complex for any farmer to dig into engine overhaul or even replacing brake pads. While that's definitely part of the problem, there is also too much time spent away from learning about how "real stuff" works – that which can't be replicated on a computer.

Young people, by and large, no longer know how to move dirt with a shovel to block or open a field ditch, how to mulch potato plants, strip out the last of the milk in a back quarter, scald and pluck a chicken, let alone pound a nail or fasten a hose on a bib.

Here on the Back 40, family and friends have been joining us in building models of sustainable solar-assisted and energy efficient systems for heating, cooling, sewage treatment and farm production. Successes, mostly from borrowed technical information on the web, slightly overbalance failures.

But the greatest success has been the young people who come with zero experience working with their hands, yet end up with a strong value for learning such skills. They practiced with the stuff of vegetable, animal, metal, wood, rubber tire, soil and stone products and found they could be successful and useful with their hands. Stop in at the Back 40 and see the results.

This is a huge difference from when I was their age in 1960. Back then, I knew no one who was as ignorant about using their hands intelligently as most young people seem to be now.

No, President Obama and hopeful GOP candidates, laziness is not precisely the focal point. Greed is more the problem, and the hope of making more money with less physical and mental effort. It has been cultivated by the unfortunate collaboration of big government and big business, who do things for us we would be better off doing for ourselves, at obscene profits for the one percent.

So in this Thanksgiving season, I'm grateful for the young people who are moving out of the comfort of the corporate-government box to experience handling stuff with their own hands, in order to provide for themselves and their family. Work really does work, and it's enormously fulfilling when it connects to real stuff and builds real human relationships. The future of our nation depends on it.

Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org