Trusting the good old days too much?

I'm old enough to trust the practicality and wisdom of the good old days. The people who came before us got so many things right that it's easy to believe they had all the answers. I've admired this quality of the tea party Republicans. I understand their zeal to keep certain things as they've "always" been. But, like them, I've had to confront the reality that some traditional systems are not as efficient and effective as I'd like to believe.

Three years ago I bought an Aermotor windmill at a ranch auction west of Billings.  The windmill was old, but unused.  Only the sail section had been put together, with the unassembled parts residing in a barn for many years.   It was an incredible bargain from my perspective – old fashioned construction, with minimal wear and tear.  This year I determined to install it over a well near our farmers ditch to pump water for livestock on our west field. 

This summer, with the tower completed, I started on the wheel, confident I could assemble those sections that had never been put together. Soon I found myself really struggling.  Parts were far from fitting and fastening locations did not match up. I assumed it was because irresponsible parties had mistreated those sections and bent the rims or sails. I got help from a neighbor interested in the project. He pointed out how the wheel rods (like spokes of a bike wheel) interfered with the sails. My mind couldn't even consider the possibility that the sail sections were not correctly assembled decades ago.

For two weeks I struggled to bend the sails and the rods to fit the rims. I used a pipe clamp and a fence stretcher. I didn't care what it took to bend the steel to my will.  I was confident that I was winning, by brute force. On October 13, 2013 I stood back and took a look at my work.  On that day, the light pierced through my cognitive dissonance.  I saw not one bent rim from mistreatment, but two sail sections I had forced into place, with spokes and rims bent askew.

At that moment I started to consider the possibility that my trust in conventional wisdom of the good old days was misguided. As I checked carefully the diagrams and narrative of instructions I found online, my worst fears were realized. The original assembly of the sail section was incorrect.   Four of the six sections needed to be disassembled and reconfigured, taking into account the full 10 foot diameter of the wheel. What happened next was amazing. I no longer needed to use my fence stretcher or my pipe clamp. In an hour I finished installing the last four correctly assembled sections. Now the wheel looks right and spins true with the mill gearbox.  I'm more confident that my new windmill will pump water this winter as intended, assuming rain will stop and the dirt around the tower will be firm enough to bring in a crane. 

Our nation may be at a similar place with the current health care system reforms. Lots of people express dislike for Obamacare, but not necessarily for the same reasons. Some believe that the reforms will increase entitlement spending for our growing poor and elderly population, bankrupting our country.  But some of us in Big Horn County are not enamored with the Affordable Care Act because there is no public pay option.  We feel that excessive health insurance costs are already bankrupting families.  Some of us believe that health insurance is not really an optional luxury item that certain people can get by without. Trying to force these disparate views together as a collective American rejection of Obamacare is a fallacy.

Yet the Affordable Care Act can really help Big Horn County families access health care without turning our personal finances into a tailspin. See on line for answers to health care financial questions in Montana: http://montanahealthanswers.com/families/

We don't have to walk away from or trash the windmill wheel of governance over health care in this country. Obamacare was enacted into law, with strong bipartisan negotiation among our elected representatives in Washington well before Obama refused to negotiate the dismantlement of the law. It's time to congratulate the tea party Republicans on confronting their own cognitive dissonance stop trying to derail Obamacare. Now let's get about the business of reducing the deficit, increasing affordable health care for all of us, and addressing the real sources of irrational and foolish deficit spending in all sectors of our economy.

David Graber
graberdb@gmail.com
Hardin, MT
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org