Some 70 years ago, my father started a business. It was an agriculture-related business in Iowa, and required enormous time and energy and sacrifice on the part of my dad, as well as of our family.
My mother was not directly involved in the business itself. She concentrated her efforts on managing our household--with all that that means, including being primarily responsible for the well-being of my two brothers, and me. She contributed substantially, if indirectly, to my dad’s success.
The early years were incredibly difficult, and although my parents rarely talked about the business itself in my presence, I knew when things weren’t going well. Our family income varied from week to week depending on how sales had been, and some weeks I knew the checking account balance hovered barely above zero. We never went hungry, in part because of the huge garden Dad planted and harvested, whose bounty Mom cooked when it was fresh and preserved for our use during long winters.
In time, the business became quite successful, but it was always a “small business.” The purchase of a couple of farms added to my parents’ security after I’d left home, but the farm crisis of the 1980s hit them hard. They got through that, but my father’s enterprises were never “too big to fail” by any measure.
My dad’s name was the name of his business. In many ways, the business was him, and he was the business. It hung on for a few years after his death, but eventually it died, too.
I write these things today because the destruction and looting of shops and stores this weekend feels discounted in many tellings of what’s been happening all across our nation. I write these words because I am reminded of how much my father’s business meant to him and to us, not just financially, but also emotionally and psychologically.
I write this remembrance not to take anything at all away from the brutal and unjustified murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis Police officer, nor to deny the systemic racism that infects police departments and our entire justice system from coast to coast. The problem of police brutality against communities of color must be addressed, and the kinds of efforts begun by the Justice Department under the Obama administration must be restarted. The national sin of racism needs to be defeated in all its dimensions.
I am compelled to write this because it is easy to say of a burnt-out, looted store, Well, it’s only a business…it can be rebuilt, but a life taken cannot be restored. Which is true, but only partially so.
A business can be, and often is, the embodiment of a life-of hopes and of dreams, of sweat and of tears. Of risks taken, and rewards deferred. Of sacrifice, often as much to serve the community as to make a buck.
We tend to see many things in one of two ways…this way or that way…on the one hand or on the other. If George Floyd’s death is bad, burning stores and destroying neighborhoods in response must be by some measure not so bad, maybe even good. But it isn’t. Pay attention to all the people involved—hurting, in pain, struggling, sorrowing—and real life is much more than a child’s game of cops and robbers.
About this point, some of my readers are no doubt getting ready to respond, But looting and burning cities is the only way to get white America to pay attention to the realities of life in black America. I cannot argue with that fact. Non-white Americans have been used, abused, and then ignored by both political parties for years. Both have had their chance to make things better, neither has succeeded. It is a crisis deeper than our carefully cultivated partisanship.
But hear out my feelings.
A number of years ago the machine shed on my uncle’s farm was struck by lightning in the middle of the night. As I recall, its contents were pretty much destroyed in the ensuing fire. I was in Iowa visiting my family when it happened, and drove to the farm to see for myself and offer what I could to the family. My uncle and my cousin were sifting through the thick mix of ash and water that covered the ground, looking for what they could salvage. It was one of the saddest sights I’d ever seen. I ached for the work they had to do to begin to recover.
In time, they did recover from the fire, and I hardly heard it mentioned in later years. But there was one thing lost that night that never will be replaced: a set of daily journals my great-grandfather kept for many years as he worked that very farm.
I suspect many of the businesses ransacked the past few days held irreplaceable memories such as the ones I have of my father’s business and such as those journals recorded. They are part and parcel of the very lives of people invested in them, as well as a means of financial and social stability for them and their employees. To talk of their destruction as if no human cost is exacted is simply wrong.
“The truth is, the unlimited power which merchant captains have, upon long voyages on strange coasts, takes away a sense of responsibility, and too often, even in men otherwise well-disposed, substitutes a disregard for the rights and feelings of others.” (Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast; originally published in 1840.)
