I’m Hannes Zacharias, and while I grew up in Dodge City, today I live in Lenexa, Kansas for High Plains Public Radio, Radio Reader’s Book Club. The book is “The Time it Never Rained” by Elmer Kelton.
Published in 1973 This West Texas yarn inspired by actual events during a severe drought in the 1950s, vividly captures the hard work and thoughts of the cranky Charlie Flagg an independent, self-sufficient. quintessential West Texas rancher who staunchly avoids government assistance to try and save him from financial ruin and by extension his ranch, family, and immigrant ranch hands.
The drought is the catalyst for the demise of the Flagg family ranch and environs, but the real villain here is the government, at least from my perspective. From the opening pages the government is viewed as a pariah populated by incompetent and unfeeling bureaucrats and should be avoided at all cost.
This perpetuates a common trope that we would all be better off if we got government out of our lives and ignores the past and current government assisted programs that allow us then and now to live so-called ‘independent lives.’
Some of the best examples of government assistance occurred during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s….programs which extended into the 1950s and current day as well.
The National Drought Mitigation Center with the University of Nebraska states this government intervention is “credited with saving many livelihoods throughout the drought periods. The programs had a variety of goals, all of which were aimed at the reduction of drought impacts and vulnerability:
- Providing emergency supplies, cash, and livestock feed and transport to maintain the basic functioning of livelihoods and farms/ranches.
- Establishing health care facilities and supplies to meet emergency medical needs.
- Establishing government-based markets for farm goods, higher tariffs, and loan funds for farm market maintenance and business rehabilitation.
- Providing the supplies, technology, and technical advice necessary to research, implement, and promote appropriate land management strategies.
- Removing dead trees and planting new trees to alleviate psychological stress and create shelter belts.
Problems remained, but these programs and activities would play a fundamental role in reducing the vulnerability of the nation to the forthcoming 1950s drought. Although a larger area was affected during the 1950s drought, the conservation techniques that many farmers implemented in the intervening years helped prevent conditions from reaching the severity of the 1930s drought”.
Essential government work continues today where forecasts of global warming alert us to impending peril of continued drought. A new study in Nature Climate Change shows that Earth's warming climate has “made the western drought about 40 percent more severe, making it the region's driest stretch since A.D. 800. And there's a very strong chance the drought will continue through 2030”. Warnings which for some are totally ignored or set off as being government conspiracies. Mitigating the impacts of this global phenomenon will require collective action on all of us.
As the 17th Century English Poet John Donne wrote:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
The story that Elmer Kelton delivers is fiction, a nice yarn of independence. Unfortunately, global warming and forecasted extreme weather patterns of prolonged drought and flooding, are not.
This is Hannes Zacharias in Lenexa, and you are listening to the High Plains Public Radio, Reader’s Book Club.
