The Dignity of Rural Life: In Appreciation of Millet

Last year I learned more about, and was impressed by, Jean-François Millet when I read “To Plow His Furrow in Peace: Jean-François Millet’s art taps his peasant roots to honor the dignity of rural life,” a major article in the Spring 2021 issue of Plough Quarterly.** That became the seed for this blog post.

Millet (1814~75) was born in rural northwestern France, and his most famous work is “The Angelus,” an oil painting completed between 1857 and 1859.

The painting, which the Plough author says you may have seen “hanging in some grandma’s living room,” depicts two peasants bowing in a potato field to say a prayer, the Angelus, that together with the ringing of the bell from the church on the horizon marks the end of a day’s work. 

I don’t remember when I first saw a reproduction of this painting, but I’m sure it was when I was still a Missouri farmboy.

Two earlier paintings by Millet are also widely known and appreciated, perhaps especially by rural people: “The Sower” (1850) and “The Gleaners” (1857).

What I did not know until I read the Plough article is how Millet was criticized. The author says that Millet’s “rustic paintings met with a great deal of negativity from critics and Parisian society. The truthfulness with which they depicted rural people and rural life was labeled mere ugliness.”

The sophisticated city folks thought that art should depict “dignified things, like lords and ladies and historical events and Greek myths and things like that. It was not for poor people.”

But by his paintings, Millet continued to depict the sacredness to be found in ordinary rural life. And in the concluding words of the Plough essay, to this day Millet’s “works remain a reminder of the worthiness of the ordinary worker who lives an ordinary life.”

My father was born in rural northwestern Missouri 101 years after Millet’s birth in France, and while not a “peasant” such as those depicted in Millet’s paintings, he—and his father—were “common” farmers, and from them I learned, and came to appreciate, the dignity of rural life.

On Aug. 15, 2020 (my 82^nd birthday), I posted a blog article titled “My Old Missouri Home,” and I won’t reiterate here what I wrote then, but it was in part about “the benefits of being a farmboy.”

What I didn’t say in that article is that I learned about the dignity of rural life from my father and his father. Grandpa George lived on a farm in Worth County (Mo.) all of his life except for a brief period in the early 1910s, and my father (d. 2007) did the same except for the years from 1935 to 1945.

There were exceptions, but they and most other farmers like them, were good, honest men who worked hard to provide for their families, who were kind and helpful to their neighbors, and who didn’t get into harsh verbal conflicts with anyone (except maybe on a few rare occasions).

Yes, 80~100 years after Millet, they embodied the dignity of rural life that the French artist painted so beautifully, and I remain grateful for what I learned from them.

But what about now? The world is much different now than when Millet painted “The Angelus” in 1857—or when my father bought his farm in 1945. I am afraid, though, that the dignity of rural life has deteriorated in the last forty years.

“Talk radio” (such as The Rush Limbaugh Show from 1988 until Limbaugh’s death in 2021) and, to a lesser extent since it requires cable, Fox News augmented the polarization of the general public, including and perhaps especially rural Americans.

When 80% of the people vote the same way, as they did in many of Missouri’s (and other states’) rural counties in 2016 and 2020, perhaps that indicates a notable loss of the dignity of rural life to the polarizing forces in contemporary society.

That dignity has been tarnished in recent years by the MAGA majority demonizing those with opposing political views and many of those in the minority 20% feeling alienated from their neighbors/friends.

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** Back in 2016, I posted “Following the Plough” on a Blogger.com page. Few have accessed that page, so if you would like to know more about Plough Quarterly and the Bruderhof community that produces it, click on this link.

The Power of Pictures

“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” Arthur Brisbane (1864~1936), a high-profile New York journalist and editor, penned those words 111 years ago in a 1911 newspaper article. That seems to be the origin of the much-used expression that you have heard repeatedly. 

This post is about two specific photos that were made public fifty years ago rather than about the power of pictures in general.

One of those images is now generally titled “Napalm Girl.” It is the photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl, taken in 1972 by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut (who was born in Vietnam in 1951).

“The Girl in the Picture” was the title of my 7/10/11 blog post, which includes a reproduction of the photo, so I will not write more about that powerful picture here.*

The second picture, and the main subject of this article, was also made public in 1972. Different names have been used for it; the one I prefer is “Tomoko and Mother in the Bath.”**  

Kamimura Tomoko was born blind and paralyzed with congenital “Minamata disease” in 1956 and was 15 at the time the picture of her and her mother bathing was taken. She died in December 1977 at the age of 21.

“Minamata disease,” a type of mercury poisoning, was the name of the malady suffered by those who were born with various deformities in and around the small city of Minamata in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. Tomoko was just one of nearly 3,000 people who contracted Minamata disease.

American photojournalist W. Eugene Smith took the picture of Tomoko being bathed by her mother in late 1971. Smith (1918~78) was widely known because of the outstanding photos he took during World War II. But many commentators regard “Tomoko” as Smith’s greatest work.

The iconic photograph was first published in the June 2, 1972, edition of Life magazine as the centerpiece of a short Minamata photo essay.

The movie Minamata, which premiered in Berlin in 2020, was released in the U.S. in February of this year. It features Johnny Depp, who does an outstanding job of portraying the not-so-likeable Smith. 

Although there are various historical inaccuracies and other defects in the movie, it pictures well the suffering of so many families in Minamata and the culpability of the Chisso Corporation, the Japanese chemical company which for 34 years polluted the water supply near Minamata.

The climax of the film is Smith’s photographing Tomoko and her mother. And, in actuality, upon its publication in 1972 the photo became world-famous, significantly raising the international profile of Minamata disease and the struggle of the victims for recognition and compensation.

Minamata is about 120 miles due south of Fukuoka, the city to which June and I (and our two children at the time) moved in 1968. Although the tragedy of children born with Minamata disease was known, in part, since the 1950s, I don’t know when we first began to hear about it.

In the summer of 1971, shortly before Smith arrived in Minamata, we came back to the U.S. for a year, so perhaps we didn’t become aware of the dire situation in Minamata until after Smith’s photo essay in Life, including “Tomoko and Mother in the Bath,” was published the following year.

In February 1988, I went to Minamata with a group of Japanese Christians who wanted to learn more about the situation there and to consider how to do more to not only help the victims but also to help stop the polluting practices of companies such as Chisso.

While there are lingering effects of Minamata disease, that sad episode is largely over. But the fight against industrial pollution, in all countries including the U.S., is an ongoing one.

The Trump administration did away with a great many restrictions established by the Environmental Protection Agency. And if (when?) the GOP gains political dominance this year or in 2024, industrial pollution will likely be a problem that will again have to be addressed more actively.

Powerful pictures protesting pollution may become imperative again.

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* If you want to read even more about this picture, check out “'Napalm Girl' at 50: The story of the Vietnam War's defining photo,” a CNN article posted last month.

** Although Tomoko’s surname was “Kamimura,” because of the misreading of the first Japanese character of the family name, the photograph has sometimes been erroneously known as Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath. 

Combating Egocentricity

Egocentricity (=thinking of oneself as being at the center of the universe and seeing everything primarily from that perspective) is a universal human characteristic—and a persistent problem that needs to be combated. 

Explanation of Egocentricity

Babies are born self-centered. In those first weeks/months they don’t have the ability to understand the world except from their own perspective. Normal infants, though, grow to an ever-increasing awareness of the world outside themselves and as young adults outgrow much of their egocentricity.

We start life thinking about “me” and, in a healthy/happy childhood proceed to see things proudly from the standpoint of “my family,” “my community,” “my church,” “my country,” and so on. Whatever is “mine” is normative and “the best.”

(Yesterday was Father’s Day, and I wonder how many children, of any age, sent cards or other items to their fathers boldly proclaiming, “World’s Greatest [or Best] Dad!”—here is a link to numerous images saying that. Since he is my father, he must be the best!)

Unfortunately, most people never fully grow out of their egocentrism in order to see themselves and their surroundings more objectively—and more correctly. Thus, they are continually inflicted with observations/evaluations skewed by egocentric bias.

Mature people seek to combat/overcome such bias by endeavoring to understand the world from the viewpoint of other people also and not just their own. This is an ongoing issue with which we all must struggle.

Examples of Egocentricity

Consider two examples of objectionable egocentricity I have recently observed.

** Example #1 – Reason for School Shootings

Here is a meme I have seen several times on Facebook: 

This is an example of people seeing things only from their own (limited) perspective and intimating that if things were just like they experienced the rash of contemporary school shootings could be curtailed.

Such people fail to note that the countries where homicides by guns are the very lowest are countries where the percentage of Christians is also very low and where there certainly is not, or was not, daily classroom prayer and reading from the Bible.

The homicide death rate by guns per 100,000 people is 0 (zero!) in Japan and Hong Kong! As only about 2% of the citizens in Japan and around 11% in Hong Kong are Christians, the public schools in those countries most certainly do not start the day with Bible reading and (Christian) prayer—and never did.

Maybe there is some reason for mass shootings in U.S. schools (and elsewhere) other than “taking God out of our schools.”

** Example #2 – Reason for High Gas Prices

Currently, inflation is definitely a big problem in the U.S.—and some wrongly-focused politicians are now declaring that having to pay $5-6 a gallon for gasoline is a more critical issue than the serious threat to U.S. democracy seen in the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year.

Many Republican politicians—and Facebook memes, again—directly accuse President Biden’s flawed policies as being the main reason for the inflated gasoline prices in the U.S.

According to a recent report, though, on June 13 a gallon of gasoline (in U.S. dollars) costs $10.22 in Norway, $9.06 in Central African Republic, $8.39 in the U.K., $7.82 in New Zealand—and $5.19 in the U.S. It is amazing how Pres. Biden has so much influence on gas prices around the world!

Or, isn’t this just another example of how people tend to view things only from their own egocentric (or ethnocentric) perspective rather than understand matters as they really are?

Elimination of Egocentricity

Egocentricity can/will never be completely eliminated even in the most mature among us. But we all can meaningfully work toward the elimination of unacceptable egocentricity through concerted efforts to try to see things from other people’s point of view also—and to search for objective truth.

In Support of the Moral March on Washington

This is not the first time I have written about William Barber II (see here and especially here), but I am posting this article in strong support of Barber and his (and co-chair Liz Theoharis’s) Poor People’s Campaign’s “Moral March on Washington and to the Polls!” on June 18 (here is their website link.)

The June 18 March on Washington is also dubbed the Mass Poor People’s & Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly. Barber and Theoharis have issued a declaration for why the long-planned June 18 assembly and march are necessary (see here).

After stating that “there are 140 million poor and low-income people in this country,” the Declaration lists eight major concerns. Here are the first three of those:

1. Living wages, adequate incomes, inclusive welfare programs & the right to form and join unions

2. Universal, quality and affordable healthcare, housing, water, utilities & public education

3. Expanded voting rights, civil rights, access to democracy & equal protection under the law

Further, Barber and Theoharis give ten reasons for the assembly and march. The first is:

Because the promise of our democracy requires that we address the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of health care, militarism & the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism. It is time to heal the wounds of our society and declare a moral revival across the land.

This is the kind of statement the vocal opponents of “critical race theory” and intersectionality find objectionable and depreciate. But it seems to me that this is a very clear, correct, and significant statement.

Barber and Theoharis conclude with this appeal:    

    Join us to move this society beyond the false choices of liberal vs. conservative and right vs. left and toward the essential question of our time: right vs. wrong! 
    Join us to revive and renew the heart and soul of our democracy!

Those of us who have concern for the large segment of our society who are struggling/suffering the most should surely respond to this appeal wholeheartedly.

Please note that Saturday’s march/assembly is not a political activity—although it does align with the left wing of the Democratic Party more than any other (except maybe for the Democratic Socialists).

The Poor People’s Campaign is firmly rooted in the teachings of Jesus Christ, not in politics. Barber and Theoharis are Christian clergy, and how refreshing it is to see Christian leaders in the news because of their commitment to following Jesus’ teaching rather than because of some sexual or financial scandal as, unfortunately, is so often the case nowadays.

Most of all, Barber and Theoharis are seeking to lead those who heed their call to follow the teachings of Jesus such as found in Luke 4:16~21 and Matthew 25:31~40.

Yes, how encouraging it is to observe the activity of clergy who are truly Christian leaders rather than misleaders, to witness Jesus-followers who are carrying on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., Walter Rauschenbusch, and many other faithful clergy of the past.

The June 18 assembly/march will be virtual as well as live. (You can access the livestream of the activities that day beginning at 9:30 a.m., EDT, here.)

Perhaps most of you will not take the time to watch all the livestreamed program (and neither will I), but I at least will watch some of it from about 10:45 (EDT) that morning—and I hope you will, too.

Still Pessimistic about Gun Control

The following is not what I planned (and partially wrote) for today. Rather, it is quite similar to the article I posted on Jan. 10, 2013 (see here), but it is more than just a repeat or an update. 

Less than a month after the unbelievably tragic Sandy Hook mass school shooting in Connecticut, I wrote about my staunch support for increased gun control in this country—and my serious doubts that there would be any meaningful legislation passed. And, indeed, there wasn’t.

And now in 2022 there have been mass shootings in Buffalo (N.Y.) and Uvalde (Tex.) and . . . and . . . .

While there is a small glimmer of hope that some minimal gun control legislation might soon be passed by the U.S. Congress, there is not much possibility, it seems, that there will be any bans on the sale of AR-15 type of assault weapons.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why any private citizen needs to own a high-powered assault rifle, but from what I read (here), a federal ban on such weapons “stands no chance of winning the needed 60-votes in the Senate.”

But as Eugene Robinson posted on June 6, “We’ll get less than half a loaf on gun control. We should take it.” So, yes, something is better than nothing. But I am pessimistic because of my doubts that that something will substantially reduce the mass shootings that have become so common. 

In addition to guns, alcohol is also the cause of needless deaths daily. According to USDoT, every day “about 32 people in the United States die in drunk-driving crashes. . . . In 2020, 11,654 people died in alcohol-impaired driving traffic deaths.” Some of them were school-aged children.

When 20 children are killed by a needless mass shooting, it is, certainly, an unspeakable tragedy. But is the pain and suffering any worse than that of the families of 20 children killed, separately, in needless drunk-driving accidents?

I assume that (probably) all my many “liberal” friends are strongly in favor of significant gun control legislation. But I also assume that maybe all of those friends, most of whom drink alcohol to varying degrees, would not support any ban on alcoholic beverages.

Again, I assume those friends would say that the problem is not alcohol but irresponsible drinking and people who break the anti-DUI laws. And to a large extent, they are probably right. But isn’t that exactly the same sort of argument the anti-gun control people widely use?

I still support widespread gun control legislation, and I firmly believe that such legislation would reduce both the number of homicides and suicides.

But even with the passage of such legislation, the number of gun deaths would likely remain high—just as the number of drunk-driving deaths is high in spite of strong anti-DUI laws and the legal drinking age being 21 (rather than 18 as it is now for assault rifles.)

Despite, or in ignorance of, the data, the general public lives with—and are seemingly not particularly upset by—the 11,600+ yearly deaths in the U.S. because of “drunk-driving crashes,” which DoT says “were all preventable.”

Perhaps that is all that can be expected about mass shootings (and all gun-related deaths) as well, despite the media mania when tragedies such as the one in Uvalde occur.

But put things in perspective: the percentage of children killed by a mass killer inside a school is really very, very small.

Since I live in Missouri, I researched the number of school deaths by shootings in the state. According to this website, only 14 people in Missouri have been shot to death at school over the past 50 years—and none of those was by a mass shooting.

In 2021 there were over 860,000 K-12 students in Missouri schools, and many of these were in the 2,200+ elementary schools. Why should so many children (or parents) be traumatized by fear of what, odds are, will never happen in their (or their children’s) classroom?

They are most likely safer there than in the family car going on a 50-mile highway trip. 

Celebrating Milestones

“Milestone,” as most words, can be defined/described in various ways, but I am using that word here to indicate a significant point in a person’s life. In particular, I am using “milestone” to refer to wedding anniversaries and birthdays that are divisible by the number five. 

Celebrating anniversary milestones

Recently there have been three milestone wedding anniversaries in my immediate family.

65th anniversary photo

June and I celebrated our 65^th anniversary on May 26. Today (June 4) is our son Keith’s and his wife Brenda’s 45^th anniversary. Then, May 26 was also the 20^th anniversary of our daughter Karen and her husband Rob Daoust.

We didn’t do much to celebrate our milestone anniversary this year, unlike the previous three. 

With the encouragement of our children, we made a trip to Europe for our 50^th anniversary, celebrating the very day on Mt. Planalp near Brienz, Switzerland, near where some of my ancestors had been born.

Five years later we had an extended car trip, mostly in the Dakotas, and it was on that trip I was finally able to visit the last of the 50 states (N.D.). Then in 2017, June and Kathy, our oldest daughter, organized a family cruise in celebration of our 60^th anniversary (and June’s 80^th birthday).

Celebrating birthday milestones

Yesterday and today were milestone birthdays for two dear family members. Ken, our fourth and last child, celebrated his 50^th birthday! (You realize you must be getting up in years when your youngest child turns fifty!) 

And then today is the 25^th birthday of David Laffoon, our oldest grandson (and fourth grandchild).

Yesterday evening we had a family birthday party by Zoom, mainly in celebration of Ken's big 5 0.

And then on the last day of this month, June will be celebrating a notable milestone, her 85^th birthday.

June’s milestone birthday fundraiser

Institutions celebrate milestones as well as individuals. In May 2016, Seinan Gakuin, where I served as a professor from 1968~2004 and as chancellor from 1996~2004, celebrated its centennial. June and I made a trip back to Japan for that joyous occasion.

The speaker at the main celebration service was Dr. Tetsu Nakamura, who had gone to Seinan Gakuin Junior High School. After becoming a medical doctor, he spent decades helping people in Afghanistan. (See my blog post mostly about him here.)

In December 2019, Dr. Nakamura (b. 1946) was assassinated near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as he was going to work. That was less than two months after he had been granted honorary Afghan citizenship.

Early in 2020 through posts about Dr. Nakamura, June became Facebook friends with Musa Anwari, a young man (b. 1999) who lives in Jalalabad, the fifth largest city in Afghanistan. Musa was a great admirer of Dr. Nakamura.

June and Musa have interacted repeatedly on Facebook during these past two and a half years.

Musa is now starting free, four-month schools around Afghanistan for the children who have become orphans because of the wars and for girls and other students whose schools were closed by the Taliban after they came to power again last year.

Each new school costs US$300, and June and I have sent him that amount, which he soon put to use. You can read about what he did with our donation and see the pictures he posted by clicking on his Facebook account (here) and scrolling down to May 21.

For her (milestone) birthday fundraiser this year, June has set up a GoFundMe site to raise money for Musa’s schools. Please read about her “Let’s Start an Afghan Class” project here—and both she and I would be delighted if you would click on the “Donate now” button there.