Farm Town
When I moved here to Pataskala, Ohio in 1978, it was still considered a “farm town”. The directions to the high school were: “Turn left off State Route 16 onto Watkins Road, go south three miles, and it’s in the west cornfield just before you reach the National Road”. In October, soon after the fields were cleared, the high school had “Tractor Day” when the seniors drove their Green or Red (it’s a thing) tractor to school and paraded in the parking lot.
The landscape, now covered with sub-divisions, was dotted with older farmhouses, barns, sheds and silos. Silos were the tall circular structures where grain was stored, piped into the top and filled at the end of the harvest. Some silos would get corn some would get soybeans. In the spring, when the structures were empty they were fun to “play” in.
The school “tradition” was to kidnap the senior government teacher on the last day of seniors’ regular school. No one told me about that tradition when I took the job, but for the first three years of my career, I found myself bound (one year handcuffed) and held by the graduating class. Silos were a great “prison”, though one year I figured out I could jump out of a window about twenty feet up.
I managed to escape, hide from the searching (and not quite sober) seniors in a field, and walked the few miles back home. That year they weren’t able to parade me as the trophy into the morning senior assembly. They were eighteen, I was twenty-four. It was a great game.
Danger
But silos could be dangerous places as well. Every year in some small farm school in Ohio, there’s the tragic story of a kid lost to the grain in a silo. They fall in as the grain is being loaded, the dust chokes them to unconsciousness, and the grain smothers them to death.
While there are still a few old farmers left at the local diner, Pataskala is not really a farm town anymore. Forty years have turned it into a suburb of Columbus, with housing developments and industrial parks filling the places were corn and soybeans grew. Most of the kids at school couldn’t identify what “green and red” means when it comes to farm equipment, and struggle to tell the difference between soybeans or corn growing in the few remaining spring fields. John Deere makes lawn tractors as far as they are concerned.
And the few remaining silos are now homes for rodents and bats. The danger there isn’t the grain, it’s the structure collapsing on the few adventurous kids who put down their video controllers long enough to venture outside.
The News
But there is a different kind of silo that impacts our growing suburban community. It’s a silo of information, a “mental” structure rather than a physical one. But those mental silos are just as real as the old silo that still looms by the railroad tracks in “downtown” Pataskala. And they are just as dangerous.
While forty years has changed the landscape, it’s really only been in the last ten that we’ve seen this mental containment. Up through the first decade of the twenty-first century, we all got our information, “the news,” from similar sources. We read the Columbus Dispatch or the Newark Advocate, and we watched Channels 4, 6, and 10. Sure there was cable news, with Fox, CNN and MSNBC, but we still all went to the same “well” for most of our general information.
Maybe we should blame it on the IPhone. When did “getting” the news become a matter of watching a two-inch by three-inch screen? And when did our news sources stop being Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw? Now we have our “inside sources”, the Twitter feed that tells us exactly what’s going on. And the only time we catch the “local” news on 4, 6, or 10 is to see the high school football highlights or catch a late weather alert.
Facts
Our information is so “silo’ed” that what’s a “fact” is no longer a certainty. We are in the middle of a global pandemic. Over a quarter of a million Americans are dead just in the last nine months. Our schools here in Pataskala just went “virtual”, because too many of the staff are getting sick. And yet, we can’t even agree to wear masks, social distance, or stay home for Thanksgiving. My silo of information says yes – my neighbor’s silo says it’s all a hoax.
Over the next six months, how we decide to deal with COVID will determine how many more will die. And which information “silo” we live in will decide what we think about that.
And now there’s an even bigger question. Another neighbor down the street flies his American Flag at half-staff today. Below the Stars and Stripes – a Trump for President banner. He believes that Trump won the 2020 Presidential election, and that Joe Biden truly stole the Presidency from him. There’s no discussing it. His silo of information tells him over and over and over that the election has been rigged.
And my silo says the opposite: that Donald Trump is intentionally trying to destroy confidence in the election process, for his own personal and financial benefit. And that the Republican Party, sold lock, stock and soul to Trump, is willing to disenfranchise as many minority voters as it takes to maintain their power.
Collapse
The old silos out in the fields are collapsing from disuse and age. They are a hazard: old bricks falling from the top, and vermin living in the base. But the information silos built mainly on the screens in our pockets are structurally impregnable. We cannot peer out; we can only look up at our one source of information, pouring like grain on top of us. And who’s to say that we are right? If all we see is corn, how do we know what the soybeans look like?
There are two Americas right now, one looking at “corn” and saying there are no “soybeans”, and one doing the other. And no matter whether corn or soybeans are “right”, as Lincoln said:
“…a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
