When I moved here to Pataskala, Ohio in 1978, it was still considered a \u201cfarm town\u201d. The directions to the high school were: \u201cTurn left off State Route 16 onto Watkins Road, go south three miles, and it\u2019s in the west cornfield just before you reach the National Road\u201d. In October, soon after the fields were cleared, the high school had \u201cTractor Day\u201d when the seniors drove their Green or Red (it\u2019s a thing) tractor to school and paraded in the parking lot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cplay\u201d in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The school \u201ctradition\u201d was to kidnap the senior government teacher on the last day of seniors\u2019 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 \u201cprison\u201d, though one year I figured out I could jump out of a window about twenty feet up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t able to parade me as the trophy into the morning senior assembly. They were eighteen, I was twenty-four. It was a great game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But silos could be dangerous places as well. Every year in some small farm school in Ohio, there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t identify what \u201cgreen and red\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the few remaining silos are now homes for rodents and bats. The danger there isn\u2019t the grain, it\u2019s the structure collapsing on the few adventurous kids who put down their video controllers long enough to venture outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But there is a different kind of silo that impacts our growing suburban community. It’s a silo of information, a \u201cmental\u201d 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 \u201cdowntown\u201d Pataskala. And they are just as dangerous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While forty years has changed the landscape, it’s really only been in the last ten that we\u2019ve seen this mental containment. Up through the first decade of the twenty-first century, we all got our information, \u201cthe news,\u201d from similar sources. We read the Columbus Dispatch<\/em> or the Newark Advocate<\/em>, 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 \u201cwell\u201d for most of our general information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe we should blame it on the IPhone. When did \u201cgetting\u201d 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 \u201cinside sources\u201d, the Twitter feed that tells us exactly what\u2019s going on. And the only time we catch the \u201clocal\u201d news on 4, 6, or 10 is to see the high school football highlights or catch a late weather alert. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Our information is so \u201csilo\u2019ed\u201d that what\u2019s a \u201cfact\u201d 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 \u201cvirtual\u201d, because too many of the staff are getting sick. And yet, we can\u2019t even agree to wear masks, social distance, or stay home for Thanksgiving. My silo of information says yes \u2013 my neighbor\u2019s silo says it\u2019s all a hoax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the next six months, how we decide to deal with COVID will determine how many more will die. And which information \u201csilo\u201d we live in will decide what we think about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now there\u2019s 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\u2019s no discussing it. His silo of information tells him over and over and over that the election has been rigged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s to say that we are right? If all we see is corn, how do we know what the soybeans look like?<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are two Americas right now, one looking at \u201ccorn\u201d and saying there are no \u201csoybeans\u201d, and one doing the other. And no matter whether corn or soybeans are \u201cright\u201d, as Lincoln said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u2026a house divided against itself cannot stand.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Facts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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