The impact of disaster

I just completed watching the first episode of Ken Burns’ “Dust Bowl” which was originally aired on PBS several years ago. It had a special meaning for me since both my parents were “Kansas kids” whose lives were forever impacted by what some ecologists call the greatest ecological disaster ever on the North American continent.

Memories of Mom’s response to questions about the “dusty bowl” as I called it were mostly confined to “It was just something that happened before you were born.” As the years passed, I discovered there were a lot of things that happened before I was born, but the truth of that event, lasting nearly ten years, and coupled with the Great Depression tended in the American history taught in schools around the country to fade into the background when the depression and WWII dominated our attention.

Mom’s family ended up starting all over in California, and Dad’s stuck it out in Kansas after losing their land near Silvia, Kansas which became a ghost town where the clan continued for years to have family reunions in one of the few buildings still standing.

The ferocity and size of the dust storms simply cannot be imagined in the same way that other calamities such as floods, hurricanes, tornados, and such which come and go in a limited time period. During the Dust Bowl years, thousands of the elderly and very young died from what was called “dust pneumonia.” Other thousands of lives were shortened or impacted for ever after.

As one watches the terrible effects of the disaster claim the lives of so many, and the economic impact of the loss of production of the Plains States on the country, the sadness of realizing the pain and suffering of so many is offset by the pride in a people that refused to quit, that refused to give in to hopelessness, and that set about to develop methods of farming for dry land agriculture that improved conservation of the invaluable topsoil.

That we have problems in our country is clear, but what has yet to be determined is whether the present generations of citizens have inherited that spirit of the past, and will work together toward solutions rather than build walls of distrust between citizens.