And now we come to the end of I’ll Take My Stand, although I am not going to be able to finish up in one post. I’ll Take My Stand is not just a book about agrarianism but a book about Southern agrarianism. For many, maybe most, agrarians, that is not a distinction they are interested in. Since I am a philosophical agrarian, at best, for me the distinction is the main event.

Stark Young starts off the last essay, Not in Memoriam But in Defense with this paragraph:

If anything is clear, it is that we can never go back, and neither this essay nor any intelligent person that I know in the South desires a literal restoration of the old Southern life, even if it were possible, dead days are gone, and if by some chance they should return, we should find them intolerable.

The South was a beautiful representation of how to live but it had a disease. The cure to that disease left it unable to withstand the onslaught of industrialism. Still in the South today you find men burdened down with all that is modern yet still carrying that spark of humanity that is uniquely Southern. I know because I am married to such a man.

And what of all this for the Missouri farmer, the New York banker, the Maine Yankee, or the Oregon homeschool mom? Does it really matter?

Maybe not, but we can all learn from different cultures, especially former representations of Christianity.

SOAPBOX AHEAD:

In the last month I have become increasingly aware that the word homeschooling does not imply reading. Many mothers have looked at my library and sighed over the fact that their children don’t/won’t read. I have met more Christians who haven’t read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe than those who have. This does not bode well for our present day Christian culture. Do you really think that someone will read a book after watching a movie, if they didn’t read it before? After all you can read the entire book in 2 hours and it doesn’t have a hard word in it.

If people will not read you cannot point them to the past. They don’t know about the former milemarkers along the road. I am not sure people who don’t read can think. Sure they can feel but can they think?

If your children do not read then may I suggest that you are running around too much. If your children don’t read you probably have no business joining that co-op. If your children do not read then stop everything, and give them at least 2 hours a day to read. Please do not tell me your children resisted your attempts to make them readers. Readers are people who read. You are the mom, make them read, give them time to read. A hurried life does not produce a thoughtful person. Stop and read.

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