Fire on the Prairie

I was not raised on the prairie, but living on the prairie brings a sort of clarity to each day. There is nothing out here to impede the horizon or cloud your vision. There are no buildings or hills or mountains or trees to block the view. I can make out the bend of the planet at times.

On this flat topography, you can see the moment the sun rises and the second it falls off the side of the Earth. Bright red at daybreak and dusk. Orange and then pink and purple. When I take a picture and send it to my friends, they likely think I’m using a filter — the colors are too vibrant to be real. Fire in the sky observed twice a day.

Fire on the prairie.

I’ve been on the prairie for nearly two decades now.

But, sometimes I miss the hills and creeks of Arkansas. The creeks of Northwest Missouri are cavernous, muddy affairs. They look blown out…like someone took a big lathe or drill and bored out the land to let the mud in. The sides of the creeks reach six or ten or twelve feet above the muddy and silty water below.

I once asked an Iowa friend why the creeks in this part of the country look the way they do and he said it was due to some Iowa farmers.

I guess it’s hard to plant and harvest around meandering streams in the middle of fields so years ago, some farmers “straightened out” those creeks which led to faster-running water that whooshed into Missouri and blew out our little creek beds. At any rate, the creeks are not inviting in my part of the state. You wouldn’t pack a picnic lunch to crawl down a cavern only to dip your toes in silt.

Oh well…the good with the bad.

The prairie landscape and mindset tend to make folks pragmatic. Aware. There’s nowhere to hide so it’s all out for everyone to see. People are plain-spoken, and in general, mean what they say.

*The exception to that rule is the Republican politician.

I often speak across the Midwest. When I travel to the coasts, I have people tell me after my talks that “You just tell the truth.” The first time I heard that, I thought it was odd — of course I tell the truth. There would be nothing more embarrassing than to be caught in a lie. Mortifying.

After hearing it over and over and over again, I think I know what they mean: I tell it like it is. There’s no point in sugar-coating the truth in times like these. Just say the thing that needs to be said but do it with passion.

Fire and Brimstone.

I try to channel the women who went before me and I have studied a great many. From Seneca Falls to the Civil Rights movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Rosa Parks. Lucretia Mott to Fannie Lou Hamer. Sojouner Truth. Susan B Anthony. Ella Baker. Angela Davis. Their modern sisters; AOC. Katie Porter. Jasmine Crockett.

And one I absolutely adore, Kansas spitfire Mary Elizabeth Lease. A lecturer, writer, and political activist. The “People’s Joan of Arc.”

I love that picture of Lease. It looks like she has a candle with a flame burning on top of her bun. A passion burning so intensely, it spread to the top of her head. A fire so hot, you can see it in her eyes and her pursed lips. A heat that threatens to erupt and burn down the Kansas prairie.

Here are a few scandalous words about Lease written by journalists and politicians in the 1880s:

One reporter described her as "untrained, while displaying plenty of a certain sort of power, is illogical, lacks sequence, and scatters like a 10-gauge shotgun."

A Republican editor similarly characterized her as "...the petticoated smut-mill. Her venomous tongue is the only thing marketable about the old harpy, and we suppose she is justified in selling it where it commands the highest price."

I could only wish to be remembered as a petticoated smut-mill…

Lease was reported to have famously said, “Raise less corn and more hell.” She later said that reporters had invented the quote. She let the quote stand, though, because she thought "it was a right good bit of advice.”

Mary Elizabeth Lease was a schoolteacher. She was an activist for the underdogs in American society. She went on tour as a lecturer for women’s rights. Birth control rights. Labor. The abolition of slavery. For farmers, who at the time, were the little guys pitted against the bloated bankers.

She wasn’t able to vote or to run for office, but she was a fighter. She was a reformer and a Populist. She defied her second-class citizenship.

She was fire on the prairie.

From her speech, Wall Street Owns the Country:

Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. We were told two years ago to go to work and raise a big crop, that was all we needed. We went to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of it? Eight-cent corn, ten-cent oats, two-cent beef and no price at all for butter and eggs—that's what came of it. The politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States, and over 100,000 shopgirls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their wages deny them... We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out...
 

We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of money who dogged us thus far beware.

She didn’t sugar-coat shit and she wasn’t scared of the devil, much less the politicians of the day.

I like that. No. I love that.

We need courage and bravery and grit right now. We need spines of steel and words of fire. I don’t know exactly where we go from here, but I can look back at the women who went before me who couldn’t vote, or even wear pants, but who made an impact on policies and our country.

If they can do it, we can do it.

In solidarity.

~Jess