The farmer, and perhaps the rancher as well, stakes a claim in a specific place and nurtures it through thick and thin.

This was called homesteading and is an example of what I was referring to. This worked because the farmers were moving on to empty land that they were then able to nurture it. This analogy is not applicable today because all of the existing land-mass has other people on it.

Seems to me that the spirit of the address is more one of giving a damn enough about place to look after it properly wherever one decides to take a stand.

There is merit in this. My mother used to say that it is easier to be a big fish in a small pond than it is to be a small fish in a big pond. However, this option was not available to me at the time, and I had to seek opportunity elsewhere. The fundamental problem is that “place” often has existing social structure that is reticent to the influence and power of competent upstarts, thus necessitating the elimination of such social structure and its replacement with one created by the “competent”. In my particular case, this would involve genocide. Leaving for greener pastures is a far more humanitarian choice.

Bright competent people often are not allowed the “reins of power” that would allow them effective stewardship over a place and its people. Naturally, the competent should not be expected to play second fiddle to the less competent, simply because the latter enjoy the benefits of existing social structure. This is a fundamental issue that Caleb fails to address.

In any case, the following link,

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124329530359452757.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

suggests that this problem is already correcting itself.

I do not consider Wendell Berry or Victor Davis Hanson to be serious thinkers. I have no respect for either of these men nor for their world-views, which I find to be quite repugnant and disgusting.

Frederick Jackson Turner certainly has his followers, yourself apparently among them. However, other serious thinkers as diverse as Wendell Berry and Victor Davis Hanson have made a strong case that the first over the horizon, particularly trappers, fur traders and prospecters, ended up as essentially than savages themselves. The farmer, and perhaps the rancher as well, stakes a claim in a specific place and nurtures it through thick and thin.

I believe Mr. Hanson even went so far as to compare our current generation of deracinated “office man” to the exploiting trapper in that both lack any sense of stewardship. Mr. Steagall explains in his 11th paragraph that he is not making a blanket case for cradle to grave parochialism. Seems to me that the spirit of the address is more one of giving a damn enough about place to look after it properly wherever one decides to take a stand.

As to your updated riff on Gingrich and Jerry Brown’s Extraterrestial Jacksonianism. I strongly recommend Netflixing WALL-E.

America was founded by people who left their ancestral homes in Europe, crossed the Atlantic in wooden ships (no mean feat as this was actually dangerous), and came to the “new” world to create a new life for themselves, essentially cut off from the people back home. Later, people came out west in covered wagons and, later, trains to create a new life for themselves during the 19th century and early 20th century. All of my ancestors were pioneers as they did these things.

The kids today who seek new opportunities elsewhere, are they not the modern-day equivalent to the pioneers who created the U.S.? I fail to see any qualitative difference. Of course, we don’t have a physical frontier right now, but I would think that the sunbelt or other places could be considered as an economic or social frontier that serves the same function of the physical frontier of the past.

What if space colonization becomes economically feasible or someone invents FTL space travel? Would we all be obligated to stay here on Earth when the infinite resources (and opportunities) of space beckon?

Pioneering is even a part of religion. The Pilgrims who founded Plymouth and the Mormons who came out west and created Salt Lake City as one of the most livable cities in the U.S., these are examples of religious groups who embraced pioneering, who left their homes to create something new. American was founded as a pioneering, frontier-oriented society. It seems to me that pioneering and the quest for new opportunities and the desire to expand one’s horizons is a fundamental aspect of human nature. It is in our blood and comprises our heritage.

Viewed within the appropriate historical context, this speech does not make much sense.

But I mean this in only the nicest way.

Suffice to to say that your ceremony and speech sound somewhat more moving than our own, Mr Stegall.

Their best bet is a short road trip and buying a well-stocked tool kit at a local tag sale before reintroducing their hands and muscles to their eyes and brains. The youngsters I have the pleasure to know will likely fare better in the coming era than their dreamy parents, raised on five decades of reckless plundering abandon.

“Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire. You’re going to have to make up your own mind one day about what’s right and wrong.

This is the highest praise for what I wish somebody would of had the guts to say at my high school graduation, and which those Kansas kids were truly blessed to hear.

To the States, or any one of them, or any city of the States,
Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever
afterward resumes its liberty.

That’s probably the first time many of those students have heard the truth told to them. I wish someone would have had the courage to tell it to me and my classmates some years back.

All politics begins with children, we’re all agreed, and so this goes down as one of the best political speeches of all time, especially insofar as it shows that the end of politics, as the end of all things, is union with God.

The world of higher education is a strip mining operation, plain and simple, and
you will become the raw resource being mined. This is the result of a system designed to
discover and refine the most meritorious among you and ship you off to whatever spot in
the world you will be most “productive.”

I say, resist!

You can’t even get most conservative Christians to swallow that. Hopefully, they did! And, hopefully, they’ll invite you back!! And hopefully… resistance is NOT futile!!!