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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Simplicity

Jon Schaff, a political science professor and a regular reader of this blog, gives The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming a great review in his local paper. Excerpt: Since moving to South Dakota twelve years ago I have fallen in love with my adopted home state. I am perplexed by the way South Dakotans often […]

Jon Schaff, a political science professor and a regular reader of this blog, gives The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming a great review in his local paper. Excerpt:

Since moving to South Dakota twelve years ago I have fallen in love with my adopted home state. I am perplexed by the way South Dakotans often feel the need to apologize for their state to outsiders. We are embarrassed by our rural nature and perceived lack of sophistication.

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Dreher’s book is a tribute to his sister and also to a place. Many successful people tell him of the meaninglessness of their pursuit of wealth and accomplishment. Our rootlessness and individualism often leave our lives without purpose or meaning. A strong connection to a place can give us just that.

Dreher is not naïve about the shortcomings of small towns. They are often small-minded and provincial. Still, the book’s dedication says it all. He dedicates the book to his sister’s children, writing “This is your mother; these are your people.”

We in South Dakota have many of the same virtues as small-town Louisiana. The pastoral simplicity of our state is not for everybody, but we should recognize its value and the hazards of rootless cosmopolitanism. This is our land. These are our people. Nothing to be ashamed of there.

Jon, thanks so much for this. One of the lessons I hope people will take from my book is that there is no such thing as a small life. It is true that some lives, and some places, are more vivid than others. The vision Ruthie gave me, and that the people who cared for her gave me, is that what we do every single day, in our relationships with others, matters. It matters now, and it matters in eternity.

It’s not that small-town people are necessarily more virtuous than big-city or suburban people. You can be a saint in downtown Chicago, or damn yourself with hard-heartedness in Mayberry. To paraphrase Solzhenitsyn, the line between good and evil does not run between town and country, but down the middle of the human heart. The key, I think, is to banish envy from your heart, and that means to resist and reject despair over what you don’t have that others do. Ruthie had gratitude for what she had. She wasn’t perfect in this way, but for her, having a good marriage, happy, healthy kids, meaningful work, dear friends, and a good place to live, was all she wanted. She wasn’t materially rich, but she was rich in what really matters.

And the key is also to see the people in front of you. This might be easier to do in a small town, where it’s harder to be anonymous (a fact that is sometimes one of its drawbacks). Ruthie excelled at this. She never sat around thinking about what she didn’t have. Part of that was gratitude, but part of it was taking the time to help those who didn’t have as much as she did, and who needed something from her, if only attention, a compassionate ear.

My tendency is to overthink things. I could read a whole book about compassion, and busy myself thinking big thoughts about the meaning of compassion. None of it matters as much as Ruthie’s standing in the grocery store for 20 minutes longer than she would have done, because a woman she barely knew wanted to tell Ruthie about her problems, and Ruthie wanted to listen, because that woman needed to talk.

Ruthie lived in simplicity, but that’s not the same thing as being simple. In fact, her life had complexity (which is not the same thing as being complicated), and tremendous depth. It was, like the ocean at rest, only simple on the surface.

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