Speaking Personally: Why I worry about lost skills
Wed, 12/10/2025 - 11:16am
admin
By:
Amanda Mendez, publisher
While I don’t have a strong opinion on what Purgason said or the way she represents herself online, what I found truly appalling was that all these angry people did not seem to know how or where to start.
Three of my four grandparents were raised on dirt floors in the Ozarks. None of them had more than a high school education. At least one dropped out of school to take care of his siblings, eventually earning a GED. Two generations ago, their Christmas seasons and daily lives looked very different from mine.
Listening to adults chat at holiday dinner tables, I grew up untangling a web of references to hungry years, violence, fear – and survival. Yet, all around me was comfort. I’ve never been hungry a day in my life. Nor have my children. On one side of my family, I’m the first woman to earn a college degree.
One of my grandfathers, Bennie Jones, lived the American dream – born on an Arkansas farm, in young adulthood he was too underweight to get a job in the Bonne Terre lead mines. Try as he might, he couldn’t gain the ten pounds he lacked, so he moved to St. Louis with his young wife, my grandmother Dodie. Working his way up from a mail clerk position at Ameren UE, he eventually became head of a department. He provided my grandmother and their six sons with a home straight out of a magazine. Holiday tables groaned with the weight of the feasts served there.
My other grandfather, Len Gibson, could repair or build anything – cars, ceilings, roofs, tile floors, and even elaborate dog houses wired for light and heat. The quintessential tradesman, by the time I was old enough to ask about his job, he was a locksmith at Washington University, where I would eventually earn my degree. By then, he had done just about every job that took place outside and needed good hands and know-how. This man began providing for the people around him while he was still a child himself. The oldest of seven children, and eventually a father of four, he cared for my grandmother Vickie until her death, retired comfortably, and spent the final years of his life raising tiny poodles and befriending neighborhood children. He fixed their bicycles. The kids’ not the poodles’, although I can’t say with certainty that he never tried to make a poodle trike. I wouldn’t put it past him.
As the holidays approach, I’m thinking of the circumstances my grandparents overcame so that my childhood holiday memories are a happy blur of singing and games, turkeys and cheeseballs, platters of cookies, and piles of presents.
I could speak French and navigate from London to Paris before I butchered my first chicken or picked my first morel. I have been provided with every opportunity and advantage my family could arrange, but like so many people my age, many of the skills that my grandfathers possessed have been lost in the life of ease and comfort I’ve enjoyed.
I’m sure this is the life they wanted for me, and the last thing I want is to sound ungrateful. Two generations ago, my family clawed their way out of dirt floor shacks in Steelville. They survived so that I could thrive, and so I am.
That’s why I have the time to worry about a lifestyle of convenience that separates us from our food sources, from the earth, and from other people.
I muse, could I feed my family from the land in a global depression? Could you?
Why is it a thing these days to tell someone to, “touch grass?”
This brings me to the recent collective pearl-clutching I watched as hundreds of community members reacted to a video posted on social media by West Plains R-VII school board member Jodi Purgason. Five stakeholders’ speeches to the school board were front page news two weeks ago.
Just as preparing and preserving food or making clothing are skills lost to a comfortable way of life, I fear that navigating local government is a similarly disappearing skill. Unlike access to fast food and fashion, however, best practices for interacting with local politics would be very familiar to our grandfathers. The rules haven’t changed much, but the way we all interact with each other certainly has.
After all, this whole story started with a Facebook video.
While I don’t have a strong opinion on what Purgason said or the way she represents herself online, what I found truly appalling was that all these angry people did not seem to know how or where to start. Setting aside the cyberbullying and other noise, there was, in fact, a core group who wanted to cause political change.
As someone who regularly begs voters to become more involved in local politics, initially I was interested, even excited, to see what they would do. But watching their attempts to oust Purgason filled me with dismay.
It's deeply concerning that educated and well-spoken members of the community, even a couple frequent West Plains-area activists, would think an online petition has any significance other than a polling mechanism. 800-plus signatures on a change.org petition does nothing, especially when only 65% of those signatures came from the right zip code.
Of equal concern was a demand for the superintendent, who is an employee hired by the school board, to remove Purgason, an elected member of that board.
In previous columns, I have discouraged the use of business meetings of school boards to be the platform voters use for dialogue with their elected representatives. I wish it wasn’t so, but speaking to school boards in Howell County has resulted in increased frustration for the speaker(s) 100% of the time I’ve observed it. School board members are trained to present a united front, not to act as individuals, so there is no conversation – only attorney-reviewed prepared statements. No solutions.
The citizens who walk away from those interactions are unlikely to get involved in the future. All they have learned is that getting involved gets you nowhere.
It wasn’t the right place to start or end, but so few people know this. It is so frustrating to watch another organized and motivated group of citizens lose steam because they didn’t know how to interact with their school board. It happened recently in Mountain View-Birch Tree, and it’s happening in West Plains now.
This is a bit of preaching to the choir because if you’re reading this, you’re likely more prepared to interact with local government than most. Regular readers would know what happens when aggrieved citizens address our local school boards because we report it in these pages. Being informed is the first step.
If it were me, I would demand a town hall meeting with the school board members, moderated by the local media. I would use that angry energy to shame any elected official who refuses to engage in open dialogue with citizens.
I would consult the local election authority, the Howell County Clerk, about the steps to start a legal petition. And most importantly, I would begin campaigning now for the April election.
This advice comes not as value judgment on what the West Plains group wants to accomplish, but abject horror that the skill of interacting with local government has, apparently, disappeared.
Maybe I’m romanticizing the past. Maybe my grandfather and yours would have had no idea how to oust a school board member who offended him. Maybe he would not have been offended in the first place.
But I have a feeling that the same folks who turned dirt floors into parquet could have figured it out. I’m not so sure about my contemporaries.