http://www.okmagazine.com/news/view/11336
Tom Hanks Lashes Out At Mormons
We didn't know he had it in him! The normally mild-mannered Tom Hanks had some surprisingly strong words for the Mormon on Wednesday.
The executive producer of HBO's drama about polygamy, Big Love, called parts of the church 'un-American' for supporting Prop 8. "The truth is these people are some bizarre offshoot of the Mormon Church," he told Fox News's Poptarts column at the show's premiere party, "and the truth is a lot of Mormons gave a lot of money to the church to make Prop-8 happen.”
“There are a lot of people who feel that is un-American and I am one of them," the star said of the anti gay-marriage law. "I do not like to see any discrimination codified on any piece of paper, any of the 50 states in America, but here's what happens now. "
A little bit of light can be shed and people can see who's responsible and that can motivate the next go around of our self correcting constitution and hopefully we can move forward instead of backwards. So lets have faith in not only the American, but Californian constitutional process.”
Friday, January 16, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
Moroni Makes His First Video
So this is what I did when I had insomnia last night. The music is Xymox from their album "Twist of Shadows" from 1989. The scenes are mostly from my property, but there are a few snapshots from Utah, Colorado and a couple from Pittsburgh.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Our Living Conditions, Part 5
So how did it work living in a United Order?
Well, first of all, my father gave me a couple of responsibilities.
I must say about my dad, he had your typical A-type personality. He was a very charismatic, driven person. But much to his credit, he was always self-effacing. People were always trying to thrust him into positions of leadership. There were even a couple of people who tried to make him their “prophet”. But my father always resisted such notions. When we moved out into the wilderness of Arizona, we made a conscious decision not to govern ourselves by the “one-man rule”, but by common consent and council.
My father, given his innate sense of leadership and priesthood calling – not to mention his position of family patriarch - could have easily asserted himself as “bishop” of our United Order, the agent in charge of collecting the consecrations. He would have naturally fit that role. But my father was afraid of the power that this role would give him in our family. He was more afraid that other people would perceive that everyone would view it that he was “taking everyone’s money”. Ironically, many people still said that about him.
So he appointed someone to act as a sort of treasurer for our Order. That person was me. I was supposed to occupy this office for a year, after which the position would rotate to someone else.
I was mortified to have this position. So you create a United Order, and the person you pick to run it… is a spendthrift. I had never been good with money. I’m still not. Even though I have made a living doing accounting and handling other people’s money with success and care, when it comes to my own money, I suck. My wives are better at budgeting that I am.
I went to my father privately and expressed my objections.
“I think it will provide you with an opportunity to learn something,” my dad told me. “You’ll be able to become strong in an area where you are weak.”
The next thing – I am a people pleaser. It is a challenge to have someone who is a people pleaser in a position like that, because I do not like to say no. People would come to me for money for certain needs, and invariably I would say yes. Even if the funds were not available.
After a year of handling everyone’s money very poorly, I gladly handed the reins of the office of “treasurer” back to my dad. And he handed them right back to me. I acted in the capacity of treasurer for nine years. (And I don’t think I ever got better at it.)
“I don’t think you’ve learned what you need to yet,” my father said.
The way we would work things – we would get paid weekly, and every pay day (before we had a chance to spend our money) we would all come together for a meeting we simply called “Financial Meeting”. Present were all the wives and all the husbands. Everyone would have an equal voice.
The main thing accomplished at Financial Meeting was to place all of the earned wages into the “pot” and then to disperse them according to everyone’s needs. This means specifically that my pay check went every week to the extended family. At this meeting, everyone was supposed to bring their bills to the table, we were supposed to review them, and the funds were supposed to be redistributed according to those needs, and according to the priority.
And this worked most of the time except for two different kinds of personalities. First of all, you had people pleasers, like me, who thoughtlessly gave all of their income and bit back their own needs for the sake of others. At each meeting, I would watch the sum grow smaller and smaller as more and more needs were brought up. My heart would sink, and I would think, “I guess I can try and pay that bill next week.”
The consequence is – I am still trying to pay off bills that I put off back then. This is no one’s fault but my own. I can’t blame anyone nor can I blame United Order. I should have spoken up. One thing I learned from all of that was that no one can benefit anyone if they are in debt. And it was not fair to my children that ignored my own debt.
On the other hand, there were people like my former sister-in-law Sarine. If people like me bit back their needs, Sarine was always needy. Having grown up in a family that lived off of the dole in the Allred Group, she had no concept of self-sacrifice. There were several occasions when my father would say to her, “Sarine, your needs exceed the amount of money we have brought in this week. If we meet all of your needs, there won’t be anything left for anyone else.”
And she would blink with incomprehension.
For almost four years, Martha and I shared a trailer with Sarine and her husband. At one Financial Meeting, Sarine actually brought up that it was not fair that Martha and I kept our bedroom door open during the winter, because the heat was going into our room and thereby not giving her enough heat. My dad answered, “They have just as much right to the heat as you do.”
When we moved out into our own place, Sarine made constant upgrades (threatening to leave if she did not get them.) In a system where we were all supposed to be equal, Sarine had a washer and drier. (The rest of us went to the laundromat once a week.) Sarine had a water heater. (The rest of us heated water on the stove.) Sarine had water pressure. (The rest of us hauled water.) Sarine had solar power. (The rest of us used candles at night.) It was the quintessential case of the squeaky wheel.
But this is an inevitable fact about a communistic lifestyle. There will always be idealists who will believe and try to make it work. And then there will be parasites who will take advantage of the hard work and sacrifice of others.
The Financial Meeting was a place where other issues were brought up. For instance, it was in this way that we eventually arranged for all of us to have septic tanks. (After one year, no more buckets.) I brought up in a previous post the relevance of personal property in the United Order. When I married Temple, she brought her personal belongings with her. She owned a llama. She had owned this llama long before she met me, and when we got married, she brought her llama and we put him in a pen we built on our property.
Now, what does a llama do? I asked this question of many people before. A llama eats. That is the answer. A llama eats. So we had a weekly expense of purchasing hay. There were some in our Order who complained about this expense and insisted that we sell the llama, get rid of it and thereby rid ourselves of what they deemed as a luxury.
And I always insisted that the Order had no right to make that decision for Temple. It was her personal property, and the Order had no right to step over that boundary and make that decision for her. I agreed to take care of that expense myself, but I would allow no one to make that decision for us. My father always did joke with Temple that, if times got lean, we would eat the llama. Temple always sensed that this was a half-joke.
When we first moved out to the Land, my dad wanted a set of rules made. He wanted to pattern this set of rules after the Orderville Charter. He assigned my oldest brother to create this set of rules. Each week, my father would ask my brother how this was progressing, and each week my brother would say that he had not got around to it yet. My brother admitted to me later that he was reluctant to create a set of rules that would be too binding. I was very grateful for this.
One rule that did my dad did create, though, was the “No TV” rule. A man my dad respected once told him that TV would ultimately destroy a United Order. The story of my dad hearing this would grow and grow with each telling to the point that my dad decided that no one would have a TV on the Land. We all made an agreement about it. I never agreed with the decision, but I made it because I respected my dad. And since we had no power, I didn’t think it would matter anyway.
I have since gone back on that agreement years ago. The way I look at it – no man should tell another man what he can or can’t do in his own home. I love my dad, but in this instance I think he was wrong. Maybe God will hold me accountable for making an agreement and then going back on it. But there is nothing to fear about technology. We are not Amish. A TV itself is not good or evil. It is how we use it.
I am not saying that it was all bad in our United Order. There was much that was good. For one thing, we all ate together.
Each Financial Meeting, someone was assigned to do the grocery shopping for the whole Order. That person would go out each week and but the food for everyone. Sometimes, it was slim. You would work all week, and then someone would bring you back only a few bags of groceries.
But then we would all eat dinner together. The women would divide up cooking days between themselves. For instance, you would not have to cook for most of the week. But once or twice a week, you would have to cook for everyone. It worked out pretty good, and everyone ate well. (Except for the nights that Sarine would cook. On her nights she only ever made lentil soup. Yuck.)
We would all meet at my father’s house and eat. Since we had no TV, we would sit around and talk. I look back at those times as some of the best of my life. As the years go by, I wish that I could go back to that time of my life. Everything was simple then, and we were all united.
But there were complaints about some of the women not helping with the dishes after dinner. So the decision was made that we would still cook dinner for each other, but everyone would eat at their own homes.
When I was courting Temple, she came and visited for a couple of weeks while we were all still eating together. By the time we got married and she moved in, the Order was eating dinner in their own homes. Temple told me that she could feel the difference. We were less united.
For a while, we still cooked dinners together. There were even other families who moved into the area that participated in this for a couple of years. But this went by the wayside as well, eventually.
In fact, in my mind, the ending of the meals marked the decline of our United Order. But I will talk about that in the next installment.
Well, first of all, my father gave me a couple of responsibilities.
I must say about my dad, he had your typical A-type personality. He was a very charismatic, driven person. But much to his credit, he was always self-effacing. People were always trying to thrust him into positions of leadership. There were even a couple of people who tried to make him their “prophet”. But my father always resisted such notions. When we moved out into the wilderness of Arizona, we made a conscious decision not to govern ourselves by the “one-man rule”, but by common consent and council.
My father, given his innate sense of leadership and priesthood calling – not to mention his position of family patriarch - could have easily asserted himself as “bishop” of our United Order, the agent in charge of collecting the consecrations. He would have naturally fit that role. But my father was afraid of the power that this role would give him in our family. He was more afraid that other people would perceive that everyone would view it that he was “taking everyone’s money”. Ironically, many people still said that about him.
So he appointed someone to act as a sort of treasurer for our Order. That person was me. I was supposed to occupy this office for a year, after which the position would rotate to someone else.
I was mortified to have this position. So you create a United Order, and the person you pick to run it… is a spendthrift. I had never been good with money. I’m still not. Even though I have made a living doing accounting and handling other people’s money with success and care, when it comes to my own money, I suck. My wives are better at budgeting that I am.
I went to my father privately and expressed my objections.
“I think it will provide you with an opportunity to learn something,” my dad told me. “You’ll be able to become strong in an area where you are weak.”
The next thing – I am a people pleaser. It is a challenge to have someone who is a people pleaser in a position like that, because I do not like to say no. People would come to me for money for certain needs, and invariably I would say yes. Even if the funds were not available.
After a year of handling everyone’s money very poorly, I gladly handed the reins of the office of “treasurer” back to my dad. And he handed them right back to me. I acted in the capacity of treasurer for nine years. (And I don’t think I ever got better at it.)
“I don’t think you’ve learned what you need to yet,” my father said.
The way we would work things – we would get paid weekly, and every pay day (before we had a chance to spend our money) we would all come together for a meeting we simply called “Financial Meeting”. Present were all the wives and all the husbands. Everyone would have an equal voice.
The main thing accomplished at Financial Meeting was to place all of the earned wages into the “pot” and then to disperse them according to everyone’s needs. This means specifically that my pay check went every week to the extended family. At this meeting, everyone was supposed to bring their bills to the table, we were supposed to review them, and the funds were supposed to be redistributed according to those needs, and according to the priority.
And this worked most of the time except for two different kinds of personalities. First of all, you had people pleasers, like me, who thoughtlessly gave all of their income and bit back their own needs for the sake of others. At each meeting, I would watch the sum grow smaller and smaller as more and more needs were brought up. My heart would sink, and I would think, “I guess I can try and pay that bill next week.”
The consequence is – I am still trying to pay off bills that I put off back then. This is no one’s fault but my own. I can’t blame anyone nor can I blame United Order. I should have spoken up. One thing I learned from all of that was that no one can benefit anyone if they are in debt. And it was not fair to my children that ignored my own debt.
On the other hand, there were people like my former sister-in-law Sarine. If people like me bit back their needs, Sarine was always needy. Having grown up in a family that lived off of the dole in the Allred Group, she had no concept of self-sacrifice. There were several occasions when my father would say to her, “Sarine, your needs exceed the amount of money we have brought in this week. If we meet all of your needs, there won’t be anything left for anyone else.”
And she would blink with incomprehension.
For almost four years, Martha and I shared a trailer with Sarine and her husband. At one Financial Meeting, Sarine actually brought up that it was not fair that Martha and I kept our bedroom door open during the winter, because the heat was going into our room and thereby not giving her enough heat. My dad answered, “They have just as much right to the heat as you do.”
When we moved out into our own place, Sarine made constant upgrades (threatening to leave if she did not get them.) In a system where we were all supposed to be equal, Sarine had a washer and drier. (The rest of us went to the laundromat once a week.) Sarine had a water heater. (The rest of us heated water on the stove.) Sarine had water pressure. (The rest of us hauled water.) Sarine had solar power. (The rest of us used candles at night.) It was the quintessential case of the squeaky wheel.
But this is an inevitable fact about a communistic lifestyle. There will always be idealists who will believe and try to make it work. And then there will be parasites who will take advantage of the hard work and sacrifice of others.
The Financial Meeting was a place where other issues were brought up. For instance, it was in this way that we eventually arranged for all of us to have septic tanks. (After one year, no more buckets.) I brought up in a previous post the relevance of personal property in the United Order. When I married Temple, she brought her personal belongings with her. She owned a llama. She had owned this llama long before she met me, and when we got married, she brought her llama and we put him in a pen we built on our property.
Now, what does a llama do? I asked this question of many people before. A llama eats. That is the answer. A llama eats. So we had a weekly expense of purchasing hay. There were some in our Order who complained about this expense and insisted that we sell the llama, get rid of it and thereby rid ourselves of what they deemed as a luxury.
And I always insisted that the Order had no right to make that decision for Temple. It was her personal property, and the Order had no right to step over that boundary and make that decision for her. I agreed to take care of that expense myself, but I would allow no one to make that decision for us. My father always did joke with Temple that, if times got lean, we would eat the llama. Temple always sensed that this was a half-joke.
When we first moved out to the Land, my dad wanted a set of rules made. He wanted to pattern this set of rules after the Orderville Charter. He assigned my oldest brother to create this set of rules. Each week, my father would ask my brother how this was progressing, and each week my brother would say that he had not got around to it yet. My brother admitted to me later that he was reluctant to create a set of rules that would be too binding. I was very grateful for this.
One rule that did my dad did create, though, was the “No TV” rule. A man my dad respected once told him that TV would ultimately destroy a United Order. The story of my dad hearing this would grow and grow with each telling to the point that my dad decided that no one would have a TV on the Land. We all made an agreement about it. I never agreed with the decision, but I made it because I respected my dad. And since we had no power, I didn’t think it would matter anyway.
I have since gone back on that agreement years ago. The way I look at it – no man should tell another man what he can or can’t do in his own home. I love my dad, but in this instance I think he was wrong. Maybe God will hold me accountable for making an agreement and then going back on it. But there is nothing to fear about technology. We are not Amish. A TV itself is not good or evil. It is how we use it.
I am not saying that it was all bad in our United Order. There was much that was good. For one thing, we all ate together.
Each Financial Meeting, someone was assigned to do the grocery shopping for the whole Order. That person would go out each week and but the food for everyone. Sometimes, it was slim. You would work all week, and then someone would bring you back only a few bags of groceries.
But then we would all eat dinner together. The women would divide up cooking days between themselves. For instance, you would not have to cook for most of the week. But once or twice a week, you would have to cook for everyone. It worked out pretty good, and everyone ate well. (Except for the nights that Sarine would cook. On her nights she only ever made lentil soup. Yuck.)
We would all meet at my father’s house and eat. Since we had no TV, we would sit around and talk. I look back at those times as some of the best of my life. As the years go by, I wish that I could go back to that time of my life. Everything was simple then, and we were all united.
But there were complaints about some of the women not helping with the dishes after dinner. So the decision was made that we would still cook dinner for each other, but everyone would eat at their own homes.
When I was courting Temple, she came and visited for a couple of weeks while we were all still eating together. By the time we got married and she moved in, the Order was eating dinner in their own homes. Temple told me that she could feel the difference. We were less united.
For a while, we still cooked dinners together. There were even other families who moved into the area that participated in this for a couple of years. But this went by the wayside as well, eventually.
In fact, in my mind, the ending of the meals marked the decline of our United Order. But I will talk about that in the next installment.
.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Our Living Conditions, Part 4
In 1994, my family pointed out some injustices that we observed in the congregation that we belonged to – the Allred Group (AUB). Suddenly we found ourselves excommunicated… again… only a few years after having been cut off from the LDS Church. Disillusioned, my parents moved back to Arizona.
Martha and I stayed in Utah, trying to make a go at it by ourselves. We were basically still a newlywed couple with a little baby – Sophie. We found ourselves experiencing the worst bout of bad luck ever. I was working construction, piece meal, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week and barely making enough to make ends meet. (I have learned that money is relative.) We were trying to get into a house, but we were having no success everywhere we turned. One house had structural problems. Another had a cloud on the title. After some serious praying, we felt that we needed to move to Arizona.
So in our prayer, we told God, “You need to make this happen. We need money if we are going to move.” That day, our tax return arrived in the mail. We paid all of our bills, loaded as much of our belongings as we could into our Mercury Topaz, and gave away the rest of our belongings and drove to Arizona.
This is where our real venture into United Order began. Martha and I lived in my parents’ house in Mesa, along with my brother and his wife. The day I arrived in Arizona, I found a job hunting for natural gas leaks for the gas company. My dad worked as a social worker. My brother worked in the lab. Every week, when we got paid, the three of us put our paychecks into the proverbial “common pot”. From that pot, we paid all of our bills together, bought our gas and groceries, and if there was anything left, we took care of entertainment, or put it into a surplus fund. (There was rarely anything left.)
We got up every morning at 4AM for prayers. The wives cooked and cleaned together. We ate together. Although there were some drawbacks of being 25 and living with your parents – and there were a few minor disputes among the women about the chores – this was a happy time. We all felt united and that our needs were met.
But there was a general feeling that this lifestyle would work better out of the city and in a more rural setting. Our small neighborhood was nice – mostly Mormon – but we were surrounded by bad neighborhoods with a lot of gang activity. Any given evening, one could step onto the front porch and listen to gunfire coming from nearby neighborhoods. Someone tried to break into our house once, and on another occasion someone stole all of my tools out of my truck.
On the weekends, we would drive around Arizona, looking for land. Prescott, Cottonwood, Flagstaff, Tucson – anywhere outside of the Phoenix area. After one such excursion, my parents found a 40 acre ranchette outside of the Show Low area, in eastern Arizona. I knew this area, because as a Boy Scout, many of our outdoor activities took place here. It was high elevation, pine trees, lakes – and a lot cooler weather than Phoenix. It was a place that you would not soon forget, and I felt good about it.
So one February afternoon, the whole Jessop clan drove up from Phoenix to look at this land. It was located about five miles off of the highway down a bumpy stretch of dirt road. The property was a piece of windy rangeland with only a few juniper trees – a perfect circle of earth surrounded by rolling mountains and a huge expanse of blue sky. The only trace of civilization was the jet contrails high in the sky. It felt safe. I loved it immediately.
We bought the place with cash that the United Order had set aside, and the next project was to put a well on it. My dad asked me to put a stake down where we wanted the well and the tank. I walked around the empty property, and it was the only time I ever “witched” a well. Looking around the sagebrush, I searched until I found a place that “felt” right. We hit water 100 feet before most of our neighbors did, and it was sweet water. Our property sits on top of a lava bed that serves as a natural filtration system, and you can taste it.
My father put his home up for sale, and my brother put his home in Utah on the market. With the proceeds, we purchased two double-wide trailers to set up on our new property. But between the sale of the homes and the set up of the mobile homes there was a period of about two weeks when we were homeless.
In December, 1995, Martha and I again loaded up all of our belongings into our car, along with our two babies and headed into the wilderness. We lived out of a motel, and I drove down the snow-covered dirt every day to oversee the set up of the trailers. We spent Christmas in the motel, and by New Year’s Eve, we were in our new home.
There was no electricity. The nearest power source was over four miles away. Back in Mesa, I was an avid Trekkie. My day finished out regularly with an episode of “The Next Generation”, and suddenly here I was without a TV. Entertainment consisted of reading a book by candlelight in a drafty trailer, hoping the flame would not blow out.
And there was no plumbing. We had a well and water. But no septic tank. The toilet was a toilet seat set on top of a bucket. You would take the contents of the bucket somewhere on the large expanse of the property, dig a hole with a shovel and bury it.
The first day there, I refused to do this. In the mud and muck, I drove my car up the hill and sloshed through the mud until I found a nice juniper tree to do my business. But the car got stuck in the mire, and I had to walk home with the awful clay mud you find here caking to my shoes. The mud froze in the night, and when I finally got my car out the next day I had to chip the mud away from the wheel wells with a chisel and hammer. My next visit to town, the frozen mud caused my wheel bearings to drop and bounce merrily away, leaving me stranded.
And it was cold. We bought propane heaters and set them up in the kitchen, but they barely did the trick. The heat barely reached the bedrooms.
My first night there, the wind swept up over the Mogollon Rim and rushed across the plateau and blasted into the side of our trailer. The walls shook, and Sophie started to cry. She wouldn’t stop, and Martha asked me to go get my father so that we could administer a blessing to her. I stepped out into the cold to walk over to my father’s trailer. The ice crunched beneath my shoes, and the stars – unobsctructed by any city lights – were brighter than any I had ever seen. I looked at my watch and saw that it was midnight – the New Year. As the wind howled over this cold place, I wondered, “What the hell am I doing here?”
In the next installment, I will discuss how I adjusted to life on “The Land”, and how we continued living the United Order there.
Martha and I stayed in Utah, trying to make a go at it by ourselves. We were basically still a newlywed couple with a little baby – Sophie. We found ourselves experiencing the worst bout of bad luck ever. I was working construction, piece meal, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week and barely making enough to make ends meet. (I have learned that money is relative.) We were trying to get into a house, but we were having no success everywhere we turned. One house had structural problems. Another had a cloud on the title. After some serious praying, we felt that we needed to move to Arizona.
So in our prayer, we told God, “You need to make this happen. We need money if we are going to move.” That day, our tax return arrived in the mail. We paid all of our bills, loaded as much of our belongings as we could into our Mercury Topaz, and gave away the rest of our belongings and drove to Arizona.
This is where our real venture into United Order began. Martha and I lived in my parents’ house in Mesa, along with my brother and his wife. The day I arrived in Arizona, I found a job hunting for natural gas leaks for the gas company. My dad worked as a social worker. My brother worked in the lab. Every week, when we got paid, the three of us put our paychecks into the proverbial “common pot”. From that pot, we paid all of our bills together, bought our gas and groceries, and if there was anything left, we took care of entertainment, or put it into a surplus fund. (There was rarely anything left.)
We got up every morning at 4AM for prayers. The wives cooked and cleaned together. We ate together. Although there were some drawbacks of being 25 and living with your parents – and there were a few minor disputes among the women about the chores – this was a happy time. We all felt united and that our needs were met.
But there was a general feeling that this lifestyle would work better out of the city and in a more rural setting. Our small neighborhood was nice – mostly Mormon – but we were surrounded by bad neighborhoods with a lot of gang activity. Any given evening, one could step onto the front porch and listen to gunfire coming from nearby neighborhoods. Someone tried to break into our house once, and on another occasion someone stole all of my tools out of my truck.
On the weekends, we would drive around Arizona, looking for land. Prescott, Cottonwood, Flagstaff, Tucson – anywhere outside of the Phoenix area. After one such excursion, my parents found a 40 acre ranchette outside of the Show Low area, in eastern Arizona. I knew this area, because as a Boy Scout, many of our outdoor activities took place here. It was high elevation, pine trees, lakes – and a lot cooler weather than Phoenix. It was a place that you would not soon forget, and I felt good about it.
So one February afternoon, the whole Jessop clan drove up from Phoenix to look at this land. It was located about five miles off of the highway down a bumpy stretch of dirt road. The property was a piece of windy rangeland with only a few juniper trees – a perfect circle of earth surrounded by rolling mountains and a huge expanse of blue sky. The only trace of civilization was the jet contrails high in the sky. It felt safe. I loved it immediately.
We bought the place with cash that the United Order had set aside, and the next project was to put a well on it. My dad asked me to put a stake down where we wanted the well and the tank. I walked around the empty property, and it was the only time I ever “witched” a well. Looking around the sagebrush, I searched until I found a place that “felt” right. We hit water 100 feet before most of our neighbors did, and it was sweet water. Our property sits on top of a lava bed that serves as a natural filtration system, and you can taste it.
My father put his home up for sale, and my brother put his home in Utah on the market. With the proceeds, we purchased two double-wide trailers to set up on our new property. But between the sale of the homes and the set up of the mobile homes there was a period of about two weeks when we were homeless.
In December, 1995, Martha and I again loaded up all of our belongings into our car, along with our two babies and headed into the wilderness. We lived out of a motel, and I drove down the snow-covered dirt every day to oversee the set up of the trailers. We spent Christmas in the motel, and by New Year’s Eve, we were in our new home.
There was no electricity. The nearest power source was over four miles away. Back in Mesa, I was an avid Trekkie. My day finished out regularly with an episode of “The Next Generation”, and suddenly here I was without a TV. Entertainment consisted of reading a book by candlelight in a drafty trailer, hoping the flame would not blow out.
And there was no plumbing. We had a well and water. But no septic tank. The toilet was a toilet seat set on top of a bucket. You would take the contents of the bucket somewhere on the large expanse of the property, dig a hole with a shovel and bury it.
The first day there, I refused to do this. In the mud and muck, I drove my car up the hill and sloshed through the mud until I found a nice juniper tree to do my business. But the car got stuck in the mire, and I had to walk home with the awful clay mud you find here caking to my shoes. The mud froze in the night, and when I finally got my car out the next day I had to chip the mud away from the wheel wells with a chisel and hammer. My next visit to town, the frozen mud caused my wheel bearings to drop and bounce merrily away, leaving me stranded.
And it was cold. We bought propane heaters and set them up in the kitchen, but they barely did the trick. The heat barely reached the bedrooms.
My first night there, the wind swept up over the Mogollon Rim and rushed across the plateau and blasted into the side of our trailer. The walls shook, and Sophie started to cry. She wouldn’t stop, and Martha asked me to go get my father so that we could administer a blessing to her. I stepped out into the cold to walk over to my father’s trailer. The ice crunched beneath my shoes, and the stars – unobsctructed by any city lights – were brighter than any I had ever seen. I looked at my watch and saw that it was midnight – the New Year. As the wind howled over this cold place, I wondered, “What the hell am I doing here?”
In the next installment, I will discuss how I adjusted to life on “The Land”, and how we continued living the United Order there.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Our Living Conditions, Part 3
So when I was a kid, my father explained to me a little bit about the United Order.This can be a bit overwhelming to a nine year-old. In the ultimate sacrifice, I imagined consecrating all of my belongings to God, and men from the Church coming into my room to cart away all of my most cherished possessions. I pictured them boxing up the Conan and Tarzan books that I loved so much and taking them away to serve the greater good. What a sacrifice that would be. God would then know that I was willing to give up everything in His honor.
Even though I may not have understood everything my father taught me, the teachings did make an impression on me. Growing up as a teen in the decadent 80s, there was a lot of pressure to conform. Wearing Polo, Reeboks, designer clothing was an imperative. I reacted by going as “non-conformist” as possible. I used my lunch money to buy used clothes from the thrift store – the uglier, the better. Loud paisley shirts from the 60s, mustard yellows, puke greens. I spiked my hair with egg whites and wore guyliner. Why? Because, in my overdeveloped sense of idealism, everything that bucked the system was good. (Ironically I became well-known in my high school as someone with a high fashion sense.)
More importantly, I became aware of social issues. I read many of the underground punk/ anarchist “’zines” that preached dropping out of society by scavenging – eating only cast-away food and wearing only used clothes. I decided on my own to read “The Communist Manifesto”, and the idea of redistributing the wealth to the masses resembled what I had been taught about the United Order. So, there at the tail end of the Cold War, I decided that I was a communist.
When I was old enough to register to vote, our high school set up a booth where students could register. The lady behind the desk asked me if I would register as Republican or Democrat. Can you imagine the shock on her face when I said, “Neither. I want to register with the Communist Party.”
Sure, it was mostly the shock factor.
I remember my junior year, being interviewed by a panel from the American Legion for entry into Boy’s State. I cringe now (and laugh a little) as I remember telling these old veterans of the Korean War that I was a communist. Needless to say, I was NOT selected for Boy’s State. When I was a student in Belgium, I met many communists. One of them sat across from me and blew cigarette smoke in my face.
"You know, I really hate your country,” he said (in his thick French accent). Then I started to speak of the proletariat, dialectical materialism and the “bourgeoisie”, and he wound up later telling me, “You know, you are the first nice American I have ever met!”
This phase was short-lived. I quickly rejected Marxism, but this whole experience left me with a great distrust of wealth and the people who have it. I remember arguing in college with a friend, insisting that people only became rich by somehow enslaving others. (Sorry about that, Poppy.) I saw no purpose or meaning in spending my time in the pursuit of money. As long as I had “sufficient for my needs”, that was all I needed. Having anything else would be sinful, and, deep down, I felt that I didn’t deserve anything else. I was already placing myself in a poverty mindset that I even now am trying to break.
In 1988, while I was away studying in Belgium, I received news that my father had been called into the stake president’s office to be reprimanded for his belief in plural marriage. Within a year, he was excommunicated, and a year later, so was I, along with the rest of my family. My father found a book on United Order, and, in it, there was a special baptismal ceremony that was used for bringing people into the order. Since we were alone in Arizona and knew no one else who believed the same as we did, my father decided to initiate the United Order with his own family.
So we set up a portable swimming pool in the back yard, and early one summer morning in 1990, my father baptized us all into a United Order. For me, a college student working my way through school at an auto parts store, it meant that I gave half of my money to my dad and kept the other half for my education and entertainment. It didn’t feel any different than paying rent and helping with the bills.
The whole family eventually moved to Utah and joined the Allred Group (AUB), where I soon married Martha. There were several quasi-United Orders set up. One in Southern Utah, and one in Santaquin. My father set out immediately to try and join one of them. But one of the members of the Council, Bill Baird, cautioned my father against this, pointing out that many of these orders already had built in problems.
“You have everything you need within your own family to live the United Order,” Bill told my father.
So for the next ten years, I practiced living the United Order with my father and my brothers. There were some good experiences and some bad ones. I will tell you in the next installment what I learned.
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