Graf Family and friends taking
down hop vines

Yesterday we were at our son and his family’s house in Shawano County, Wisconsin. All three of our grandchildren were showing cows at the County fair as members of local 4-H club. They live across the road from a family dairy farm with three children about the same ages as they are so they access and interest in cows. My two grandsons both had cows that received blue ribbons in judging of the cows and one of my grandsons and my granddaughter got blue ribbons in the showmanship divisions. During the showing of the cows by their children my son and his wife were recording the events with on video camera.

After the County Fair cow showings my son’s family, Pat and I and a few of our grandsons’ friends went home to pick and prepare hops, a key ingredient of making beer. Some years ago my son and his wife decided to invest some of their land into growing and harvesting hops, a hobby farm, as my daughter-in-law calls it. It has been a lot of work for my son and his family and a financial investment since hops are slow to grow. But when hops need the vines taken down and the good hop flowers picked you need to do it immediately. The hop farm has had it’ up and downs with weather, weeds and fungus. But this weekend some of them were ready. We were able to cut down six rows of hops, pick off the good flowers and put them in a homemade dehydrator in about five hours of work. This leaves 12 more rows but between today and tomorrow after working at the fair they might be able to get a good part of the work done. Unlike growing vegetables in a garden it takes a team effort to harvest hops.

Tonight my wife, Pat, and I watched a recording of the documentary Five Broken Cameras, a deeply personal, first-hand account of life and non-violent resistance in Bil’in, a West Bank village surrounded by Israeli settlements. The video was shot by a Palestinian farmer, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son, Gibreel, and ending up recording the family’s and village’s nonviolent resistance in their village on the West Bank village surrounded by Israeli settlements. This farmer’s family, unlike my son’s family, has no time for hobbies, for they are struggling to stay alive, keep their land and crops from being destroyed. Considering all the violence they faced from Israeli army and settlers it is nearly impossible to see how they stick to nonviolent resistance, as they do. Being shot by the farmer in the middle of the struggle the resistance takes on a new light. This contrast of families is outstanding. The child, Gibreel, see his family and friends being killed and their way of life being destroyed by Israel and can easily falls into a state of hate and fear. The crop they watch destroyed were olive trees some of the hundreds of years old being bulldozed out of the ground or set on fire at night by settlers.

Two families, one on the land for thousands of years now is threaten with extinction, the other on the land for nine years, now worries about their hop investment, incidental to their survival. One set of children are concerned about the looks and behavior of cows they are showing and the other about not being killed and having enough to eat and survive.

With my Middle Eastern and German heritage I am feeling a little prepared to deal with both. The Germans, great beer makers, knew a little something about growing hops and my Syrian/Lebanese heritage knows too much about war and violence in the recent past.

Our president talks about war and violence in retaliation to one side’s of a civil war in Syria using destructive chemical weapons. Government officials’ act like more violence will reduce violence. This has never been true in our modern day wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and has no chance of working now in Syria. My son and his family will continue to record on video their family events while the farmer on the West Bank in Palestine, by the end of the film, was on his sixth video recorder camera since the previous five had all be destroyed by the Israeli army. Two families, Two Videos.

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