I’m a human in Wyoming.
I keep feeling like artificial intelligence is gunning for my job. Is hijacking politics. Is threatening to replace real, fingerprint-bearing human beings with the collective sum of our least complete thoughts.
I’m also watching the simplification of political and social theories – which were once intricate and myriad – into bulk movements propelled by the force of eight or nine scary buzzwords apiece.
For the space of this column, let me be an individual.
I was born in a hospital in Riverton, Wyoming, to a mother who only ever wanted to be a mother.
The fourth of five children, we had hard times and good times. My oldest sister, who is perfect in a will-gut-the-enemies-of-her-loved-ones sort of way, got her hardship permit at the age of 14 and drove the rest of us around in a Chevrolet Cheyenne so we could mow people’s lawns.
I spent my money on school clothes and a Semisonic album.
We attended what everyone called the “ghetto” elementary school. We made friends with poor kids and felt bursts of interpersonal sonder. We were embarrassed by the Sharpie-black initials our mother wrote on our socks.
Jefferson Elementary School has since been demolished, but the love of poetry I grew between its warped-pane windows remains in me. Thank you very much to Mr. Ron Bailey, who always shouted “poetry break!” before belting out Robert Frost pieces.
Also thank you to Mrs. Kay Fabricus and Mrs. Shanell Stanley, who snuck my written work off to the local newspaper editor and helped me to land my first column at age 11.
At our home between Riverton and Kinnear, we rode that three-wheeler everywhere.
I wonder why they outlawed those? Yes, they were dangerous. Yes, they tumbled without notice. And yes, I yee-hawed from the back grab-bar while my sister roared up a sage hill like a mad Valkyrie.
Oh, maybe that’s why.
In middle school my grades dipped. I was awkward and had no fashion sense or concept of why that mattered.
I found solace in hokey country songs, the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and an Oscar Wilde book that my Aunt Linda sent me for Christmas.
My oldest brother Leland helped me grow – because he was impossible.
Anything I said or asserted, I had to defend to the bone. Leland argued, badgered, demanded I change my view. Sometimes I decided it wasn’t worth it, gave up, and fell silent.
But other times, I defended my point with the scrappiest logic a preteen can channel.
When I was in high school my parents bought the motorcycle shop. The gosh-dang federal government brought them nonsense.
When the lead law became effective in 2009, my parents could no longer knowingly sell 50 cc dirt bikes for kids under 12, because of the bikes’ lead content.
“You’re telling me,” railed my dad, “that the feds think 11-year-olds are out here licking crank cases?”
So we could only sell the pee-wee bikes to the age group for which they were suited, by assuming a two-faced façade of not knowing we were doing so.
That was my first brush with government absurdity; the way concentrations of power can bully men into being less real than they’re supposed to be. Big businesses do it too.
Any concentration of power too large is bound to lose the vital impetus that launched it to prominence.
That’s why we must be unafraid to stand on our own.
Those notions shaped me for what followed:
Being young and stupid in a small town.
Becoming a young wife and mother. Always reading, always writing. Reviving at age 21 what had been my “kiddie” newspaper column.
Vaulting over to the news side of the industry at age 27.
Landing on hard news at age 28, simply because I was the only person available to cover an excellent crime tip, and my editor gave me that chance.
And raising these four kids. It can be as harrowing as it is beautiful. Sometimes I want to share the journey with you, other times I don’t.
One of my urgent hopes for my children is that they can grow up in the same Wyoming that coddled me, and that keeps giving me second, third, and 14th chances to be something its vast, devastating wonders deserve.
I hope my children don’t let anyone hijack our language, which is our souls’ currency. I hope they don’t hand their infinitesimally unique identities (or the mosaic of mankind in which they’re interlocked) to some faceless algorithm.
I hope they face their friends and their enemies with both kindness and resolve.
I hope they know how precious each of them is, no matter how much the calculating, faceless, powerful, AI-backed horrors that loom in our future try to drown out their voices.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
