By Keith Roulston

As I write this column, our neighbours to the south are approaching their presidential election in November with analysts suggesting it’s too close to call.
    A while back, however, Democratic Party Vice-Presidential candidate Governor Tim Walz, current Governor of Minnesota, said something that struck me as a true rural resident‘s statement. “Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves,” he said, “we’ve got a golden rule: mind your own damn business.”
    As someone who has spent all but a few years of my life living in the country (I’m approaching 50 years in our current home) it’s a golden rule I’ve lived by. I have no idea how any of my neighbours feel about our Prime Minister as an election seems possible at any moment. I’d have had no idea about how neighbours felt about getting vaccinated during the Pandemic if a young man who used to visit my own young lad many years ago, hadn’t made the news for attending the blockade of Parliament Hill and been quoted in a farm paper.
    The diversity of opinions in one neighbourhood was made clear to me when I was young and growing up on a farm north of Lucknow where, as often was the case, we had a Farm Forum, based on the Farm Radio Forum that played most weeks in the winter months on CBC radio.
    In Farm Forum, the organizers chose a topic each week and had presenters discuss the topic and then had questions to be discussed and answered in each of the hundreds of Farm Forum groups across Canada. Secretaries would record the consensus of the group and send it in to Farm Forum headquarters where the results were tabulated and later broadcast.
    Within our neighbourhood, where we still worked together and had things like threshing bees and wood-cutting bees, there were still surprising differences of opinion, even when we weren’t discussing political subjects. As a kid listening on the steps to the bedrooms upstairs on nights when my family played hosts, I could hear voices getting louder as they discussed the details of topics. Yet by the time the night ended, people were friends again as they settled into playing cards (“Shoot” in our neighbourhood) and finished the evening with lunch.
    As people got television, they resented missing the programming for Farm Forum night and eventually the organization behind the show gave up. But years later my wife Jill and I briefly owned The Teeswater News and we were surprised that one farm forum still existed locally. We learned that the neighbours there had been too divided by the discussion that they’d long ago given up on that, but still liked getting together for cards and lunch.
    Periodically I get a request to support a radio program that repeats the Farm Forum recipe in rural parts of Africa and we always send money.
    We don’t get together in our neighbourhood the way we did back when the Farm Forum existed long ago. Most things have changed, but people keep trying to drag us back to those days. 
    There’s a movement to tell people what books they are allowed to read in some states in the U.S. right now, with hundreds of books defined as not worthy. Some years ago a then neighbour of mine tried to get some books taken out of school libraries, including classics by Margaret Laurence and Margaret Atwood.
    Opponents of book banning in the U.S. often  quote from the televised version of Atwood’s  book The Handmaid’s Tale in which women are kept around only to have children.
    People need to be reminded by people like Tim Walz to “mind your own damn business”. We have elections that allow us to secretly say how we feel, the rest of the time, like that Farm Forum near Teeswater, we can keep things to ourselves.◊