all states    this state Make your own photo site Photowiki is free and easy for you to share your photos. Make your own! www.photowiki.com

© 2004 Bill Snead, The Lawrence Journal-World Introduction Essay for Kansas 24/7 A Sense of Glory By John Marshall About an hour after noon on a Saturday in March, the season's first tornado plunged from the black skies over northern Edwards County. It was the stuff of home videos--a pewter hook churning, lifting specks from the distant tableland. It seemed early in the year for a tornado but hardly a shock for Kansas, where weather is lore and wind is its footing. Half a state to the northeast at the Statehouse in Topeka, the Legislature, again, put truth to the notion that little happens in Kansas without wind, including politics. The Capitol landscape is demanding, with its fogbound peaks of complicated issues, its jungle growth of codes and strictures, its crosscurrents of tribal feuding. Topeka is now moved most by the power of its own machinery, a culture tuned more to the special chemistry of cause lobbies than to the broad throb of a public pulse. Beyond the yellow light of Capitol corridors and their security checkpoints is a populace now challenged more to save their communities than to improve them. What was once a mission to provide promise for the future has become one to secure hope for the present. In the cities and suburbs the cry for better schools, more schools, has become a plea for decent schools. In the prairie towns and hamlets, the mission is simply to keep a school. Or keep in touch. As the farms grow bigger, the towns get smaller on the High Plains and weaker at the Capitol. Six metropolitan counties now elect half of the members of the state's Senate and House of Representatives. On the vast rural stretches, great discussions are not about same-sex marriage or gun control or second-hand smoke. In the cities and suburbs the price of gasoline, the value of roads, the cost of health insurance, even the weather, are matters of convenience; in the country they are issues of survival. It was faith, not money, that sustained the first Kansas settlers 140 years ago. They confronted loneliness, a scenic monotony, the vast brooding solitudes. They were left to themselves and the elements. Only the strongest were not driven away or driven mad. Moved by self-reliance and independence, they believed in the Protestant ethic; they accepted responsibility for their lives. No space of geography so invited this ethic than the free, fertile, and open prairie. Life was muscled out of the soil, chaining new communities to the plains. Fortune accelerated with the discoveries of oil and gas, the innovation of cropland irrigation, the seeding of hard winter wheat, expansion of the railroads. A sense of vitality, even glory, survived the deficiencies of place. The state motto, Ad astra per aspera (To the Stars through Difficulties) seemed fitting and proven. Today the challenge has changed from overcoming hardship to outlasting disappointment. Promise is put to the test as a state, again, rolls up its sleeves. The images in this book seem to tell us that a kind of mature compromise has settled in as people look to keep their schools sound, their stores open, their farms breathing, their jobs whole, their families healthy, their lives real. Meantime, the rich promise of Ad astra per aspera has worn to a filament of hope. It is still uttered now and then, but with care and prudence and an eye up, scanning for the next storm. Browse    View All    A Sense of Glory    Hearth & Home    Hard at Work    Kansas at Play    Reason to Believe    Our Town Photos: 132 Photographers: 35 Towns: 60

home  |  about 24-7  |   buy a book Copyright © 2004 24/7 Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of the website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Please contact Alex@America24-7.com to request permission