It is illegal to even have a unionid (clam) shell in your possession in Michigan. Those fellas are crazy protected. And it's not from the zebra mussels.
Oh no.
It's from buttons. And pearls.
The manufacturing of buttons and pearls wiped out over 600 million native clams in the Great Lakes at the turn of the 20th century. Now it's illegal to even own one. Most of the buttons in the US, and even exported around the world, came from fresh water clams until the invention of plastics...
Speaking of plastic buttons...my grandmother worked in a button factory when she was a very young woman. Work in a noxious, miserable environment for long hours for very little pay back in the day...but times were tough, as they always seem to be, and she had 4 children to support in their house that had a tarp in place of an exterior wall... 3 of the children were from her husband's previous relationship...
The oldest was 12 and she was 18, and she had just had my father. One of them brought home fish and squirrels for the impoverished family to eat, and wild rice from the bogs.
My grandmother married my grandfather very young after her own father died. My great grandfather on my grandmother's side died in an airplane factory. He got conked on the head while working and he somehow died outside of the company grounds, so the company refused to pay any compensation to the family. My grandmother, 16 at the time, had to go pick up her father's body and drive him back to West Michigan where for the longest time work was scarce...
You see, the city was between its lumber era and the peak of its industrial era...
During the Lumber era of this region the Lumber Barons slashed through nearly the entirety of the old growth forests in Michigan in the late 1800's. They processed much of that wood right here in Muskegon and shipped it all over the country, all over the world. When Chicago burned down, Michigan and Muskegon provided the lumber for the city to rebuild.
But eventually the trees were all gone. All of them. Gone. The whole damn state. I remember my old Aunt Margie recollecting a time when there weren't hardly any large trees in Michigan...mostly vast open spaces. Not like the deep forests of today where you can still find the occasional branded end of wood, marked with a lumber barron's sign of ownership.
Then came the era of the industry and black soot covered the skies...you'd go downtown in a white shirt and go home in a reddish-brown shirt just from the nasty, polluted air...
Much of that was back when Nationalist Socialism was marching across Europe and the numbers of the dead, in this newfound time of assembly line killing numbered in the tens of millions in just a couple short decades in the early 20th century.
That nonsense was put a stop to when we dropped a nuclear weapon on some people with different skin and different culture than we had here in the States...and thus began a half century where two superpowers stood and ground their teeth at one another with enough firepower to wipe the world clean of every living thing but maybe a few cockroaches in the space of 15 minutes from any given point in time...many of us grew up living in such a world that could end at any hour and it seemed maniacs were at the button itching to push it.
At some point in there the Cuyahoga river in Ohio caught on fire from the sheer enormity of industrial pollution being poured into it and making its way into the Great Lakes.
You know what my grandmother said often of the late 20th century and early 21st century?
She said
"Oh, I hated the old days. I much prefer now."
When it seems to me that things are falling apart, and lives are unraveling, and we're headed for irreversible calamity, I remember my grandmother and a sense of historical perspective she seemed to have.
It's not an occasion to sit back and close my eyes and make believe things are going to get better. It's an occasion to suit up and play as much of a part in making sure things get better as I can, and I take comfort in knowing that generations have survived much worse and have endured.
A single blogger can do a whole lot of damage. And here we've got a massive room full of them. And several months left to keep the Dems from losing control of Congress to the people who have caused the problems we're facing.
I am starting to reject the notion that "progressive" is a single thing and that we're going to find ideal progressive candidates that embody all progressive ideals...unlike the conservatives, liberals are a rag-tag group of people of disparate beliefs and passionate focuses forming an occasionally convenient coalition.
Case in point...for all those who dislike Bart Stupak for his insane position on the health care reform bill, Bart Stupak was THE driving force behind ending offshore oil and gas drilling in the Great Lakes at the Federal level.
What I'm saying here is...the Democrats may not all fit all the ideals of progressivism each and every one, with each and every principle. But we're a hell of a lot better with them at the helm than not, and I feel GREAT about fighting to keep them in control this year.