In Finland You Will Find It

I have had the good fortune to have twice visited the country of Finland, visiting in particular a friend my wife had made years before when she spent her senior year of high school as a Rotary International Exchange Student in Helsinki. Her lovely friend, an educator of children and master of children's musical theater, now dwells in the nearby town of Lohja with a delightful family of two bright sons, two gifted daughters, along with a musically-talented, quiet and good-hearted husband. On both visits, I also enjoyed the company of various members of the extended family of this Finnish couple, going with them into the breathtaking wooded lake country. In J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, the adventuring fellowship of heroes find a brief but restorative respite among the Sylvan Elves and their queen, Galadriel. The love the Sylvan Elves had for their land -- both what grew upon it and the fellow beings who took their sustenance from it -- is a collective love that stands in good mythic comparison to the social reality I came to understand on my two visits to Finland in 2005 and 2006. The Finnish people, comprising the Saami in the Far North, and the Suomi in the southerly provinces, have lived in their part of Scandinavia for literally thousands of years. Other than a highly respected Swedish minority descended from immigrant settlers during the days of Sweden's rule (the country is legally bilingual in all its signage, product labels and official documents), the majority of the populace do not speak Indo-European languages, but Ural-Altaic languages. The beginning of their limited participation in European Continental civilization began really only in the 1500s, and most of their country (with the exception of its Baltic coastal cities) remained much as it had for untold centuries until the latter part of the nineteenth century. For most of their history as an organized political region they have been either a province of the Kingdom of Sweden or the Empire of Russia. Compared to other European countries, it can be said that, while in intrinsic terms Finland is very old, in modernist terms, this country is very young, even compared to the United States. All this is an introduction to my central point: it is a very unspoiled country both in terms of its natural environment and its people. The citizens I have met there and the individuals I have actually gotten to know communicated to me something wonderfully different in their patriotism: they actually love the land itself for itself and they love each other (all the citizens!) as one great family. This is a spiritual and social depth of connection that is wanting in places where patriotism is all about idolatrous flag-worship, spiritually-bankrupt saber-rattling and religiously protecting the narrow interests of an almighty stock exchange over the well-being of the labor force. There is still a sense of community in Finland like that which was once common in America. Their country is in the northern part of the hemisphere, so they have long dark days in the winter. This can have a depressive effect, so neighbors visit each other for fun social games, sympathetic conversation, storytelling, refreshments and spontaneous jocularity to keep each other's spirits up until the days begin to lengthen again. Their population and capitalist economy is growing, but they are taking pains to preserve what they know to be a rare state of natural pristineness and healthy traditional fellowship in their country. They have fought off Nazi Germans and Soviet Russians with only humble resources, and they would do it again to any other that would despoil their hard-won country and do harm to their modestly spoken, hardy fellow citizens. Global political and business trends seek to shame them for their social welfare state as somehow "backward", and try to shame Finland into paving over their land to make room for invasive globalized business ventures. However, the Finnish people as a whole remain stoutly resistant to these testing claw-swipes on their pride. A simple illustration is their dedication to see to the free university education of any citizen who would stand to benefit from it. To do otherwise is in their minds (as clearly stated to me) tantamount to an abandonment of their children. Collectively, they take care of each other like a big family. People are free to work without fear of how they will take care of themselves when they are too old to work. Young people are free to pursue their studies without fear of how they will manage to pay off their academic debts once they enter the world of professions. I saw very few obese people in Finland. They are hard-working, but they have not yet been deceived by the free market myth that selfish individualism is the only legitimate form of society. In Finland, the less you earn, the less you're taxed; the more you earn, the more you're taxed. People there aspire to achieve creative contributions not greed. Yet none of them ever need fear homelessness due to joblessness, nor being able to afford any form of health care that their well-being might require. In Finland, they have not forgotten that other law of nature that social darwinists and libertarians seem to forget (or ignore): that members of a species do not merely compete to succeed materially; they also take care of each other in order to succeed psychologically -- which is everything! This tradition of mutual care is evident in the remains of even our distant ancestors in the evolutionary tree of the Hominid Family: bones that were lovingly buried and showing signs of handicaps from injuries suffered many years before their deaths; evidence, in short, that when alive, they were taken care of by a group of their fellows. Well, this spirit remains alive, in some places more than others. Finland, I salute you! If Americans would, just as the Finns do toward their own country, learn to actually love the natural living land of America and all the life upon it, including their fellow citizens, imagine the things we could accomplish! For one thing, climate change could be overturned.