Once again, this year, I’ve been trying to do a little pioneer attitude adjustment. Little by little, I’m softening up with my attitude about the pioneers. It’s time I made peace with my forefathers. Those of you who know me, might know that I have had a bit of an ongoing struggle with my attitude in regards to the whole pioneer thing.

I’ve let this attitude show now and then. When I do let it show, I’m often met by shocked looks and shaking heads and “Oh Merrill, you don’t mean that” sort of comments.

When I say “pioneer thing,” what I mean is the ancestor worship we seem to practice in Sanpete in regards to our pioneer forerunners. In Sanpete, Isaac Morley is almost deity. “Father Morley” led the original party of settlers who bravely first settled Sanpete in 1849.

If you can trace your genealogy through one of the original Sanpete settlers, you are automatically kind of in an upper society caste and shouldn’t mix too freely with the untouchables in lower castes. (OK, it’s not that bad, but sometimes it’s fun to say.)

It is certainly all right to honor our forefathers. But I just think that we should leave the serious ancestor worship to other cultures. Our Sanpete brand of the Shintoism culture seems to be regularly practiced. We have pioneer commemorations, reenactment treks, remembrance events, or some “pioneerish” thing every time we turn around.

I don’t want to trivialize the trials and tribulations of the Utah pioneers, but we’ve reenacted and proxy tribulated right along with them “’til the cows have all come home.” (I do have to remind myself that the “rising generation” hasn’t “tribulated” as much as some of the rest of us.)

OK – I guess these first few paragraphs don’t sound very penitent, do they? I just had to establish what I’m talking about. And you can see that perhaps I haven’t totally come to terms with this issue.

But what has been helping me change my attitude, to some degree, is that I’ve been getting to know a little more about the pioneers and their lives. The more you learn about them and their times, the more you learn that they were “people” and not a race of “near-gods.”

They had problems and had to face them – just like we do. Different times, different problems – but real problems in both cases, just the same.

What we choose to remember and tell about our pioneer ancestry is, understandably, the “good stuff.” That’s a natural thing.

We’re obeying the command that we all got from our mothers, “If you can’t say something good about someone, don’t say anything at all.” (I’ve also heard the corrupted version of that: “If you can’t say something good about someone, come sit right down here beside me and tell me all about it.”)

This concept is similar, for example, of how we collectively in America like to remember our founding fathers. For example, we fondly remember George Washington as the “father of our country.”

Never mind, that he had a number of less than perfect traits – we remember and talk about his super human achievements of leading the victory in the Revolution and helping organize the Constitutional Convention — and rightly so.

Really, to me, it’s heartening to know that our “larger than life” founding fathers and heroic pioneers had personal problems and were not always shining examples of perfection. It gives me hope.

Learning that our pioneer ancestors were real people with imperfections, like you and me, has helped me lighten up on them. I believe that they probably said “shucks” and “dang it” (or some other phrases and words of frustration) when the wheels of their wagons and handcarts ran over their toes.

So, I say let’s honor and venerate our pioneer forefathers. I’m going to do it knowing that they were human beings taking on awesome challenges and doing the best they could. And they did remarkably well.

We are in the same position in many ways here and now. We are human beings with genuine challenges and we need to do the best we can. And hopefully, we’ll do remarkably well too. — Merrill