SISU! Ehh? (Attributed to Charles Kuralt, journalist.) MARQUETTE, MICHIGAN. We say that the Irish who came to America brought a gift of good talk and poetry, the Germans brought thrift and energy, the Italians a love of music. I dont know about all that, but after a few days in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I am certain of the contribution of the Finns: sisu. I heard a man say of his neighbor that he had sisu. When I asked what sisu is, the man dug up an essay for me to read. It was written by Dr. John I. Kolehmainen of Heidelburg University, and it gave me a scholarly understanding of sisu. Its hard to translate, but it means something like guts - courage, doggedness, persistence, the ability to accept reversal and go on. The Finns who settled the ragged wasteland of the Upper Peninsula needed all the sisu they could get. This was a logged-over, burned-over land. The Finns decided to farm it. It is pretty widely agreed that nobody else could have taken such a desert of stumps and stones and turned it into a land of neat furrows and tidy houses - nobody but the Finns. They did it with axes and plows and sisu. The men put in back-breaking days of stern hard work and self-denial. The women, they say, worked on an eight-hour schedule: eight hours in the morning, eight more in the afternoon, plowing and sowing, hoeing, digging ditches, cutting hay with the men. The Finn is singular, wrote a visitor who watched the first generation Finns at work up here, in that sooner or later he is conquered by an unreasoning, mad passion to own his own place . . . He has to have something, if only a birch tree, a spruce, or a pine, a goat or a cow, around which he can fling his arms and exclaim, This no one, not even the richest lord, can take away from me! Almost all the Finns of the Upper Peninsula came to own their own homesteads. It took sisu, and they had more of it than anyone else. Drive through here now, notice the pretty houses and barns and meadows resting under the snow, and if you know a little local history, you cannot help admiring the Finnish sisu. And if you have been reading the morning papers, you cant help hoping that in times like these, some of it will rub off on the rest of us. Thank you, Charles Kuralt!! The last paragraph is as true today as when he wrote it: Text copyright 1979 by CBS, Inc.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 08:26:29 +0000
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