I have never been a hobby gardener, what food I grow during the summer and can and freeze and dry is a major part of my livelihood and always has been. I would have never been able to pursue music as a career without it and certainly would never have had the time, both to read what I have and, while weeding or doing other things, to think about what I read without that being the case.
Yesterday's hail storm has pretty well wiped out crops I absolutely depend on, which is certainly not something we are used to in our part of New England, it has never happened here within living memory. We went from a day of extremely hot, humid weather with oppressive stifling heat to the ground being covered with nickle and quarter size hail and much of the leaf mass of the trees in a quarter of an hour. This is like having a killing frost at the height of summer. I have no idea what I'm going to do about it, other than plant more of what can be planted this time of year, something which will take up a lot of my time in the coming weeks. Which will, beyond doubt, keep me from writing things. As I mentioned a while back I was already having financial trouble. This is pretty bad. I'm hardly the only person this is a personal disaster for. It gives me a chance to learn more deeply how it is for other people, around the world.
With global warming and other man-made disasters, I expect what I'm getting to experience in a small way is already the common experience of huge numbers of people, man-made food shortage. The response of the capitalist mind will, no doubt, be to produce more of the things that led to the disaster, more petro-chemicals, more GMO products that will require more of those - with the kind of tranquility that the people who are destroying the planet already have quite too much of even without the help of meditation technology. Of course even our allegedly liberal president will serve the oil and other extraction industries which our failed democratic systems serve, the massive corporations and, ultimately, the tiny class of people those exist to serve. I think it's appropriate to talk about societies which don't take the religious obligations that democracy rest on seriously as post-democratic societies. We live in one, now. If you want to know why Barack Obama has turned out to be a corporate tool, American's are told by their TVs and radios not to vote for anyone who isn't one and, not having any other equivalent force in their experience to tell them otherwise, they do what they're told with all of the manipulative techniques that the advertising and PR industries can devise to convince them to obey. He is the product of the training grounds of such people, the Ivy League class universities. Corrupt governments in alleged democracies are the product of media enabled to lie for profit, they are the result of the free-speech, free-press legal industry. If it were illegal to lie on TV and radio and in the movies, if it were the grounds for loss of permission to make money that way, we would never have seen the implosion of democracy in America, we would have never seen the destruction of liberal reform which was won with so much work and blood. If you don't know the truth, you cannot be free. You can't even find out what really is killing you.
In the age of climate change scarcity of food of water, with billions of people, with a class of billionaires who have been given given free reign by our courts, our political systems, by the overlords of the World Bank, The IMF, by other such entities created by mulitlateral trade deals made by corrupt politicians and corporate lawyers which have superseded even national governments and which serve bankers and billionaires instead of The People and the common good we will find that the entire world has been turned from the commons to private concessions in the ultimate program of enclosure. There is no North America, no Australia to ship the excess population to when the whole world has been made the property of the aristocratic 1%. And, with the aid of mass media, TV, radio, in that most seductive of forms of control, entertainment, those close to the bottom will be turned on those below them, protecting and enabling those above them. That is how they conquered the American people, that is why we elect pseudo-liberals who serve the elites who are robbing us, who are destroying the very basis of life. Ultimately, that is all based on lies, on the abandonment of morality, on the denial of the absolute moral obligation to do justice.
In re-reading the Jewish scriptures I am struck over and over again at how full of resonating, pulsing, flashing warnings they are against what we are seeing all around us today. Those were people who lived on the thinnest of margins in an arid environment, where the denial of, not only fair treatment but generous hospitality, food, drinkable water, could mean death within hours. They learned things that we in a life of plenty in a boreal forest environment, in the fields carved out of that, never had the reason to learn. I am afraid we are going to experience something like what they did. But their ethical and moral insights weren't the only things such experiences of deprivation and danger can produce. There were other and entirely worse conclusions drawn from that experience, you can see it in areas where war lords and other such thugs rule, you can read about it in the Book of Judges and others that deal with what happens when there is no effective legal prevention of that. We are ruled by those thugs in finely tailored suits and judicial robes now.
This is sounding kind of like a Jeremiad, maybe it is, but I don't know of any other way to express these observations of what I'm seeing, here in my little town and all around the world. The last thing we need is coping skills to soothe our minds, we need to change things, not cope more effectively with them. I figure telling the truth is the start of that.
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