ANOTHER EXCERPT FROM HOMESTEAD TSUNAMI
Okay, folks, I’m going to give you one more excerpt from my new book, HOMESTEAD TSUNAMI: Good for Country, Critters, and Kids. The introductory $5 off sale concludes this weekend, Sept. 30. I’m autographing the first 1,000 and we’re steadily approaching that number. My hope is that this book gives many of us the language to address numerous cultural dysfunctions of our day. The homestead tribe needs a lexicon to speak credibly and articulately to those who think life consists of Twinkies, football, and TikTok. Until Jan. 1, here’s where you can get the book: https://polyfaceyum.com/product-cat/polyface-love/#!/HOMESTEAD-TSUNAMI/p/585878338/category=127349790
FINDING FREEDOM THROUGH PARTICIPATION
When store shelves emptied during the spring of 2020, when the covid Black Swan enveloped the world, did you panic or yawn? At our farm, we yawned while most people panicked. That’s not said pridefully; it’s simply a statement of fact.
Several hundred jars of canned produce filled our basement pantry shelves. Well-stocked freezers full of meat and poultry promised delicious, nutritious meals for months. Bulk flour, stores of maple syrup and honey, along with a neighbor’s raw milk, assured us a future of thriving, not just surviving.
For decades, America more than any other country in the world offered a false promise that we could abandon historical participation in the foundations of life, somehow freeing us to do more important things. We would be free to spend more time keeping up with celebrity culture, going to movies, attending football games, and visiting vineyards. We could go on cruises, shop in Paris, play more golf, and hit the slopes routinely. The ultimate freedom—time to play more video games.
Liberated from life’s chores and drudgeries, we could really live. No more weeds to pull; no more cows to milk; no more hay to make; no more eggs to gather; no more tomatoes to plant, trellis, and water; no more meals to cook; no more canning to toil over in a hot kitchen; no more firewood to cut; no more larder to inventory and stock. We would all sail off into some sort of blissful Star Trek nirvana, eating laboratory concoctions, popping pills, and wearing spandex instead of Carharts. We could unmoor from domestic drudgeries and escape into artificial intelligence, leaving our mundane lives free to pursue exotic activities.
Iconic radio commentator Paul Harvey differentiated between two types of freedom: the freedom to do what we want and the freedom to do what we ought. He likened the freedom to do whatever our whimsical desires wanted to a driverless car and a train without a track. They’re free, but not in any sense that is functional. What does freedom to do what we ought look like?
It looks a lot like participating in life’s most basic foundations. Over the last couple of generations, the hardscrabble American life, centered around home and hearth, has been replaced with convenience. We’ve contracted out the cornerstones of life to others, assuming new-found freedom would bring us to better places. Viewing domestic chores and basic life immersion as unnecessary slavery, as a culture we embraced TV dinners, cardboard tomatoes shipped across the country, Hot Pockets, and Lunchables.
In the name of convenience and liberation, we enslaved ourselves to a host of dependencies. We abandoned the one-room school with complete local control to a federal bureaucracy, quickly driving our nation downward in academic competency. The average college graduate today can’t pass an 1880s eighth-grade exam.
The historic in-home and locally-sourced entertainment and recreation model is now an outsourced video game conceived by nameless, faceless people a world away in both location and values. Instead of neighbors and friends getting together for a spelling bee, poetry sharing, or mock political debate, where everyone brings something, we sequester on our screens with someone else’s imagination. Instead of a creativity potluck, we cater in entertainment, allowing us to slay virtual bad guys with violent weaponry in a virtual world. For many, we spend more time in a world that doesn’t exist than the one that does. Is that healthy?
Instead of investing our money in local businesses and developing community-based entrepreneurship, we invest in Blackrock and massive global holding companies that use children to mine lithium. All to power our electric vehicles. Consider the care and attention our forebears put into the livery, keeping the horse fed, shod, and groomed. The early automobiles, built in backyard mechanic shops, could be maintained by anyone with a mechanic bent. Today we need a multi-million dollar computer interface just to diagnose a problem, which is often some malfunctioning computer micro-chip sensor.
Rather than the neighborhood doctor who would often take a sack of potatoes as payment for a house call, we go to government-sanctioned hospitals that won’t let patients take vitamin C supplements. Who wants to get tangled up in the medical system? How many of us lost parents during covid, dying alone in hospitals and assisted living facilities, probably more from feeling abandoned than from any physical malady?
When the health care system gets its tentacles into your condition, your options become tormented by the clutches of a practically inescapable paradigm. The “informed consent” movement is a parallel tsunami to the homestead tsunami. They spring from a common root: loss of personal autonomy to make fundamentally intimate choices.
As a nation, we’ve abandoned Judeo-Christian moorings. Church attendance is at an all-time low, giving us more time to watch weekend sports, view pornography, smoke dope, seek exotic spiritual voyeurism, and a host of other miscreant activities. We took down the Ten Commandments from our school rooms and now wonder why we have school shootings. When I was in high school, the student parking lot was full of vehicles with guns—lots of students went hunting for a couple of hours after they got out of school. Nobody thought they were dangerous; we had prayer and posted the Ten Commandments in the classroom. Corporal punishment taught us early on that some behavior is okay and other is not. We called sin sin and evil evil.
Could it be that we traded the Ten Commandments for metal detectors and school security officers--and fear? Freeing us from those historical moorings brought us to a new non-freedom. Morality is now completely relative; no absolutes. Freed from biological constraints, our children suffer sexual dystopia, suicide, and self-hate. That sounds like a bad trade. The spiritual hole in the human heart must be filled with something. If it’s not filled with truth, it’ll be filled with untruth and nonsense. Some may call this the purpose hole. Call it what you will, but something about gathering eggs, milking a cow, and snapping green beans fill that hole with meaningfulness.
With all this going on, however, nothing indicates the dramatic societal shift as much as where we live and how we live, physically, on the landscape. Why plant a garden when we can go to Kroger? Why know a farmer when Costco is around the corner? Why run a freezer when take-out is an Uber Eats away? Cooking from scratch is now opening a can, pouring it in a micro-wavable dish and nuking it for a few minutes. Voila! Dinner is served. More households don’t know what to do with a whole chicken. Butternut squash? What’s that? Squash is supposed to be in a can.
All of this sounds progressive, cool, modern, and liberating--until some unexpected crisis like covid hits the culture. When the supermarket shelves go bare and people realize that cities only have three days’ worth of food in warehouses, this carefree, liberated, non-participating existence suddenly becomes vulnerable and fragile. The Chinese have a saying: “Plenty of food, many problems; no food, one problem.”