political interlude

"The current crisis facing the euro is the biggest test Europe has faced in decades. It is an existential test and it must be overcome ... if the euro fails, then Europe fails," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Finally, a leader says something honest. Or more honest than anything any other leader of anything has said. No surprise she's from the least socialist country in the EU, while the "bailout" went to the most.

And it is more than an existential test; it is an existential crisis and the truth of the matter is that the existence has shifted, changed, never to go back, so all the looking for "the recovery" and "getting back to the way it was" are whistling past the graveyard, covering the ears and singing "lalalala". The currency almost has no option but to break what with all the printing going on.

So the questions to ask yourself are these: what will I eat, where will I live, how will I keep warm?

Husband and I were out yesterday. I couldn't believe the building going on, with empty building right beside, but it was the new cars on the lot that got me. "I can't believe they still make new cars," I said. "We could go twenty to forty years without a single new car being made."

"And imagine all the jobs there would be," husband chimed in. "Mechanics and machine shops."

"And people to paint and upholster," I said.

And in real estate, four or five families could live in a McMansion and again, people could be employed gainfully, doing something real, making those monstrosities into functional and efficient living spaces. And every yard, and every median, could grow some food.

It isn't a grim thing, this existential crisis.

where the longing for love beat out the struggle for the legal tender

I think I probably spend a lot of time on this blog extolling the pleasures of this lifestyle. So forgive me if I indulge in one quick moment of whining: I don’t believe the temperature here has been above freezing in 20 days at least. It has been three weeks now that the highs haven’t been out of the low twenties -- I know because highs in the twenties require insulated coveralls to work in and this is the third week I’ll be wearing them. With the highs in the twenties, the lows have been single digits. Every night they predict lows in the teens but every morning we wake up to single digits.

That much cold starts making things hard. Wood is frozen and sawing frozen wood is, well, imagine using a bread knife saw through frozen steak. When bucking up a big log with only a buck saw while snow’s on the ground , a chainsaw begins to look tempting even to us. The van’s fan belt broke and we can’t fix it until it warms up. The truck’s choke sticks. I’ve gotten the truck stuck twice on the steep part of the hill which has meant backing it down the steep part of the hill (and then all the way back out to the road) twice now -- once I was successful and once I needed a come along to finish turning the truck around after it slid exactly crossways in the road. There’s a valve in the water pressure tank that is protected in the basement and even it has frozen three times. The house is considered warm if it gets up to 60 degrees.

ENOUGH!

Here’s what I have to say. We could easily fix all those things and never ever have to put up with them again. We could have a four wheel drive vehicle that isn’t officially an antique. We could have a working chainsaw. We could have a damn tractor. We could have all the trappings of civilization. We could have all the thing’s everyone else has.

And here’s what we’d have to give up to have it. Everything. Because to have the chainsaw on the one day it would come in handy, we’d have to live to afford it every other day of the year. Likewise, in order to have the nice, nearly new family vehicle and 4WD truck and a tractor, we’d have to live to afford it every other day of the year.

And that living to afford it means not living like we do live, the personally, family, socially, globally, environmentally, spiritually (and every other way) responsible life we’ve grown together here on this mountain.

It is a privilege to huddle together over the fires sharing a cup of tea and figuring out how to get the minimum done while we enjoy each other and wait for it to warm up just a bit.

And even people who give up everything to have all the thing’s everyone else does have times that challenge them too. They don’t get out of that -- they just give up the possibility of everything else.

juxtaposition this day

haulms off the corn field
world in handbasket in hell
three roosters lose heads

what I wish the President would say

I can always pick out a thing or two in his speeches that I really like, that I agree with, that I think the nation needs to hear. This last time, in the non-State of the Union speech, it was that this latest ‘crisis” was not unforeseen -- that we knew about the energy crisis in the 1970s and we as a nation did not respond in any responsible way to it.

I would continue that to say that we know and knew that not everyone can invest in the stock market and “make money” year after year because the stock market is basically a bet and you really cannot invest in it money that you cannot afford to lose. We know that when you buy a house, you should have 20% down payment at least and the payment should be less than 30% of your income. We know that more people cannot be consumers than are producers, takers than are leavers.

Yes, there is not any part of this crisis that sensible, sensitive, awake people did not foresee.

Here is what else, what else he didn't even come close to saying but needs to say. There is only so much sunlight that hits the earth and that is the maximum amount of energy that we can use. We’ve cheated with fossil fuels. We can cheat only so much longer.

The lifestyles that fossil fuel use has provided are as bankrupt as the housing market and as empty as the capped oil wells. We need to build new lifestyles, not attempt to resurrect dying industries and prop up ponzi scheme false ideas of security. We do not need the government to create “good paying jobs”. We need to see our way to a life that doesn’t take so much money and doesn’t involve so much fakery. Manual labor is not enslavement and abundance is not stuff. We need as humans the satisfaction of creating real things, and really useful things.

It is not a bad thing to live smaller, to let the world be a bigger place and to more fully inhabit our little piece of it. It is, in fact, a good thing, a thing to be embraced, celebrated even.

We no longer expect the free lunch or respect the workaholic. Rather we expect that all people will work, and work rather hard, all their lives . . . but they will always have the time to sit and have a piece of pie with a neighbor. We will not honor idleness and fakery or seek what is false.

Our hope is not the hope of seeking the status quo, is not the hope of the ever-expanding middle class, it not the hope of the growthgrowthgrowth (cancer) economy, is not the hope of what we have come to know and expect, but the hope of moving into a new paradigm: A paradigm where, simply, less is more.

I’d like him to acknowledge that real freedom, real liberty, begins with securing food because if you don’t have food, you are a slave. So the victory garden becomes the liberty garden. Arbor day becomes orchard day. Every household and every community ought be challenged to grow more and more if its own food.

Sustainability is about being willing, and being able, to do things every day, every year, forever. It isn’t about looking for retirement or living for “one day”. It isn’t about sacrificing for a bit now in order to get something in the future. It is about living now the way we can live forever. Embracing. What we need to do now is not to sacrifice but to embrace a way of being that we can keep up forever.

That’s some of what I with the President would articulate.

Imagine

Imagine that you provided (you and your family), not bought, everything you need. That is, everything you really need. For you and your family.

So, you need some shelter, a house. Now see that house as trees standing, or rocks lying, or sod growing, or a shovel waiting to dig into the earth. Imagine taking those things and with only simple tools (like that shovel) turning them into a snug enough house. One that isn’t going to bake you out of it in the summer or freeze you during the winter.

It is awfully nice when that house has some heat, but if you are providing that with your own efforts, well, that involves more than just turning up that thermostat. Most likely it is fire. And that can also cook your meals. But it would also involve, perhaps, making warm, usually woolen, clothing, which would involve sheep and washing and carding and spinning and knitting or weaving or the like.

Imagine that food didn’t come from the grocery store, or from halfway around the world out of season. What would you eat? What would you concentrate on growing? What would you learn about nature and wild foods in your area? What animals would you keep? How would you feed them? And how would you prepare the food, considering that you can’t just turn the stove on and (poof) it is hot? How would you chill the milk, preserve the meat, keep greens and fruit on the table in the dead of winter?

Now, look at what you do “for a living”, what you do for money. Or if you are a SAHM, what you do for your family. And ask yourself this: Is anything I do worth what it takes to meet my basic needs? Is anything I do really worth what it would take for me and my family to make a house, a warm home, clothing, food?

The answer is, No, it isn’t.

And that’s what I’m talking about with material participation.

happy INDEPENDENCE day

cupcakes
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

Independence doesn’t mean not living in relationship with one another. It means not being in servitude. Wage slavery is a form of servitude. Being afraid to lose your job because of health insurance is servitude. Working 60 hours a week and still not owning anything is servitude. People get mad at me when I say this, but it is worse than slavery. You might say that no one owns you, that no one can sell you, but suddenly find yourself without that wage and see, without that relied upon monthly income and see. The dependence that we have on petroleum, on machinery, is servitude because you can’t eat and you can’t stay warm without it (or you think you can't).

More important than being willing to die for our freedom, we must be willing to LIVE free. Now.

Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness.

And always remember that it was the Over Mountain Men who really won independence for the US.

The Calculus it is a-Changing

aka CG as Benign Dictator

aka Stop and Pick the Berries

I listened to W’s talk on energy today (thus “the calculus is changing” -- it was my favorite line), as oil shoots up to another new high, as does corn. I’ve also listened to our candidates vying to replace W. None of them, none, speaks the truth, or anywhere near to the truth.

Here I give you my plan for energy and the future of the US.

• Stop all, that is ALL, subsidies. None to energy, none to agriculture, no more EIC, none to green anything, none to big business, no highways to nowhere, no around the bend mountain cooperatives, nothing.
• Re-start government stockpiling of commodities, including energy but mostly food. You may be unaware that there are nigh unto no stockpiles currently. Last source I saw for it said there was enough wheat for ½ loaf of bread per person in the US and that’s all.
• Once we have some commodities in, stop food stamps and start commodities. At a minimal level measured in calories. And make people work for them. Everyone can do something useful.
  
• Stop the freaking mowing. And road building.
• Ok, I’m going to try to not say “stop” anymore. Just assume stop everything.
• By executive order I allow any direct consumer of anything (that is not otherwise illegal) to buy it from the direct producer. So milk and cheese and meat and such is legal, period, on a direct level. Buyer beware, but the buyer only need beware his neighbor, not a multinational corporation trying to stick it to him.
• So is all health care legal and non-regulated on a direct level. If you want to see a quack and can afford to, go for it. But government needn’t pay for your high tech stuff either -- it is as much quackery as the other. And besides, we have to die of something.
  
• But vaccinations and teeth cleaning, toothbrushes and soap are government provided.
• As are “funeral home” fans -- cardboard on a wooden paddle. This replaces the “cooling assistance” program. That is a joke. The fans will once again be advertisement for funeral homes and churches, no doubt. Government should not do anything that can be done privately.

You get the idea. Don’t encourage anything except personal responsibility, and thus community responsibility.

What individual people have to do is, one, garden. Two, use less energy. Three, start seeing the possibilities.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that this will wreck our economy. Yes it will, so long as we are talking about the economy powered by oil in particular, and fossil fuels in general. But (and this is where “see the possibilities” comes in), it doesn’t have to be that way. People could take the economy and turn it to subsistence , manual labor based, human scaled, stable, community based economy, choosing to make things of real value. They could choose to stay home and pick the berries.