Things are pretty good at the homestead.
by freeacre
“I, too, have been seduced by the Intellect - obsessed with "understanding" and "knowing what is going on," I can while away hours, big hunks of days and years, trying to put it all together in my head, despite wrong information, lies, deception, with enough just enough truth thrown in to keep things going.” From freeacre
Zoner shared in the comments from the last post, that he has come to terms with not knowing, and now he has more time for his kids and his guitar. Somehow, a balance between awareness of the world and a subjective immediate immersion in one’s own life and location needs to be established, it seems to me.
I was mulling over the conversation regarding a “fast” or a “slow” crash as I walked around the property in my pajamas the other morning. I was checking out the garden and the greenhouses while being followed by the poultry posse. After all, it was upon reading Michael Ruppert in 2002 and 3 that we began to anticipate a fast crash. Ruppert nailed the timing of the real estate bust. It gave us time to take out a home improvement loan, pay off the car and the credit card debt and re-model the house. We figured that we had a year to fix up the home and sell it before the housing market tanked. I am grateful to that “knowing what is going on” fixation. As you all know, we sold the house in Tahoe, moved to central Oregon, and bought the cheapest acre with a mobile home in the local MLS listings in September of 2004. And retired.
That was seven years ago.
Anticipating the crisis that would manifest once Peak Oil became a household term (we figured around 2006), we began stocking up on food supplies, and began to compost our leftovers and planted a garden a year after that. It’s a good thing that peak oil has not caused the disruption that we thought it would. I mean, it has led to all sorts of political and financial mischief, wars, etc. But, so far the gas is still in the pumps. The oil barons are just pumping it now from deep waters where the damage will not only be to the land and air, it will now extend to the seas as well. I guess the big plan was to reduce our use of oil by getting rid of manufacturing. Americans can all be waiters, stockbrokers, bank tellers, ski-slope trimmers or whatever… Yeah, that was a plan. We can see how that one is working out. I guess it did buy some time. And the rich have been able to get richer, so their plan seems to have worked. I had a different plan. But then life hit.
That food we stored up is going bad now that the expiration dates have long since expired. I guess we were not as diligent as we should have been regarding the “rotating” of the canned goods. For openers, it took murph about two years to convince me that rotating the cans didn’t mean turning them upside down. Well, anyway, I digress…
I was walking around in my p.j.’s thinking about a “fast crash” with a sense of irony. If and when things ever really fall apart it might seem fast. But, it will be like the actress who works her ass off for years in small plays and bit parts, all the while learning her craft and making the right contacts. Then “all of a sudden” she gets a part in a film that puts her on a whole new star track for the foreseeable future. So, was that sudden or not? Depends on how you look at it.
So, for us, living in a way that anticipated coping with immanent disaster, has led us to the way we are now. We’re feeling pretty secure on the crisis front. We have not slacked in our efforts to cope in a post electronic and post petroleum world. The latest effort that murph is making with the help of this young couple who are our friends, is to build a well house over the well head that will shelter a hand pump installed in the well. I figure that if an EMP from the sun or some man-made weapon takes out our electricity, we had better figure a way to get water than standing outside in the winter dipping it out by hand with an Amish dipper. So now, thanks to the Lehyman’s non-electric catalog, we have the hand pump, and soon we’ll have the shelter as well. Just, you know, in case…
Peak Oil doesn’t seem to be the critical issue right now. But, after reading Matt Savinar’s blog for years (Life After the Oil Crash – Breaking News), there is no doubt that it is having an impact on our lives – and fortunes. It’s probably part of what drove the money mutants to ramp up the finance industry with real estate and assorted derivatives when they couldn’t depend on Oil anymore. So, The Rich have been squeezing it out of the The Rest for the last thirty years or so. They also have been enriching the military-industrial complex, running the international drug trade, and propping up the stock market with the laundered drug money. They’ve managed, world-wide, to centralize banking to the point that sovereign nations are secondary to the regional currency, as with the Euro. The plan to institute the Amero for us, Canada, and Mexico seems to have stalled after many of the neo-cons left Washington D.C. It’s probably still on the books.
A different warning that Ruppert, et al, also trumpeted years ago was about debt. He and many money gurus counseled avoiding being crippled by personal debt. But, back then they were really pissing into the wind. Advertising, media, and international corporations merged and became the communications arm of the globalist bankers. Computers, cell phones, desk-tops, iPads, television programs combined with social networking – all commercials for stuff and more stuff to purchase with a credit card, of course. And now banks are going to charge a fee for us slackers who do not maintain at least a $1,500 balance of debt!! It’s like a pimp telling his lady to not come home without at least five hundred dollars. What a pimp job.
Most of the kids growing up didn’t have a chance. Everybody told them they had to go to college at all costs if they were to have any chance at all to jump onto the gravy train. Many even signed up for the armed services just to get the chance to someday go to college. Now, on average, they are graduating at least $25,000 in debt at an interest rate that most of them will never be able to re-pay and from which there is no bankruptcy recourse. Debt servitude. That’s slavery without the housing. With not near enough jobs in site, for them, the shit HAS hit the fan. And, on top of that, the country just put them in the position of footing the bill for the trillions of dollars of national debt – all owed to the same detestable douche bags (Yes, that’s you, the Federal Reserve). And there is no real promise of any social security or any other help from the government for them.
Engineered or not, this is getting pretty close to the spontaneous combustion stage. If you think back to most of the rioting in the world, it’s mostly youth who feel that they have nothing to look forward to or to lose. Who can blame them? School loans and growing up with no medical and dental have taken their toll on a lot of them. With the “take over” movement, maybe the oldsters will stop whining long enough to take a look at what young people’s suffering looks like, what families are going through, Reminds me of the poem by Langston Hughes,
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Well, here in my backyard, I’m not sensing any explosions. Even the comets and asteroids, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, earthquakes, planetary alignments, stuff falling from space, the marching magnetic poles of the earth, and the alignment with the Galactic Center seem to be managing to hold things together without my help. One of my biggest problems is that my pole beans only produced two beans in the greenhouse. Why? Why?
But, still we build a hand pump onto the well. By now, it’s not so much for the Crash – fast or slow. It’s because more and more it feels good to be connected – to the land, the water, the garden, the animals. It tastes good to eat mostly stuff that is not contaminated with godknowswhat. We like the neighbors and friends we have developed here. We are on a first name basis with our city and county commissioners, as well as the DEQ and the planning commission’s steering committees.
Sometimes I have to remind myself to tear away from all the things that are sick and wrong, and focus on what’s around me that has worked out right, even though it was not a well-controlled event.
But, once again, I think the Overlords already have a plan to deal with the troublesome Useless Eaters. Take a look at Clif High’s most recent post. He anticipates a Shock & Awe event around the 15th of this month if I am not mistaken.
There goes that Compulsion to Know thing again. Rats!
Related:
http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONv-xrjC9Qg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWgwJP3YCPk&feature=email
http://www.halfpasthuman.com/grunch.html
