[Homestead] Falling skies versus homestead serenity
Gene GeRue
genegerue at ruralize.com
Thu Dec 18 14:39:28 EST 2008
My vocabulary belly, once seen as well-muscled, is gaining stretch
marks these days. It seems that this is because people got greedy
about real estate profits, greedy about stock market profits, greedy
to the point of printing new money cleverly and incongruously labeled
"derivatives."
As Bill the Shakes guy might say, "Ah, greed."
Greed indeed. How much of life is normal striving to ward off
potential shortfall, how much is beyond normal, past excessive,
zipping well into the greed zoo?
But I digress. I must focus on focussing on homesteading. Why, you
ask? The MSM says it is important to understand imploding currencies,
demand destruction, supply destruction, energy market volatility,
liquidity implosion, derivative extrapolation, securitized loan
default swaps, PEG ratios, bull runs, bear divergences, crude-oil
futures, long deflation, hyper inflation . . . . Whee!
My goodness, what's a poor country boy to think? More cogently, how to
cope?
Well, this poor homesteading boy thinks simple. The common-sense
homestead answer is simple to the point of somnambulism. The well-
designed homesteading life is essentially immune from the kinetics of
the global economic world, that world of really, really clever guys
and gals who know market vocabulary, who are sophisticated, who are
clever to the point of, whoops, consternation and, um, uh, well,
bankruptcy. Even to the point of oh-mi-god dismissing landscape
maintenance personnel, shortening au pair hours, reducing the days-per-
week of mansion keepers. Can CEO salaries of less than tens of
millions-per-year be really possible?
Meanwhile, back in the boonies, homesteaders are designing next year's
garden, not their stock portfolios. They are planning construction
projects using materials from within five hundred feet of the project,
not from Amazonian rain forests, nor from China or Japan. They are
reading novels and gardening books and reviewing seed catalogs. They
are hugging their children and grandchildren with joy.
As always, there is a choice. As it has seemed for many decades now,
it seems to me the homestead life is more sane, more serene, more
fulfilling. Yeah, sublime.
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