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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] The longest post yet-Anger
  • Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2008 20:57:59 EST

Desert Bob, this is an odd amalgam of points but there are some things I’d
like to say about them:



>And you are not poor.

Technically I am. My household runs on about 1/6th the cash established for
the poverty line for a family this size. As the government reckons it, we
are
in searing, grinding poverty. Let me add quickly that this household runs on
that much money alone, we receive no assistance of any kind and none of us is
on SS or disability or any such. No one here receives a stipend, pension,
dividend, or any such.



It’s the straight dope, the real McCoy, we have devised a nearly cashless
economy in the modern world. Nearly.

>But, I could not even come close to what you have done. Not even close.



You have allowed that part of the phenomenon is the "will", which I would
reduce to a more simple "don’t want to." Not many people want to live this
way.
You have to derive some dark pleasure from hard physical work and also from
thwarting the "system". Not everyone, not many in fact, are of a bent to be
that way.

I have always hated debt, and I had some so I had good reason to hate it.
IRS and state department of revenue were the worst, and the latter was the
worse
of the two. But I have never had a credit card in my life. I took a car
loan once in my misspent youth, regretted doing so, and never did it again.
Naturally being at 23 a snarling, teeth gnashing old Silas Marner or
Ebenezer
Scrooge when it came to debt, when it came time to buy land a few years
later, I
did not have to borrow much money for it. And I parlayed that into a more
valuable place and that into a more valuable one still, so that by the time I
was
married (at 36 years old) we could buy this farm for cash and have enough
left over to buy the materials for he house.

I often have people say, "But what about me? I’m not 23 and I have this
mountain of debt and I’m in bad health etc," (This question comes up in
another
forum, a blog where I have expounded my philosophy of economics and free
living
in detail, and which will remain nameless here). And this is my unfeeling
arrogant bastard reply:

What if someone said "I was careless with my 12 ga. shotgun loaded with 00
and I accidentally shot off my right foot. What do I do now?" My answer is,
"You limp through life with one foot."

Some things are not easily undone. If someone made bad debts, got cleaned
out in a divorce, got in trouble with the IRS, ends up like the couple on
Green
Acres with one not willingly leaving the city for anything, ….then, sucks to
be you. You’ve been foolish. Don’t be foolish any more.



Now, I’m quite up for walking along with someone limping on one foot. I’m
not in a hurry and there’s no place I’ve got to be. That is, there is a
great
deal to be considered from people who are living and independent life. It
has little to do with how you skin a deer or malt barley or plant onions. It
has to do with viewing the world a different way. My reason for
participating
the way I do on this list isn’t because I hold up my household as a model
for
anyone to emulate nor duplicate, but rather so that you can see things from a
different point of view. Where that point of view takes you will vary, if
indeed you want to make any practical use out of it at all.


>I think they just work, play, buy cars and houses, have babies, and listen
to the media, and stay so busy that they don't realize they are spending most
of their time working for someone else's benefit and profit.

Bob, this is the most important point, and the hardest one for most to deal
with: It isn’t so much spending one’s life working for someone else’s
benefit
and profit, it’s spending YOUR life benefiting from someone else’s labor and
misery. It is the very thing that causes people like Moon to flare up. They
just don’t like thinking about it. In modern America we swill at the trough
of the resources of the world paid for by the lives, blood, and misery of the
rest of the world. That is why I speak out against the abomination of
blaming
our aggression around the world on the whim of George Bush, and that as soon
as we get rid of him, we need never be aggressive again. That’s true only if
everyone in the country is willing to live closer to the bone than even we on
this homestead do. For this sort of life to make any sense, you have to be
able to look beyond the sort of PC drivel we’ve addressed here



.>You must be stubborn as hell, and also hard willed to get the wife and
family to carry it as far as you have.

Again, let me see if I can express this. Stubbornness and hard will can lead
you astray as easily as lead you where you want to go. It isn’t a matter of
stubbornness, it’s a matter of clarity. We have clarity. Since we don’t
use much cash, where does our "stuff" come from? Mainly we live by the
largesse
of Nature. Nature is a Mean Mother. If you come here to the backwater to
live, leave all notions of nature as seen in Disney cartoons behind. It
doesn’t
work that way. When you begin to let go of the consumerist, industrialist,
agribusiness mindset, you see that Nature has no tolerance at all for any of
the PC claptrap we have been addressing. Nature cares not a whit whether you
are young or old, male or female, fat or slim, well or ill, black or white,
insane or sound. She will behave toward you with compete impartiality. You
will
learn clarity, the ability to discern what Nature is about and act
accordingly, or you will perish.

On a post about making choices, one commenter remonstrated that disaster
could strike in ways you did not anticipate and so the idea that you could
prosper
by making wise choices was invalid (that same argument has been advanced
here). She told that she and her husband had been homesteading on 2 acres
and
when he became ill (and eventually died), she could not tend the 13 goats and
so
had to get rid of them. As you know, this region is severe drought central
and so realizing that, because of the dryness, the carrying capacity of the
place was diminished for the present, we reduced our number of goats to just
the
opposite of the poster in question. Instead of 13 goats on 2 acres, we have
2
goats on 13 acres. If something happens to one of us, the goats can fend for
themselves indefinitely. 13 goats on 2 acres is an agribusiness model since
it requires purchased feed and someone present to feed them.



So, Bob, on this list you will talk with people ‘homesteading’ on the basis
of many different paradigms. Some allow the homesteader to wander around in
a
PC fog and it doesn’t much affect their operation. Some make no apologies
about the fact that their husbandry is on an agribusiness basis rather than a
subsistence basis which they do not value. Each of these models and more has
its price and its results (rewards and consequences).



If you don’t want or don’t desire the results of this type of life, by all
he powers don’t approach it or attempt it. It is a radically different
vision
and it requires seeing things in a radically different way. The rest follows.


James




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