Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

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