permaculture

[Elfpermacl@aol.com]

In a message dated 1/13/97 2:55:27 PM, Bridgman@aol.com wrote:

>This is very poor advice.  Many of your other responses to peoples queries
>about  permaculture have led us to believe that you are a very wise person,
>but now I am wondering??  What if  these people followed your advice?  This
>is how wars are started.  Just shift the scale to a national level.
> Retaliation does not work.
>  Without knowing all the details of the situation it is diificult to advise
>these folks how to respond.  I would like to know how this kind of behavior
>was solicitted.  Rarely does this kind of blatant attack come without some
>kind of provocation.  Maybe the victims don't feel they did anything ...
> Something is going on... Look at the deeper issues.  the answer is right in
>front of you, not in cyberspace. Best wishes  JB

I was talking from experience.  Turning the other cheek is a strategy for
rather select situations.  If you don't defend your home you are dead meat.
 Defense is not retailation.  YOu seem to have lived without benefit of
rednecks for neighbors.  That is good.  However if you draw a line in a
reasonable place and say this far and no further, that often works.  In this
country, non-reistance did not diminish the activities of the Klan, to take a
particularly difficult example.  

Specific tools for defence are indeed not clear from the situation.  That's
what they have to figure out.  The problem is, I learn from private email,
that the group itself is split on whether to roll over and play dead or
defend itself.  This is the worst situation and no one can help them with it.
 Until they are of one mind, they will have no power in the situation,
whichever strategy would work.  We also do not understand the amount of
protection that they can expect from the government in their country.  How
much protection do black youth's get from murder in US cities?  Not everyone
can afford to keep buying land until they find a place where people are nice
to them.

No doubt there was something that set people off.  Maybe it was planting
trees, for example.  I had a group in Mexico that was shot at while planting
trees.  What do you do?  Say don't plant trees?  I have put my life on the
line, literally, to support non-violent strategies in certain cases.  During
the civil rights movement, when white people were accepted as having an equal
interest in civil rights, I was a body guard for Martin Luther King when he
came to Boston.  My job was to place myself in the way of the assassin.  It
seemed to me reasonable to spread the risk--not to heap it all on this useful
and effective man.  This was a useful strategy at the time.  Out in the
boondocks where there is no one to get outraged when you get run over, there
is a different strategy.  If, on the way home from non-violent bodyguarding,
I had been jumped in an alley, I'd have killed the SOB if I could.  I don't
see the world looking at this little permie group in the boonies.  

And are you saying that the meek WILL inherit the earth if they are dead?
 Dead people inherit maggots.  If you don't protect yourself, you will not be
protected.

For Mother Earth, Dan Hemenway, Yankee Permaculture Publications (since
1982), Elfin Permaculture workshops, lectures, Permaculture Design Courses,
consulting and permaculture designs (since 1981), and now correspondence
permaculture training by email. Copyright, 1996, Dan & Cynthia Hemenway, P.O.
Box 2052, Ocala FL 34478 USA  YankeePerm@aol.com  

We don't have time to rush.