permaculture

["Healing Hawk" <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

It really irritates me when someone tells us what we have to do but doesn't
tell us why or how to do it.  We have to build community to survive
civilization's collapse?  Duh!  How?  I have organized groups since I
organized a base camp against the war in Vietnam in 1970 and some form
community and some don't.  It seems like magic, to me.  If it requires
unhooking from our lives in the belly of the beast who will pay our bills
while we're spending three or four hours per day processing our feelings
with others of potentially a like mind?  Perhaps we can convince some rich
person to finance that?  We taught nine Simplicity Circle classes in Houston
in the late 90s and not a single person finished any one of them but the two
teachers.  How do we unhook?  This article is what Gregory Bateson would
have called softheaded.  How do we eliminate our debt, throw away our cell
phones and SUVs and green tea lattes, and squat somewhere until we get our
Post Oil souls together?  Who pays for therapy to heal us of empire's
excesses?  Probably every member of this group agrees with Carolyn Baker.  I
do.  But I don't need preached to.  I need some tools that I can use to
create the community we'll need to survive civilization's collapse.  Until I
have them, I'm going to be working like Hell to keep civilization from
collapsing.  Anyone with a single functioning brain cell will do the same
thing, because, for better or worse, civilization is what keeps life livable
in the US.  It's battered to hell and gone, but it's keeping us from
degenerating into clans run by warlords, like Afghanistan and Iraq.  Guess
who's going to own the warlords in the US?  What do you think they invented
"trickle down" economics for?  Has the trickle reached you?  It's reached
the defense contractors.  The mainstream press and media traumatize us every
day, but we can turn them off, mostly, and get our news from people who give
us the news without needing to traumatize us with sensationalist social
control crap.  We can, and should, give our TVs to the junk dealer, except
they'll end up in some third world country being stripped of their
recyclable parts by starving slaves who die fast from the toxic substances
they ingest.  Don't buy the damn things.  All they do is distract us.  Just
say no to distraction.  We need to know, and to meditate on, how totally
fucked we are if we don't get off our asses and create an ecological culture
in the US, and distraction keeps us from that.  I don't know of a newspaper
that isn't a corporate propaganda rag, either, even the NY Times and
Washington Post.  Abe Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson told us this was coming,
Eisenhower told us again, and we let the corporations anesthetize us and do
what they did to the world since Eisenhower.  Anyone who can't see the arc
from Nixon to Bush II isn't paying attention, probably because they're
comatose in front of the TV.  So how do we learn to create sustainable
community?  Let's dispense with preaching to the choir and produce some
tools that don't require us to make millionaires of sustainable community
gurus, tools we can pick up and use right away.  This is an area where the
observation phase was over three decades ago.  

Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX