Exit Strategy: Part II

Only two dozen men~those who journeyed to the moon~have seen this view of Earth. You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."
~Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut

Someone posted this picture and quote on Facebook the other day, and I couldn’t help but repost it. Immediately. Because I’m just sick inside, and I honestly don’t think I’m alone.

Perhaps because I live a relatively closed off life, I think I see things differently. I see them just the way this astronaut saw them at that moment – from a place far removed from the turmoil in the trees, perched on a cliff far outside the forest. I see a bigger picture – one divorced from all the divisions among humankind as they proceed to screw up a perfectly good planet.

Understanding that I, too, am one of these humans, I am quite prepared to take responsibility for my part in all this. And since I am, it gives me the right to pose the same question to every one of my fellow humans.

Question one for you to ponder: Are all men created equal, as defined by either your Creator, your religion, your government or your constitution?

Well, no matter what camp you come from, if you are an authentic person, you really have to answer yes. Even an atheist will have to give biological credit to the function of the species. Every human is an amazing work of art; an amazing machine, and has a seeming limitless potential.

Then how is it we can give a mere pitiful glance in the direction of Somali parents having to abandon their dying children in the desert, and express pure outrage over someone wanting to take away your union’s collective bargaining rights?

How is it that we can eat our continental breakfast while reading about the riots in London, but press every panic button on the controls when a hurricane comes ashore and threatens our real estate? 

How can we view a few losses to our portfolio as something on par with having no food, no water, no nation to call home?

Obviously, we are affected by what is in the sphere of our influence, the fabric of OUR lives. But the fact is that what we’ve all been trained to do now for the last generation or so in America is to believe that we are somehow more important than other people. Not just us as a nation – no – us individually. And while we are generous to a financial fault at “helping” these third world nations, we are not doing it because we think it’s really all that important, and we certainly don’t do it correctly. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to send Hitler some money to care for the Jews in the concentration camps, now, does it?

But let’s back up the train. Let me guess that you read this and find yourself exempt. No – not me! I am the epitome of a caring, Christian, loving, person, who cares about the world situation! Yeah…me, too. But honestly, I will be far more freaked out when my cell phone bill arrives with an extra $50 on it than I will be over reading about a widow who left two of her not-quite-dead children under a tree “to their God”, because she only had enough water for the baby on her hip.

This is simply not REAL to me. It’s not happening in my back yard – hell, it’s not even on my continent! If it happened in America, we would tell the bitch she had no excuse and we’d sic Child Social Services on her ass and throw her in jail! Why? Because we have access to things like, oh, food and water. When was the last time YOU were utterly grateful for that?

And now we have…Uh-oh…moral relativism. Is it EVER right to leave your sick, dying children under a tree and keep walking? Think with me now my logical friends: It will depend on the variables within the circumstances! One woman we want to embrace and comfort – the other we want to crucify and see burn in eternal hell. For the same act.

Now this is where I come in. I’m a writer. It’s what I DO. And what I can do within the scope of my art is generate feeling in you. I can write the above story in any setting I want, and I can make you mad as hell, or make you cry your eyes out. I can manipulate the words, the context, the quotes I use…the possibilities are endless to an author.

As such, however, I have to ask myself from time to time, “Am I being honest?” Is what I am writing serving a nobler purpose on the planet? Or am I just fearmongering? Am I spiteful, mean, arrogant, rude? Am I seeking to ruffle feathers or calm a sea? And it goes even further than that. Let me explain.

I spent 15 years separated from the main stream of society. I watched only Packer games on TV (as this was through the 90s, and they were winning). I was living a conservative, Christian, communal, self-sufficient lifestyle. I had a whole bunch of kids. We preached to a whole lot of other Christians. But we remained separate. I have always been a reader, but certain subjects are off-limits to a good, practicing Christian. So for years we dined on a smorgasbord of conservative, Christian literature and recorded media. A steady diet of the Bible and thou shalls and thou-shalt-nots.

Then, for reasons outside the scope of this writing, it fell apart and I found myself on the wrong end of the Christian gun. Imagine my dismay when I found that virtually everything we read, believed and lived was only one side of the picture.

“No excuse for divorce”  doesn’t quite roll off the preaching tongue as well when you are the one who tripped and fell over a legitimate reason to end your marriage.

“Never a reason for abortion” comes looking for its validation when it’s YOUR kid that comes home raped and pregnant and says she doesn’t want to carry the child. Suddenly, YOU are the one accosted at the clinic for merely seeking information. It’s quite the mind-fuck to run into your past self on the picket line, let me tell you.  

Oh – this list is endless. But you see, I read it, and I believed it. I swallowed it without chewing. I was, in fact, manipulated by the writings of others, owing to the fact that I never set foot in the “other camp”. All I knew about “them” was what I was taught about “them”, whoever “them” may be.

Love the episode of South Park (which, by the way, critical thinkers owe it to themselves to watch a few episodes, despite is crassness) where the neighborhood know-it-all confidently states, “Having never done drugs, I KNOW they are bad!”

I came to a realization that the mindset that shaped my life to that point has been myopic at best, and terribly judgmental and harmful at worst. It propagated an “Us vs. Them” mentality that truly has no place in the human world. We are ALL…US. And I also had to accept that my warped education had everything to do with a steady diet of the same stuff – day in and day out, wrapped in ever-so-humble packages of biased writings with God-credited jimmies sprinkled on top.

So let me ask you…how do you think that made me feel, knowing that I could be so snowed by what I read? What I ended up believing? We believe what we read, and we judge before we have all the facts, don’t we?  

Lest you do not think this is true of yourself, let me ask you what your feelings are on the way the President is handling the current financial crisis we face? How about the stock market? How about Lindsay Lohan, or whatever fallen starlet is in the news this week? All I need to do is read some of the feedback on the news feeds to see that we all have developed an opinion, one way or another. But ask yourself – how did I come to this opinion? Do you KNOW Mr. Obama? Have you spoken with him? Did YOU get a chance to sit down and listen to him explain what he is or was thinking at any given time? I doubt it. Do you know if he’s a really upstanding guy with compassion, or an abject asshole? No – you don’t. You know only what you have been told. What you have read. If you read something from a supporting journalist, he’s the new Messiah. If you read something from the right, he’s the antichrist. The fact is, you do not have enough facts to know what his personal motives are for anything.

And the same is true for most of what you see, read, and hear in the media. And you have bought it. And you have sold it – on your Facebook pages, at your kitchen tables, to your children. My kids came home from school outraged about what Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wanted to do with the unions to trim the budget. But did ANY of them even know how a union functions? Nope. But apparently their teacher did, and she let all of her students know that not only was SHE right, but that Scott Walker was wrong. About what, they weren’t quite sure, but the mood in school that day was dour, and therefore it HAD to be true.

I read another post on Facebook today that had to do with lying: “Lying has to be one of the most destructive and deliberate forms of manipulation there is. It destroys trust. It destroys friendships, families and relationships. It destroys credibility. It shows contempt, disrespect and/or hatred for others.”

I couldn’t agree more – and my next thought, which I elected not to post was, “And my, how our government and media lead the way for us to do it better and better all the time.”

Now bear in mind that I am what I fondly think of as a political atheist. I think (my opinion, here) that career politicians are NOT the ones for ANY job in politics. My solution to so much of what ails this country is for our representatives to serve pro bono. Oh, sure – give them a stipend so they can do their business in Washington, but I’m thinking that means meals catered by Doris’ Chuck Wagon Catering, accommodations at the Super 8 and coach class airline tickets. Then we will see who REALLY wants to represent YOU.

The reality of this is that no one in politics represents you as long as their job represents that by which they maintain their standard of living. Their first priority is to maintain their job. And if they have to suck up to the rich guys who pay for their campaigns to keep their job, then they WILL do this. It’s not like I’m making this up. It’s the nature of the beast.

They will sit and discuss the policies affecting our 1-star citizenry at 5-star restaurants. They are in touch with “the people” alright – when seen from the lofty hills of Washington as a mob – as cattle – as sheep – as that which they must keep happy in order to keep order. They don’t know YOU, your address, your little street, your job, your family. Nope – you are part of the collective crowd. They don’t care about your union or your insurance. They care only about how to keep the member of their contributing sponsors and party leadership happy. Unions contribute to Democrats, so the democratic candidate has to be “pro-union”. It doesn’t matter if half the constituency is working in the private sector. The big business in this country is largely Republican – and thus would rather not have their taxes raised if they are to donate as generously to the republican candidate – and therefore, the pressure to vote against taxation of the “rich” is in their best interest. None of their decisions are necessarily in our best interest.  

In fact, the point I am making is that we have ALL been duped and LIED TO. Whatever side of the line you fall on, you’ve been suckered and scammed. You’ve been lead to believe that this nation is on the mend, rebounding, that all this consumerism is a good thing – and just keep on consuming! That we are America and that we will go happily on forever and ever!  As if the history of the world has no fallen empires in the story? 

When you look at all the wars that we are currently engaged in – and I define war as anywhere you feel you need to put our military muscle – you have to wonder why? Whose idea was that? Did your congressman or Senator send out a little flyer and ask whether or not you were really in favor of sending our troops into yet another country to engage in business that is decidedly NOT ours? Naw – they just served you up another American Idol episode, and you didn’t think about it. No – they are not out of touch with us, people. They know exactly where we will be on any given evening: Glued to the tube, or the news – and force feeding you commercials that will undermine your very person, not to mention your way of life.

Ever wonder why you don’t see commercials for super luxury items? Because the people who buy them aren’t watching TV! They are still at the office at 10 p.m. swinging one more deal, or sleeping because a day in their life starts early. You don’t see John Deere Tractors advertised either. Because farmers who need them and can buy them don’t have time to watch TV either. No – they know the demographic, and if YOU are among the proletariat who is engrossed in the evening news, the nightly television faire, and the commercials therein – might I suggest that it might be time for a little self-examination?

You are being lied to. You are being manipulated. Read the above quote on lying to find out what those who are lying to you are actually doing. And let me ask you…are you okay with that?

In more than one family in this nation, there are across the table a democratic teacher, whose paycheck has been eaten into in unexpected ways, and a republican real estate broker, whose business is down – due to no fault of his own – a full 80%, and whose tax bracket has him strapped to pay his taxes. Both of whom just want to keep food on the table and the kids in decent shoes and clothes.   One accuses the other’s party of attempts at sabotaging the other. And so it goes on, as they both spout the rhetoric of the current media bias. And this is where I want to do an astronaut maneuver, grab them both by the scruff and zip them a quarter-million miles away to see what I see: We are all on the same team!! What are you doing by perpetuating the idea that it’s “us” against “them”? There is no them! There is only US.

I will stop short of going on about a conspiratorialist view of history and the future…educate yourself and draw your own conclusions about that. But my original question to you, my fellow human being, what is YOUR responsibility in all of this?

No, you and I don’t run the nation. People like me can barely run their own household, much less a municipality. But what IS our role in all of this? What can we realistically do to try and turn this tide? Stay tuned for the next segment…this is where it gets interesting!   

Exit Strategy

A Facebook friend quipped the other day, “Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to a teenager…total disaster!”

Well, I thought about that for a minute, and could not help but respond back: “Since the ride is in progress, perhaps we should be thinking about an exit strategy.”

This comment was like a little cherry on top of a very sad cake that has been in the making for quite some time, and I just can’t keep my thoughts on the matter to myself anymore, so at the risk of sounding like Harold Camping, might I suggest that the end – while perhaps not “at hand” on any given predicted day – is in sight. The end of what, you might ask? Let me borrow the phrase from my survivalist friends: TEOTWAWKI: The End of The World As We Know It.

Let me just bring a few things to light, and issue a few disclaimers about my own sanity and rationality.

If you know me personally, you are probably aware that I recently closed my business – a little store on the edge of town in a community of about 35,000 people. It was a liquidation store, where I would buy all the leftover goods from the major chain stores by the truckload, and resell them to the fine people of this town at about half of what Wal-Mart sells them for. I also had a section of the store dedicated to what has become known as “Dent and Bent” groceries. These are what your supermarket throws away daily, as we highly educated people snub the box of cereal or crackers because there is a magic date at the top that suggests the food is no good any more. Or because the box got bent, or a can got dented, and since we are paying such top dollar for our food, we reject these. The fact that we are so gullible about the “quality” of our food, and treat the “Best if used by date” as if it were the date upon which food becomes poisonous, and is suddenly a national   health hazard is another topic for another blog – but suffice to say, we have the safest, most sanitized food in the world, and if you have one of these stores near you, you would do well to take advantage of it.

In any event, when I opened that store in 2007, we did a booming business. Who doesn’t like a deal? We expanded in 2008, and floated happily through 2009, and celebrated what looked like it would be a successful 2010.  However, life does not always go as expected.

Oh, the store did fine – provided someone was there at the wheel. And when my son’s diagnosis of Duchenne muscular dystrophy informed us that his health was on a down-turn, headed toward what is, for all intents and purposes, a quadriplegic state, my time at the store became less and less. Mark did a lot of the work – and my one hired employee was absolutely amazing in keeping our little ship afloat. But the hard cold fact was that I could not keep up with the demands in both camps. By the time September rolled around, and my son needed spinal fusion from his neck to his butt, it looked like we might be headed toward the end of the line.

I put the store up for sale, but the few people who were feeling like the actually wanted to start a business in this gloomy economy took one look at all the work that it takes to keep a store with over 10,000 items at any given time well stocked and open…when they realized that running your own business is a 24/7 kind of thing, to which you are indeed married, well, it didn’t sell. By the time January rolled around, we knew it was time, and we implemented what was lurking there in the business plan since 2007: Our exit strategy.

First rule of any business venture is to have a plan, and part of that plan is the part you would rather not contemplate, but if you have a business brain in your head you will put aside your sentimentality, and realize that business is business – and things do not always go as planned. For me it was family health issues. For some, it’s poor financial management. For some, it’s the economy, or the competition, but whatever it is, you need to have in your lead suitcase a little map that tells you when you need to leave so that your finances remain intact. A little magic number, perhaps, that says when we reach this, we will have to pull up stakes. To save that which remains, to salvage what is left, to sell out….whatever it may be for your particular endeavor – it’s time to close the chapter, cut your losses, and move on. Can ANYONE tell me this is NOT prudent?

My little business had a modest 5-figure line of credit. I had decided that if I could not pay anything on the principal after a number of months, then I would have to bail. At no time did I ever consider not paying principle AND interest on my bigger 5-figure note. It would never occur to me to borrow money to pay my employee. If we could not afford to pay her – and she was worth her weight in gold! – then I would have to take over those duties myself – and that would require my stunt double, who is as booked as I am.

And so, we restructured.  We closed up shop and brought the business home, and now run it completely on-line, with a whole new business plan, including a new, improved exit strategy.

But now – if you would, indulge me in what might have happened if I ran my business the way our government is running OUR country. I would keep spending – and keep borrowing. I would have hired a slew of employees that I could not afford, and would borrow money to pay them. If my store only brought in $10,000 in a month, and I paid out $15,000 in bills, there should be some serious discussion about where we could cut back, don’t you think? But no – in this case, I just keep going back to the bank and getting my credit limit raised, and pay nothing on the principle, and borrow more money to pay my initial note. If the banker balks, I tap into my retirement account. I max out every credit card I’ve got, and pay nothing but interest on what I have borrowed, because the hard, cold fact is I am not making enough money to pay even the basic overhead of inventory, rent, utilities, and employees, much less to pay interest on the ever increasing debt.  So, at $10,000 a month income – and now $100,000 a month out-go in interest alone…what kind of business person am I? Let’s try on SUCCINT FAILURE for starters.

Now, for the Gazillion Dollar question: What are the odds I will EVER – I mean EVER – get out of debt and pay this all back AND (we can dream, can’t we) turn a profit? Come on, surely there is a financial wizard out there who is still in touch with reality who can cook my books to make it happen, can’t they?

Well, sure! They are all working for your government – and they make fun appearances on the national news every now and again, assuring us that there is a rebound in our economy; that unemployment is falling, that if you all just take it easy, happy days will be here again in no time. Your President just told you that this whole scenario is just some “bumps in the road”.  My politically correct reaction is to clear my throat, swallow hard when I hear that and inquire, “Is that so?”  The real me steps back from the screen with an incredulous stare and asks, “Are you fucking kidding me?” My intelligence is insulted – and yours should be too.

Since we already four pages into this, let me just take the blunt route and ask you how do you think this will play out? How long do you think we can keep this going with no money? Seriously – stop and really, really THINK about it. Because if you choose not to – and I totally understand why you would NOT want to – you will probably die. Sound melodramatic? Then you have not truly thought about it. You are buying into the bullshit that they are feeding you on TV about how everything is really fine, under control, “bumps in the road” as it were…your money is safe, your borders are secure, your job is still there, the grocery stores are still full – despite gas prices on the rise, it’s business as usual and will continue to be that way for as long as you live, and your children live, and your children’s children. Happy, happy, happy!!

Have you learned nothing from history? There have been, throughout the history of the world, societies just as content and prosperous as we are who were cleared from the map in no time. Don’t think these were some primitive tribes, scuffling in the dirt. Do you think the Jewish population of Germany were a bunch of idiots? We see them now in black and white footage, naked and emaciated and being herded into camps – but did it ever occur to you that a short time prior to that they were dining as Bistros that rival our finest here? That they had beautiful belongings decorating lovely homes…that they were people at every stage of life – young families, middle aged parents, grandparents, with happy lives and enough to eat. In their case, it was a government gone wrong that brought them to the brink of genocide. But they were just as real as you and I. they had the same thoughts, feelings, emotions, loved, cried, laughed…and relied on a government to keep them safe and prosperous.

But that’s only one scenario. Anyone care to ask the survivors of the Japanese Tsunami or Missouri tornado what matters most? Talk about a reality check, courtesy of Mother Earth. And those are just two of the ways she has gently reminded us that we are NOT greater than nature – we are, in fact, a part of it. Remember? From dust we came, and to dust we shall return. Every molecule in your being has its origin in her, and she can reclaim it pretty much any time, and does not require your permission to do so.

Then there is the threat of other governments upon whom we depend. You think gas is pricey now? If the folks in the Middle East get in a pissing match – with or without US poking that bear with a stick – watch them soar off the charts and out of the stratosphere. Think that might affect your budget?

There’s the little fact of the dollar being the world reserve currency. But have you noticed that your dollar is becoming worth slightly less these days? You THINK food prices are rising. Nope – and egg is still and egg, and a gallon of milk is still a gallon of milk. But in reality it is your dollar that is getting smaller, and smaller, so it takes a lot more of them to buy the stuff you need to keep food on your table. A relative of mine went to Australia recently, and traded their dollars for the Aussie variety on the way in for $1.03. A week later, they traded them back for $1.15. That’s a fairly big drop in just a week. And it fluctuates daily, like a flag in the breeze. There was a time here – yes, on our own soil – when certain money became totally and completely worthless overnight. Ask anyone who was the inheritor of a chest full of confederate bills. If you think it can’t happen again in some way, you are in denial. And it will be to your own hurt.

There you have the three scenarios that can level the world playing field, and take you and yours with it. And to be honest, who can know which will take center stage as the years go by? Who cares? The hard and cold fact is that something WILL happen – if not in your lifetime, your children’s – or your grandchildren’s…and my question to you is what are we teaching them today that will see them through what promises to be a very, very difficult time?

The school in my town needed to cut the budget – so what did the axe? Home Ec. Again – whose brilliance was on display in THAT move? I came to the realization recently that my own daughters do not know how to properly measure flour, or even make a decent batch of cookies without a recipe. They did not know what leavening was, what kinds there were, or the purpose they serve. They have no clue how to plant or tend a garden, and sadder still, no desire to do so, and no reason to even contemplate the necessity of it.

And lest we think of Home Economics as merely cooking brownies and cookies – it should actually include a home budget. My graduate this year has no clue how to figure out interest rates on a car purchase, much less real estate. Auto insurance is seen as nothing more than a bill that needs to be paid. They do not know what a deductible is. They have almost zero comprehension of what a credit report is, how to get one, maintain one, and the importance of having one in today’s economy. Do you? Do yours? I say this to MY shame – because I have been relying on an educational system to teach them all these survival skills in addition to reading and writing – while I pursue the struggle for the legal tender needed to pay for their food, shelter and clothing.

 I see the graduates today, and I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling like standing up and applauding an accomplishment. They haven’t learned anything that will truly help them in a world that is crumbling under their feet. They just stuck it out for the required 12 years. Whoop-de-do…like they had a choice with the truancy laws being what they are. So, I’ll celebrate with my “graduate” this year much like you would celebrate the end of an incarceration. Good for you…back to the real world now, where you will no doubt find that your recent education has netted you nothing. In some cases, they cannot even spell properly, or read anything heavier than the lyrics to a song on YouTube. They don’t want to. They want to be entertained. I honestly can’t say when education stopped actually educating – but with my 2.25 years of high school, I came out WAY ahead of where the four-year grads are today – thanks in part to one fantastic teacher who encouraged me to actually think as I learned.

Again, the educational failure is another blog also – but for my purposes here today, it is sufficient to say that should us Boomers be so lucky as to never see another war, famine, disease, or natural disaster in our lifetime, our children most likely will – and they are in no way equipped to handle it. And if we are not so lucky – an honest appraisal of our own lives will reveal in neon letters: Neither are we.

I don’t spill all this today as someone who has some answer to this dilemma – and it IS a dilemma. I am throwing this out there as a question to my fellow man: Hey…realistically, there is some very nasty shit that is certainly going to hit the fan, and more likely sooner than later. What are YOU gonna do about it? Because I have been giving it a lot of thought, and I’m coming up with a big fat question mark. Maybe we could pool some thoughts here?

Not that I am uneducated in survival to a small degree. I’ve spent my time obsessing over it in time past, when the Christian platform I was standing on demanded that we prepare for TEOTWAWKI. We moved to the country – because we could afford to. We banded together with a few good people, and raised our own food. We had a years worth of food and paper products stored up, a house wired for generator power, an acre garden, a barnful of critters for eggs, milk and meat. Thousands of canning jars, a library full of How-To books and an impressive armory. But unfortunately, when you attach TEOTWAWKI to a religion, one size does not fit all, and my personal population explosion taxed me to the –nth degree. Homeschooling five, three in diapers, one on the way, and heart cries that went unheard lead me to a Kamikaze move that ended it all, and I moved back to the city with no regrets.

I’ve subsequently lived a life-time or two – and the world situation does not need a religious interpretation. In fact, I’m looking at it right now strictly from a financial perspective – which includes all kinds of irrefutable facts. No guess work, here. Our house of cards is shaking in the wind, and although I happen to be on the bottom of it, it’s causing some serious soul-searching.

Ignoring it – which I have done for a number of years – is not making it go away. It is not getting better. Let me just say it for the record: ALL IS NOT WELL.

If you have the mistaken idea that this political leader or that one can fix this, you are not grounded in reality. Check-mate is check mate.

And it’s not that I don’t have a spiritual perspective – but that is mine, and you need to have your own. I will say, however, that if you are relying on a Third Party Abstract to save you should things get ugly, you have a rude awakening coming. Ask the recent victims of nature’s wrath. We cannot “blame” God as we understand it – we can only seek solace from our position in the rubble. God as I understand it is not going to deliver us from “evil” we have brought upon ourselves. In my opinion, we have simply forgotten who we are, and what we are. Our spirits have an origin in the spirit realm – but the bodies that host us are dependent upon the Earth from which we came, and to which we shall return. We are also dependent upon the other people in the sphere of our influence, their attitudes and actions. Every spiritual system and religion as far as I know it has some creedo which encourages us to live lives of peace, goodness, and kindness, and in harmony with the earth we live upon.

Being a voracious reader with an intense love of learning, I’ve become a bit of an anthropology buff these days. I’ve enjoyed reading how we began – both here in my America, as well as the rest of the globe. It seems to me, that our far-off ancestors found all that they needed to survive within the provisions of the planet. They had a view that we were, in fact, a PART of nature – and not somehow above it. All religions had their basis in this at one point or another. “Subduing” the earth had nothing to do with beating into submission to our “superior” knowledge. It had everything to do with organizing the elements so that they benefited us without harm to either.

Thomas E. Mails, chief contributor to the information regarding Native Americans for the movie “Dances with Wolves” has written several books about this very subject, and had a very interesting point. In his book regarding the Hopi Prophecies, “The HOPI Survival Kit”, he states, “Even though we know that there were at least twenty million natives in South and Middle America, and ten million in North America – surely enough to make a mess somewhere – when the first explorers arrived here they marveled at how pristine everything was. This was due to the Native attitude regarding the rest of creation. They saw themselves as a part of it, as blended with it, and not something separate and superior. Under these circumstances one does not wantonly litter or destroy. Europeans had, and still have, trouble coming to grips with this kind of behavior. …where conquests are concerned, we have not been able to identify ourselves with a people who would by nature treat nature as an equal.”

There was a time when we understood this, and in fact, movies like Dances with Wolves and Native American culture appeal to a very broad audience because I believe that somewhere inside of us we miss this. We miss the fact that living simply WAS life. We had cultures of people that consisted of tribes, clans, and families. We knew where we belonged within such, and as a result had no significant problems with displace, depressed, or discarded people. Their religious ceremonies were designed to keep them in touch with the earth; planting, and harvest, and thanksgiving and a period of rest and contemplation. This was LIFE. And it was good.

Somewhere along the line, we drifted. We foisted upon the natives beliefs and ideas that were not theirs. To offer a differing belief system would have been one thing – but we insisted they discard theirs for ours – at gun-point. Yes – being currently immersed in Native American studies, this is at the front and center of my brain – but this current line of research is my feeble attempt at making some sense out of all that is sitting in front of me today.

Look at how this has worked out for us here, in the long run. We replaced our involvement with the land, and put ourselves in a position of having to now purchase everything that we used to be able to provide for ourselves and our families and villages. Those us who still enjoy digging in the dirt now do so as a hobby relegated to the weekend, when we are not at “work”, earning money so that we can pay for our food, our clothes, our shelter, our heat, our electricity, our water. Our upwardly mobile progress has not only put us out of a job – it has put us out of our very life.

Funny how we tell people who squander time in what we deem frivolous ways to “get a life”. None us have the life that we were granted by our Creator. If I don’t come up with enough money – my water gets shut off. If I don’t have enough money from whatever my “job” is that replaced my own self sufficiency, I’m screwed. No heat, no lights, no food, no gas…the list goes on indefinitely, until you have what we see in the cities all around us: People who have become totally dependent on the government for their subsistence. They can’t even have a garden, or chickens, or a milk cow. They are quite simply, fucked.

How did we allow this to happen? Did we not see that we have done to the initial human unit? Humans lived, as I said, since time began, in groups. Tribes, clans, villages, families. Everyone had a part – a purpose – and that was to the good and benefit of the whole. Each one knew their place – and learned a skill or skills to contribute to the good of the whole. We shared. We cared. We respected our elders, and taught the children to do so also. We accomplished this together – we worked together, played together, prayed together, laughed together, mourned together. But with the advent of “new and better things”, we separated ourselves out. In America, we English saw the Native population, and spurned them for their primitiveness. And while they had their own unique sets of tribal problems, none of them involved “progress”, or destroying water sources or other natural resources. There was enough for everyone. If we simply look within the tribal life, we saw people living a life that actually worked – for centuries. But with more, and better, and stronger, and mechanized, and faster, we did away with not only a great deal of difficult laborious work – but we did away with the need for other people.

I find it interesting that the Christian religion and it’s political spokespersons today will freak out about gay marriage, or “living in sin”, touting that the Man-Woman-Child family is the epitome of the human unit of measure. But look back a bit further, will you? It used to be families, within clans, within villages, within tribes, within races. What happened to the unity of race? The existence of tribes? The cohesiveness and community of villages? The interdependence and support of a clan? You mean to say all we have left is family? No wonder they are geeking out over the loss of that! Apparently they have noticed – finally – that we have essentially eliminated that, too, and we are down to individual people, where it’s every man for himself. Take a look around you! People are so lonely – depressed – sad. We are isolated from one another to such a high degree…and it’s been that way long enough for us to consider this the norm.

And we are teaching this to our children.

In fact, when we moved out to the country, and lived in community, we were considered very, very strange by most. A cult, to be sure. But for those who hung out with us long enough to know us, despite a faulty base, we had a lot of fun, a lot of unity, a lot of abundance, a lot of support. We also had a lot of work, but each one did their part, and at the end of a day we shared an abundant home-grown meal together, prepared by the women while the men worked outside. It was a small sample of days, eras, people groups – long gone.  And today, when I look back on it, I realize how blessed I was to have a taste or raising a family in true community.

It has dawned on me in the course of my studies, that this is not a “problem” – for by its nature, a problem is something that has a solution. It is clearly a dilemma – something for which there is no “right” answer.   

To be continued...