A Goal For 2009

I have decided that I will go an learn a few trade skills - partly for fun and partly because when I retire to my new gentleman's farm I want to be able to do a lot of things for myself. There are several things I have toyed with over the years that I am not particularly good at. My father always seemed to be good and most everything - perhaps this resolution for next year will be dedicated to his memory and they way he always impressed me with "stuff".

What do I plan to learn you might ask?

Well for starters I want to take a course in small engine repair, and one in welding also - I can do a little of both but it has been a long time since I put those skills to work. I also would like to become more proficient at gunsmithing and perhaps even learn to reload my own ammunition - my cousins are good at that. I know guys that can replace and even fabricate broken springs - I would like to be able to do that.

Of course there are many things I need to learn about solar power systems - I do not plan to live off the grid but being a little self-sufficient is in my plans and I would like not to have to pay someone to install it all.

I just subscribed again to Mother Earth News and I am very excited about that. I will probably determine that there are many more things I must add to my list to learn and relearn.

My experience with farming has been limited all these years in the military - consisting of tomato plants in the back yard in the years I was home enough to tend to them. My childhood and teen years were spent under the demanding eye of my father making me work his fields like a slave but I have probably forgotten much of what I once knew. My reading list has slowly gravitated toward the subject and I expect over the coming months that will increase.

It is odd that I always envisioned that I would likely teach after I retired from the military but as the time approaches my desires lean more toward learning traditional tradeskills for my own benefit and hobby. I have been wise and thrifty so needing to work was never in my plans but wanting to be useful is a human requirement.

On a related note, I read a article a few days ago that suggested that young people are duped by the notion that they must go to a four year institution to be successful and perhaps we have a "university bubble". I have always thought as much, standards it seems must diminish with more people accepted and colleges acting essentially like businesses filling up seats.

The article suggested the best thing most young people could do out of high school is learn a trade skill. If the economy tanks more the trend will be to repair instead of replace.

This suggestion makes a great deal of practical sense. I do not believe most college students learn very much anyway - they are not mature enough for higher learning at 18-20. Now if that same kid learned a tradeskill, learned the value of hard work and then later went to a four year college - I suspect they would actually learn something.

Oh yeah - one more goal for 2009 is to mail off for one of those Dr. Div. degrees from the "One Big Church of the Immaculate Prefecture" so y'all have to call me Dr. before I have to call IKANTSPEL "Doctor" (his will be real BTW but it will not matter because mine will arrive in the mail first and as Nathan Bedford Forrest said "firstest with the mostest" is what counts)

Stumble It!

The Way Things Should Be - Home

Joshua's post regarding peak oil spurred my thoughts in a dozen directions. The simple fact is we face problems so enormous as to demand solutions which our politicians in our current system simply cannot conceptualize, much less implement.

As you may well know, I am a paleoconservative. As such every thing of importance to me revolves around just a few things, my religion, my family, my culture and my home. Essentially everything else I think or believe is driven by those priorities. I see the solution to all problems relating directly to the lessons that traditions that respect those four priorities teach us. There really is nothing new under the sun, just new ways of applying old lessons and new ways of thinking tempered with what came before.

I look at the world and I see the same problems as everyone else; with the economy, with a bloated and distant government, politicians that serve only themselves or those that fund them, corporations that are greedy and corrupt, lazy people that will not do for themselves, a culture that consumes too much. The solutions that I see for these ills are where I, and all paleoconservatives, diverge on a separate path in the woods. It is that separate path, I believe, that can make all the difference.

I hold out no hope that man can build a perfect society or cure all societal ills. I am no utopian. However, I believe it is clear that the path we now travel will lead us to a bad end. I see a dystopic future filled with shortages, overpopulation, an angry crowded and dissatisfied population and a heavily centralized government that is essentially forced to act tyrannically simply because it is the only way to maintain control of an untenable situation. Our greed, selfishness, aloofness and lack of foresight will ensure that this is the future our children or their children inherit.

All of the signs are there, over the last 140 years our own government has transformed itself into an entity that no longer serves the people but rules them. Over the last 50 years our landscape has transformed from vast areas of rolling countryside into urban sprawl and the blight of suburbia. We have degenerated from a self-reliant people that could so for themselves into nothing more than the tail-end of a long supply-train of consumer goods. We no longer read important works, think important thoughts or appreciate important things. We have all become consumers, commuters, victims, whiners and gluttons for mindless pop culture.

Why? We have lost our love for permanent things.

I am no lover of government, it is nothing more than a necessary evil at best and a brutal tyrant at worst. However, when things have gone so astray, when the people themselves are clueless as to what is actually wrong what other option but government do we have to turn to for a solution?

No, I did not fall off my rocker, I do not believe that the Federal Government is qualified to create a solution. Our state governments are no better. All of our elected officials, with very rare exceptions, are bought and paid for by the very entities that want to see the status quo remain. So please, don't take me wrong - when I say that government could help restore us to the right path I am not actually giving any credit to the government that currently rules over this impending train wreck. In a later installment of this line of thought I will discuss good government - the sort we need to implement real solutions.

Having lived in Korea for the last two years I have come to appreciate a few things about this place. Koreans do not have subdivisions. City folks live in high rises, people that grow things live outside the city. If you wear a tie to work you live in the city - it is just that simple. What an amazing concept, one we have royally screwed up in the states. Why on Earth should a stock broker, insurance salesman or any other business person, factory worker, etc. live in the "country" and drive to work in an urban area?

Just consider the waste. These people occupy anywhere from .5 to 2 acres of land each and grow nothing more than grass and a few flowers. They get in their automobiles everyday and drive, using gasoline, polluting the air and wasting time that they could spend on more productive pursuits (like spending time with their kids). Along their drive businesses thrive to serve them, restaurants, gas stations etc., taking up more space and employing people to do nothing more than serve people that are destroying the environment and wasting time. What a stupid way to live and what an idiotic way for a society to function.

I love land, I believe land is tied directly to home, hearth, kirk and kin. Land should mean something, it is the sort of thing a family should identify with, love and cherish. The hundreds of thousands of acres occupied by suburbs and the ancillary strip malls and wal-marts that service them mean nothing. These places will be sold when the current owners die - these are not family treasures they are "investments".

People should be free to choose their own destiny and become whatever they want. I do not dislike people that want to work in jobs that are urban in nature. I do not believe a society and culture can long sustain our current lifestyle. These people are not free to destroy in their pusuit of happiness.

My solution to this particular point of our current trouble is simple in concept (obviously hard but not impossible in implementation - with a good and noble government)

1. Land is for those that produce and those that support those that produce. Thus subdivisions, strip mall, interstate mega-fueling stations on every exit all must go.
   
2. If you really want to own land and have another job - you must at the least produce enough for your family and forget about daily commutes - leverage technology. This means you have to own more than half an acre obviously.
   
3. Urban planning is almost nonexistent in the US, it happens after the fact and is corrupted by greed and commercial interest. To do this right urban areas need to consolidate (i.e. absorb the influx from the former suburbs) and plan to expand over time in a logical and controlled manner. Some cities I have visited in the Persian Gulf region have successfully planned this sort of current and future growth.
   
4. Small towns, in the country are acceptable and required but an overall plan would prevent these areas from becoming urban areas - if you want to build a high rise move to the metro.
   
5. Urban areas just do not need a lot of cars running around - why on Earth do you need that? There are simply too many other economical and environmentally friendly options for the city dwellers.
   

Gosh you say, sounds grand but to implement this would cause a great upheaval. Yes it would, but sometimes lazy, greedy scoundrels need to be kicked in the pants. I cannot describe suburbanites with any nicer words. Pay them for their "homes" offer incentives for folks to build them new homes in high rises near where they work, invest in some real urban planning, develop robust mass transit systems within the cities and between the cities and make it financially impossible (too expensive) for anyone to buck the system.

Would life be wonderful and rosy in the cities? No, but what is the alternative? Someday change will come whether we plan for it or not. Someday the option of commuting to work will be cost prohibitive simply because the resources are too scarce. The urban areas will continue to expand into the country, not in a planned and logical way but willy-nilly as we see now. Some people enjoy city life, they are naturally disposed to it. There is a way to fashion a city in a palatable and sustainable way that would be for more appealing than the bleak post peak-oil cities I envision.

What we are doing now just will not work and to continue to do it would be foolish.

Stumble It!

Mr. Wendell Berry

Joshua reminds me of my admiration for Wendell Berry

Below I offer a few quotes but I highly recommend you read his entire body of work - so many good words, so little time. (Read Compromise, Hell! if you read nothing else.)

"There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the American flag when we tolerate, encourage, and as a daily business promote the desecration of the Country for which it stands."

"What I stand for is what I stand on."

"The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it."

"We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all— by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians— be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us."

"We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally."

"What could be more absurd, to begin with, than our attitude of high moral outrage against other nations for manufacturing the selfsame weapons that we manufacture? The difference, as our leaders say, is that we will use these weapons virtuously, whereas our enemies will use them maliciously—a proposition that too readily conforms to a proposition of much less dignity: we will use them in our interest, whereas our enemies will use them in theirs."

"Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call “the economy” or “the free market” is less and less distinguishable from warfare. For about half of the last century, we worried about world conquest by international communism. Now with less worry (so far) we are witnessing world conquest by international capitalism. Though its political means are milder (so far) than those of communism, this newly internationalized capitalism may prove even more destructive of human cultures and communities, of freedom, and of nature. Its tendency is just as much toward total dominance and control."

"The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful."

"Today, local economies are being destroyed by the 'pluralistic,' displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place."

Stumble It!