Like everything I do, it's never enough.

So it's been a really long time since I've written.  Ah well, not too many people to disappoint here. :)  I've been reading again finally, (another major benefit of my getting fired last fall) and have had the opportunity to read several books that address the consumptive western lifestyle that is so ubiquitous to the US that we don't even see it as a problem anymore, or how terribly unsustainable it is. 

The most recent book that I've nearly finished is, "The Revolution Will Not be Microwaved."  It's probably the most terrifying book I've ever read.  It illustrates how everything family farms in the midwest to small farmers in Africa have been systematically destroyed by big business, government, and "free trade."  Nothing in Capitalism is ever free.

Here in the States we're so cheap.  Not interested in value, not interested in quality, but we're interested in cheap.  Manufactured goods cost a lot of money.  Food cost a lot of money.  A much greater percentage of our incomes went to food in the past.  But look what we've given up in our quest for cheap.  We've given up our jobs (because they all got shipped overseas), and as a result we've given up good pensions, good livelihoods, our middle class, even.  We've given up our health to processed foods, to a total separation of how our food gets to our plates.  We've given up our health in servitude to the jobs we do have in the form of long commutes, sedentary lifestyles, and pollution.  We've given up on farmers and landowners rendering them unable to function independently from the corporate machines that dictate what plants we can have, how they're genetically modified, etc.  These all seem like high prices to pay for "cheap stuff."

I'm still trying to find my place in all of this.  I'm not equipped to sever myself from the industrialized food system, or the consumer economy as I rely on one to survive in the other.  But in the greater context of a nation that is increasingly unskilled and idle, with mounting debt and political denial, something will have to give, and I fear that if we lose the basic skills of how to take care of ourselves, we will have a grim future ahead of us.