Twitter
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Delicious
Digg
Newsvine
Google
Yahoo
TechnoratiTaking Stock
In America these days, conventional ideas of wealth and security are being turned upon their heads. Large, luxurious cars that once carried us in air-conditioned splendor over well-maintained roads become less seductive with each refueling at today's elevated prices. Roads and infrastructure crumble before our eyes, as our "common wealth" is siphoned off to pay for weapons and wars and tax breaks for the uber-class. Savings dwindle as stocks and bonds and even the US dollar lose value every day. Family homes have lost so much value that, strictly from an accounting point of view, many Americans would be better off walking away from them, rather than continuing to pour money into monthly mortgage payments. And how rational does the prospect of incurring tens of thousands of dollars of debt to cover the cost of a university education for our progeny or ourselves appear when tens of thousands of Americans are losing their jobs every month?
The American way of life -- once described by Vice President Dick Cheney as "non-negotiable" -- isn't working for us anymore. Nor, for the vast majority of us, is it likely to within the foreseeable future.
So, what's to be done? Should we, as a nation, invade other sovereign nations in an attempt to control their petroleum assets? That hasn't worked out well thus far, has it? Should we turn a blind eye to the hungry of the world and press the world's corn and sugar and soybean fields into service to produce biofuels so that we can continue to motor about in our SUVs? Shall we continue to uphold zoning regulations that prevent laundry lines, vegetable gardens, and small businesses from invading our suburban landscapes? Should we continue burn vast quantities of fossil fuels in order to heat our out-sized homes so that we can step into a 72F body of air whenever we throw back our bedcovers in the morning or return after hours or days spent away from home? How long will we continue to send the kids to day care and pay for the fuel and upkeep on two cars so that Mom and Dad can go to work at jobs that barely pay enough to cover expenses?
What is the "cost of living" anyway? What do we actually need to stay alive? Well, we certainly need a fairly regular supply of fuel for our own bodies-carbohydrates enough to keep our brain and muscle cells operational and some additional nutrients to take care of growth and maintenance and repairs. As we are relatively hairless warm-blooded creatures, we need a little extra help, in the form of clothing and/or shelter, to maintain our optimal body temperature-the 98.6F at which the chemical reactions of life processes occur most readily. And it goes without saying that we need breathable air and drinkable water.
Everything else is gravy.
It's quite a challenge for any one individual -- anywhere in the world -- to survive alone. It's even more difficult to survive unassisted while caring for young children. And that is the basic purpose of community: to help people to survive -- by sharing labor, knowledge, skills and resources.
We are awakening now from our long American Dream. The petroleum-fueled, mass-produced lifestyle that Americans have enjoyed for as long as most of us can remember is unlikely to re-manifest itself in the foreseeable future. We need to open our eyes to what survival really requires -- and how necessary community is to that survival. In this new America, the neighbor who raises tomato seedlings and can teach us how to grow them in our particular micro-climate may be more relevant to our lives than the Wal-Mart Super Center twelve miles outside of town. The friend who can help us drain down the water pipes in our unheated upstairs bathroom each winter will be infinitely more valuable than a homeowners insurance policy from State Farm. A local farmer with a functional pickup truck, wagon or a hand-cart who is willing to haul produce to an isolated suburban enclave -- and those who know how to turn that raw produce into something tasty and nutritious and are willing to share those skills with others -- will be central to communities of the future.
Survival will depend, not only upon careful stewardship of our material resources, but also upon cultivation of local sources of knowledge and skill. Most importantly, it will require the nurturing of communities in which we care for one another, in every sense of the word.
Virginia Lockett spent the first 53 years of her life in America. She lives now in Da Nang, Vietnam, where she is happy to eat, sleep, shop, work, and play within the radius defined by the range of her electric motorbike. More about Virginia's life and work can be gleaned from her blog at www.steadyfootsteps.org
12 Comments so far
Show AllThomas More,
"People who judge on such thin information seldom make the right decision."
Exactly. And you should read a bit more carefully. Where did I agree with the author? What I commented on was your presumptive and unsupported statement, of which you still provide no foundation nor merit. And your conclusion as to my agreement with the author perfectly exemplifies your tendency to presume things not in fact.
"Glad to furnish any kind of enlightenment for you no matter what it is."
Again, thanks for revealing your egoistic nature.
And btw, there is nothing more common than folks with limited ability to reason or otherwise incapable of articulating their thoughts constructively to summarily dismiss a thing as complicated. So, while you say you're glad to furnish enlightenment, you just don't. Should we conclude then that said enlightenment exists only in your own mind?
I rather doubt that simply clicking the heels of your ruby slippers together and chanting "There's no place like home" is much of a survival strategy.
I don't know why the specter of social catastrophe is such a strong sell among some of the most committed partisans, right or left...
Community in America? Are you serious?
A much more likely scenario begins with increasingly drastic fluctuations in the price of oil as demand meets and starts to exceed production capacity. Industrialized countries will go to war to secure their access to oil, but production will start to fall off, either due to disruptions in the supply stream due to war, and/or the decreasing productivity of the oil fields exacerbated by rising demand. This will not follow a bell-shaped curve; all of the "easy" oil, readily accessible and relatively close to the surface, is long gone; extracting the remainder will rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns that will require more energy to extract than it will produce. This will result in a "crash and burn" global economic depression that will make October 28th 1929 look like a minor market correction. Industries will shut down, there will be increasingly frequent blackouts and shortages of heating oil and food as an ever-increasing share of increasingly scarce resources are diverted to the war machine, desperately trying to squeeze out just one more quarter's profits for the military industrial complex.
The newly impoverished populace; hungry, cold, permanently unemployed and completely lacking the survival skills necessitated by this new reality, will start to rebel, but will be repressed by the increasingly draconian "emergency measures" of an increasingly Fascist government. Besides the nullification of the Bill of Rights by the PATRIOT Act, George Bush's (who stole the last two elections, and once referred to the Constitution of the United States as "just a goddamned piece of paper") unchallenged use of signing statements allowing him to ignore laws he doesn't like and his unchallenged claim that as commander-in-chief of his fictitious "Global War on Terror" he's entitled to eternal "unitary" (and extraconstitutional) executive powers independent of any neutered congressional or judiciary oversight or challenge, has vacated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, revised the Insurrection Act so as to empower the president to take direct control of the National Guard, encouraged the creation of private mercenary armies like Blackwater (complete with mechanized armor and helicopter gunships, which operates wholly independent of the military command structure and are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice), and awarded Halliburton subsidiary KBR a no-bid, open-ended $385 million contract to build corporate-controlled concentration camps reportedly capable of confining as many as 400,000 people. All that's now required for martial law in the United States is the stroke of an imperial president's pen (regardless of who the Pernicious Plutocratic Patricians in charge decide will be the next president).
As people become more desperate, the social fabric will fray and then quickly unravel as a society awash with firearms that prides itself on "rugged individualism" (actually a synonym for selfishness, self-centeredness, and narcissistic egocentrism) and has always assumed that their privileged position (less than 5% of the world's population but consuming more than 25% of it's resources) is the manifest will of God become increasingly pissed off that the teat's gone dry, abandon any pretense of polite society and start preying upon one another (think "Road Warrior" without gas for the cars, or Baghdad, or Mogadishu). The chaos and violence escalates as Government's span of control contracts and finally disappears altogether as the lights finally go out for the last time.
Game over. Thanks for playing.
cosmobilly July 14th, 2008 9:45 pm
You can find wisdom in simplicity, but you can seldom find wisdom in simplistic answers to complicated problems.
Glad to furnish any kind of enlightenment for you no matter what it is.
As far as the writer, its not surprising to find her attitude what it is considering her life choices and I'm not surprised you agree with her.
People who judge on such thin information seldom make the right decision.
Pax
As regards the part of the article, "It's quite a challenge for any one individual — anywhere in the world — to survive alone. It's even more difficult to survive unassisted while caring for young children. And that is the basic purpose of community: to help people to survive."
Here in the country in which I teach, we recently made comparisoms between the Western individualism and the Asian culture of families living together - sometimes there are four generations living under the same roof.
While there are many positive aspects of living in your own home and away from parents, I find that the benefits of extended families living together outweigh the benefits of individual living. Here, both parents can work because there is always someone at home to care of the children. Also, rent is much more affordable since many more people are helping pay the bills. And in most cases, these aren't small, cramped homes but large houses with room for all. Also, they have no problem sleeping three or four to a room. And you rarely see anybody traveling alone. There are almost always at least two people to a vehicle (the motorbike being the primary source of transportation), and if it is a car, then there are almost always three to four people inside. Bicycles are also widely used and these also often have two children on them.
As with any issue, there are the good and the bad sides. However, here I find much happier and healthier families whose children love their parents in a way I have never seen in Western cultures.
We truly do need each other to survive and to develop strong bonds amongst ourselves. As for myself, I still prefer the "go it alone" attitude, but it is obvious that life is a lot easier when we all help one another.
We still have a couple of hundred years worth of petroleum dream left to go before we run out of fossil fuels. The story is not over quite yet.
Thomas More, your statement is presumptive and completely unsupported.
As for wiser folk, there is generally more truth to be found in simplicity than not. (eg, Occam's Razor)
As for others, the wise learn more from fools than fools from the wise.
But thank you for the revelation... wrt you, not your observation.
Comfortable greedy delusionists will neither alter their lifestyles nor concern themselves with perceived subordinates until catastrophic events force them to do so. Plan your life now around possible future catastrophic events and you'll have a better chance of survival. Remember, madness in individuals is rare but in groups it is the rule and any kind of so called "good" government is, in the long run, predictable and irreversible psychosis. What solutionists really need to ponder is the moral dilemma that awakens when the resultant down-and-out greedy slime and family knocks on their door for help.
A bit simplistic in theory and conclusion.
"Our way of life is not negotiable". Tell that to mother nature dick.
We will also have to drastically change in our diets. Neither wheat nor sugar is likely to be a viable crop where most of us live so we will need to eat what is capable of being grown in our immediate area. Which is...?
Also, population density will need to be evened out. That is, large cities can not grow enough food in the surrounding area to feed the populations living there. So people will have to spread out more evenly across the land. A 'large city' may be 50,000 people. But some areas, such as Arizona, simply will not be able to produce enough food to maintain much of a population at all.
In fact, the viable population of a country such as the U.S.A may be less than 100 million. Possibly far less!