Re: RE: Who's Stepping Up To The Plate?


Paco contributed: As it is, many/most Americans don't have values grounded in gardening...(snip)...During a Republican convention, I believe for G. Bush Sr, they had an African American senator boast how he "... a black man, got off the farm he grew up on to make it in this world, and isn't America great?" (It was a vulgar racial prop if you asked me). So the farm and being a farmer is something to reject and get away from...

Patrick counters: Not just politicians, not just right-wingers & not just Americans either. After all, didnt Marx promise to release peasant workers from "the idiocy of rural life"? All of our contemporary world ideologies are "anti-nurturer" with nurturers defined as caregivers- either childcare; healthcare or earthcare (farmers being the latter). Thats Wendell Barry's theory, btw, not mine.

As we speak, ex farmers in Russia & China are deserting the former Kolkhozi & peoples communes in droves for 60% unemployment in the city because they think they that life prospects are better there. Ditto for campesinos in Mexico, felahin in Egypt & multitudes of small farmers in Africa.

My own home farm (a kibbutz outside of Jerusalem) is actually rented out & my former partners are all working at off-farm puruits.

When I read my own spiritual sources like the Torah & Talmud, I see passages like: "If you are planting a tree when the messiah comes, finish planting the tree & then go greet the messiah". There is similar wisdom in the holy Koran & in the works of Homer also. We have gotten far, far away from our wisdom....

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