Battle for a Place in the Sun

I want to make you aware of the precarious nature of our lives as a result of the industrialization of agriculture in America. I hope you will take your re-oriented consciousness and do what you can, to contribute to what needs to be done.

The collective consciousness we need is a consciousness of the sun. We take the sun for granted. Does that sound crazy? Maybe it would be more accurate to say that we take our right to a place in the sun, for granted. It’s effectively the same thing.

The sun is the first source of energy. It is the source of our very existence. But we have permitted a tiny elite to take over food production. Industrial agriculture is essentially a monopoly on places in the sun. In Greek mythology, this would be analogous to Hades, god of death and wealth, controlling Demeter, goddess of agriculture — and not just for part of the year, during fall and winter, but all year long. Hell has taken over the planet, and wants to cover it with genetically engineered monocultures.

In the 1930s, the Soviet government attacked the Ukrainian farmers, and somewhere between 7 million to 11 million Ukrainians were killed. Despite the human cost, Ukrainian food production has recovered. You can find food gardens in front of urban apartments in Ukraine. Ordinary Ukrainians own “dachas” where they can go grow gardens and buy meat from the peasants. Ukrainian peasants sell food on the sidewalks and food bazaars in Ukrainian cities.

As terrible as the Ukrainian famine was, industrial agriculture makes the United States far more vulnerable to mass famine. Fewer than 1 percent of our population produces the food for the rest. That 1 percent’s activities are controlled by an even tinier elite. This is a highly centralized system, which grants enormous power to those who have access to the controls at the top.

Imagine that our rulers decide, like Stalin did, to murder millions of us with planned starvation. Perhaps they want to speed up the process of replacing us with grateful, obedient brown people. Yes, they are that evil. That is exactly what they are already doing in slow motion. They just don’t see an angle in speeding up the process. Yet. Not Ukrainians, not Russians, but Americans can be “starved out” by just shutting down the highways.

Demeter

A more likely scenario is the breakdown of the current system. We know that it is politically, demographically, economically, and environmentally unsustainable. We know it will fail. We just don’t know when.

Most Americans take their place in the sun for granted. The supermarkets overflow with oil-fueled abundance — and tremendous waste. This is not sustainable. When the system fails, the supermarket shelves will empty rapidly. Your paper money and checks and credit cards won’t buy you anything, and you can’t eat them. What will you do? It takes three months to starve to death. It can happen here.

If you were truly conscious of what has happened to us here in America, you’d be panic stricken. The need to relocalize agriculture is a national emergency. By the time we become conscious of this emergency “the hard way” it will be too late. If you are a serious individual with any freedom to act and make choices, you will find a way to become a mini-farmer.

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This Valentines Day 2010, a sunny Sunday morning, I went out to my 12 by 8 greenhouse. They say a natural cure for depression is to work in a greenhouse, because it’s like being in the light of heaven. You are inside a structure, and the diffuse sunlight is easier on the eyes yet warmer on the skin, because of the sealed up nature of the greenhouse. I managed to get a morning temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit on a clear, sunny but wintry day in Connecticut.

Pluto/Hades: The God of Wealth and Death and Darkness

I put a blue tarp on the crushed stone floor, and the tarp extends along the walls about 4 inches up, for insulation, and I lined the inner walls with 18 Home Depot leaf bags full of fresh horse manure, and two garbage cans full of fresh horse manure. The horse manure creates heat and humidity. Not enough heat, but certainly enough humidity. The greenhouse isn’t ready to plant until I can buy a roll of polyethylene 6 mil plastic sheeting, and put more bags of horse manure along the outside, some hose slung over the greenhouse several times to create the air pocket between the 6 mil plastic sheeting and the polycarbonate frame of the greenhouse. Though I can get 100 degrees during the day, I lose all the heat at night.

Walking around under the morning sun accomplishing an endless succession of plant cultivation projects to get Nature working for you, is a taste of Heaven on Earth. It’s so quiet, and so light, and you are moving and thinking and experiencing real life. Heaven is living as your being was meant to live. It wasn’t meant to sit in offices endlessly finagling over the surplus wealth created by the Petroleum Age.

Human scale farming is not a frivolous occupation. It is the farthest thing from frivolous. This is true colonization of the Planet. The food supply is literally “a place in the sun.” If you are deprived of your place in the sun, you starve to death in Hades/Hell, a cold, dark, and dreary place.

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Hades abducting Persephone, Demeter’s daughter

We have allowed government/corporate farming to colonize the food supply on the planet. A powerful few can literally pull the plug on billions. They have a lever of control that reaches into our stomachs, and they abuse this power by turning the food supply into 90 percent genetically modified corn. If you care about your health and the health of your children, you won’t eat anything made from high fructose corn syrup.

An example of the food control lobby is the Mid-America Croplife Association (MACA). This is the organization that pitched a hissy fit when Michelle Obama planted an organic garden. Here is some of the damage control propaganda occasioned by Mrs. Obama’s gesture:

The CropLife Ambassador Network, a program of the Mid America CropLife Association, consists of over 160 ambassadors who work and many of whom grew up in agriculture. Their mission is to provide scientifically based, accurate information to the public regarding the safety and value of American agricultural food production. Many people, especially children, don’t realize the extent to which their daily lives depend on America’s agricultural industry. For instance, children are unaware the jeans they put on in the morning, the three meals eaten daily, the baseball with which they play, and even the biofuels that power the school bus are available because of America’s farmers and ranchers.

This propaganda is priceless. What kind of monster can oppose industrial agriculture? After all, they’re doing it for “our children,”  whose “daily lives depend” on the Mid-America Croplife Association’s sponsors. But let’s get real. Do you want your children’s lives to depend on industrialized agriculture or any other aspect of our dysfunctional and anti-white system?

MACA trumpets the fact that in 1930 one farmer fed ten people, whereas today one farmer feeds 144 people as progress. From a purely economic point of view, I am sure it is.

But we have to train ourselves to look at things from the point of view of white survival, white freedom, and white flourishing. And from that point of view, is the increasing centralization of food production a good thing?  Would you feel safer with 10 percent of the population in control of the food supply, or less than 1 percent? Why not become part of that 10 percent?

Our work is cut out for us. We need to build decentralized, relocalized economies and  become independent of industrialized agriculture.

We need to fight our way out from the cold and dark of this industrialized Hades and regain our rightful place in the Sun.

TOQ Online, March 5, 2010