A Slight Detour

To be perfectly honest, I prefer to write about gardens and greenhouses, irrigation systems and energy conservation programs.  It's also fun to write about interesting books or films or even tasty recipes.  Politics is grim territory, but sometimes I feel compelled to write in that space too.  Politics comprises much of that which makes this Rock feel, well... Wrong.

A couple of teeny-tiny facts from the financial pages:

1. 30,000 Americans -- that's about 1/100 of one percent of the population -- now pull down 6% of all income.  The gap between the richest of the rich and everybody else wasn't that egregious even at the end of the "Roaring 20's."
2. At the Federal Level, there are three times as many lobbyists representing the financial sector alone, as there are elected representatives in Congress.
3. Only Singapore and Hong Kong have a greater gap between rich and poor than the United States.
4. Twenty-one percent of American children are now living in poverty.  That's now.  Today.  That's here, not in some third-world country.

The notion, widely propagated by the Tea Baggers, is that the US has become a socialist state. Strident voices have told my own family members that "our children are being indoctrinated in Stalinist political thought." The data do not support that assertion.  We are becoming, we have become a plutarchy.  We are ruled not by law, but by the desires of the rich and powerful.

Perhaps we are not even a plutarchy.  It may be that we are more of a "lootocracy" -- a state that is ruled by looters.  After all, even plutocrats want to preserve the system that supports them.  Lootocrats merely grab and move on.  The notion of a plague of locusts comes to mind.

But I digress.

I add to these disturbing revelations the recent shenanigans of the Texas school board: a deliberate and concerted attempt to rewrite American history in such a way that young people are exposed to extreme right-wing propaganda, a deliberate and concerted attempt to weaken the barrier between church and state and imply that Christianity is indeed the official religion of these United States.  They even tried to downplay the role of Thomas Jefferson in US history, but they backed off that (for now).

This followed Texas education requirements that demand the teaching of evolution as "theory."  Texas school children will be exposed to creationism as though it were a competing scientific point of view.

We might shrug.  "That's just Texas," we might like to think.  But it's not: Texas is the largest, single textbook market in the country.  Textbook publishers are unlikely to make one version of books for Texas and another for the rest of the US.  The Texas school board is well aware of that.

In my opinion, the deliberate attempt to undermine the education of generations is a crime beyond that of mere greed.  In an ever more complex and competitive world, a deliberate attempt to damage our children's understanding of science and the natural world, of economics, of religion; a deliberate attempt to undermine critical thinking... these are crimes that aid and abet our enemies.

Finally, I offer the opinion that much of the purpose of government is to level the playing field, to keep the rich and powerful from stomping on the needs, let alone the dreams, of everyone else.  I also note that there is an ever-present drone from the corporate media -- and that's entertainment media as well as "news" media: the government is the problem.  Reagan may have popularized the chant, but he hardly invented it.

So we, as a society are being taught to distrust and despise the only part of the system that stands between us and serfdom.

The upshot of all this is that we are thrown back upon ourselves for support.  We must rely on our neighbors, our colleagues, our friends for information.  Regional economies (the drum I so often beat) are the systems that stand a chance of changing the course of events.  Only there can we find accountability.  Only there can we expect the integrity born of local reputation.

That's one reason why you should grow the biggest garden you can.  Share the food you grow with your neighbors.  

Maybe gardening isn't your thing?  That's okay.  Learn to bake bread.  Learn to weave wool into yarn.  Learn to make basic useful furniture.  Share what you know.  Share what you produce.  Share what you learn.

You can do these things.  We can do these things.

Okay.  Back to our regular programming.