From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sun Apr 20 2003 - 20:06:31 MDT
Mike Lorrey summed it up:
<<As we saw in last year's PBS series "Frontier House", living the
luddite life has it's drawbacks and limitations. It also has a tendency
to be 'nasty, brutish, and short', in ways that are quite often glossed
over and overlooked by those who hate technology so...>>
The con artists you mentioned in the Nearing article (The Nearings) no doubt
saw the failure of the economy, and it was a failure (circa 1932) as a good
idea to have everyone become self-sufficient. My late father, always a New
York city lad, saw farmers as wise, because they could grow their own food
during the great depression, they never went hungry. He never saw how many
hungry farmers there were because they couldn't keep their land, because of
debt, or couldn't affording to fertilize their crops, or couldn't feed their
livestock, etc.
Greater self sufficency is not a bad goal, if one goes into it with their
eyes open and not as a luddite (19th century romantic?)
<<Joly and his wife live in Jamaica, Vermont, in an off-grid homestead of
20 acres. They heat their home with wood and grow much of their food.
They still find that his wife must work a full time job as a teacher in
order to make ends meet. "It just isn't possible to homestead with the
template the Nearings presented, because they never addressed the issue
of income," Joly explains.>>
Yes, the Ludds need to realize "its the economy, stupid" and their back to
the land mentality, is best exemplified by Kampouchea's Pol Pot and Khmer
Rogue mass murders. Are the Nearings the same as Pol Pot? No, the Nearings,
far as we know, were not totalitarians, and were not statists. Good article
though.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Apr 20 2003 - 20:15:39 MDT