YOU DON’T NEED A CREDIT CARD TO BARTER

We keep a written account of everything we do, what we plant, the temperature, condition of the fields, animal births and deaths. At the end of the year our genial old tax man sifts through it all and by design it always turns out that we come up somewhere near the poverty level. I am not ashamed as that is the governments designation for our state of affairs, not mine. In fact, part of the reason I have been so open about what we do and how we do it is because it is one of the few ways to actually make some kind of difference. We neither feed the system nor are we fed by it. Our biggest cash outlay annually is our property taxes and as I have also said it is the one tax I do not resent paying because the payback is tangible. I kn ow our local cops and respect them and the way they operate, I use our local roads and am friends with the town road agents. We whole family benefits from the library, our town clerk buys chicken from us, the docks are well maintained down at the lake and the local schools are staffed by neighbors, most of whom are decent people with good intentions. That’s the way taxation ought to work, like commerce- locally where you can see the results with your own eyes and where your eyes are the check on how the money is spent. New England has a long tradition of both frugality and self reliance, but when needs arise for the crankiest of us, everyone sees that it is met.

What I was getting at is that in the current paradigm- and I lived it too for most of my life before we decided to do this- there is an exchange that rarely benefits the person. The consumer, yes, the human being, almost never. The way we live provides benefits we never knew existed, could never have known if we hadn’t done it and those intangibles, sleeping safe and sound, knowing your neighbor is keeping an eye out, trusting the word of the person you see every day, eating healthy at little or no cost every time you sit at table, being content with what you have instead of dissatisfied with what you do not, these are valuable things to have. In most neighborhoods in America if you heard gunshots going off at a distance you’d be alarmed, here it is a comfort because it reminds you that the community has teeth and that they keep them sharpened, not that some gangbangers have drifted in looking for a score. I wish more people were willing to take leap of faith required to embrace a way of living that has been ridiculed by the very people who take advantage of us, for all the reasons I have outlined since I started posting here. They need us, we don’t need them. All life takes place on a local level but they’ve managed to convince tens of millions of us that what some celebrity says or does or what a politician in a D.C. Taj Mahal decrees has value to us when clearly the opposite is true. They take our money, deliver us fear and envy then mock us to our faces and we keep on taking it when all we have to do is stand up from the table and say, “I’ve had enough.”

The idea that revolutions have got to be fought with armies is antiquated. Revolutions are fought with ideas and minds capable of grasping them. If we spent our lives in farm fields instead of battlefields we’d be free from the oppression because they need us, we don’t need them.

The rain has finally abated and tonight is the Father/Daughter dance under a full moon in town. Before then I will collect eggs, weed the gardens, block up firewood for Winter and spend the day with the people I love and care for the most. There’s no pay check waiting for me at the end, but the benefits… they are worth everything.