Okay, so I know it is just barley tomorrow, and this is in
no way shape or form a photo update… but I just came across this article while
getting my nightly before bed news fix, and I just felt it was something worth
sharing… something that needed sharing.
Isn’t it a bit ridiculous how most Americans (most
industrialized humans, really) have determined that debates like these are…
normal… acceptable. I personally find the whole situation appalling. I haven’t
shared too much personal information (yet) about myself on this blog. That is
not because I feel I have something to hide, or because I am ashamed of my past…
It is simply because my past life, and my current life, have so little in
common that they rarely cross contaminate each other. Two years ago I was a
military contractor/fighter jet mechanic working for a foreign entity through a
loopty-doop DOD contract… in other words, there have been very few times that
the subject has come up in my writing about the farm.
But, here is one occasion that I have some what of a reason
to fill you guys in a bit on who I am, and why I do what I do. I grew up on a
farm. This farm, to be exact. As a teenager, I motherfuckin’ hated the
outdoors. I could not wait to get the hell out of dodge. I was going to grow
up, move out, and become an extremely rich and unfathomably successful business
man. I was going to move to the city, and I was going to live in my penthouse
loft, and I was going to hire some less fortunate soul to do all my laundry
and wash my dishes. (For the record, this didn’t work out exactly as planned.)
Ten days after I turned eighteen I joined the military. The
Navy to be more specific. I left the farm, and I moved to the city. (After boot
camp and A-School I was stationed in Virginia Beach, VA.) After spending most
of my childhood living on a semi-self-sufficient farm/homestead, I suddenly found
myself one hundred percent dependent on the system… and I couldn’t have cared
less.
After the Navy (which is where I received my jet mechanic
training) I took a few odd jobs subcontracting for the DOD doing the exact same
line of work I had been doing in the service. First I worked out in Maryland
just south of D.C., and then I moved out to Nevada and worked for Top Gun out
in the middle of the desert. I spent about three years out that way before I
decided I was absolutely fucking miserable and I needed to start working on my
exit strategy. I found what appeared to be a valid enough option through a year long
contract working on fighter jets in Kuwait. The pay was epic awesome, and I
figured I could be in and out in one year with enough money to move back to
Michigan, pay for a house cash, and go to college full time on my GI Bill.
Now is neither the time nor the place to go into all the
details of my entire life story (I’m already off topic enough), so I will save
the nitty gritty details for my memoir; I honestly do have a point to this whole
thing so stick with me.
While I was in Nevada I had read a book called One Second After by William R. Forstchen…
at the time it was just a quick Wal-Mart read to keep me awake on my stint on third
shift, but it had planted a seed in the back of my mind without me knowing it. The book, at a very
basic level, is a fictionalized account of what would happen in modern day
America if an EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) were to go off and essentially kill
all electronics –permanently. I found myself wondering what I would do in
Nevada. I lived on the second floor of an apartment building. My stove, my
microwave, my refrigerator, my heat, all of it, was electric. In the scenario
of an EMP not even vehicles would run anymore. So I would be stranded in the
middle of the dessert, with no food, no water, and no transportation, and two
thousand miles away from the closest person who would give a fuck about me.
But, it was only a seed, which is why a few months later I moved to Kuwait for
Operation: Exit Strategy anyway.
I thought I had it bad living on the system in the deserts
of Nevada, until I got to Kuwait and realized what a true Total Government
system looked like. Even the food supply was owned and operated by the royals
over there. (I am, yet again, way off topic.) The longer I was over there, the
more annoyed I got with the fact that I was in control of absolutely not one single
facet of my life. Whether or not I had electricity or air conditioning in the
130 degree heat, was up to somebody else. Where and when I got my water supply was
up to somebody else. How much cooking gas I got was administered by the government…
I hope I am not coming off as some hard line extreme freedom nut, that is not
my intention, I plan on tying this back into food shortly, I swear…
Either way, big picture… those two things combined, the
book, and then finding myself in a truly dependent situation, lead to my
decision to cancel Operation Exit Strategy, and instead focus on Operation
Become Self Sufficient. You see, I wanted to be in control of where my food
came from, and what was or wasn’t sprayed on it, or injected into it, and genetically
rearranged in it… I originally came back to the farm in order to be more self-sufficient,
but the longer I have been back, and the more research I have put into it, the
more I realize that I am here for other reasons as well. And this article kind
of just sparked off the need to share some of those reasons. I don’t want my
food to come from some far away unknown land where things like "portable field toilets"
are an issue… I want to know exactly where my bacon came from; I want to
know my bacon's name, and I want to know what it was fed, and how it was
treated, and what was injected into both the living beast, and the slab of pork
belly during the curing process. I want to know that the fruits and vegetables
I am eating have been grown in healthy soil, with natural (read: chicken shit) fertilizers,
and no chemical pesticides… I want to
know how to do these thing. How to grow and raise my own food, how to preserve
and store the excess, and how to cook and prepare my meals from raw ingredient (like for real raw... like I-want-to-grind-my-own-wheat-before-baking-the-loaf-of-bread raw).
In other words, I want to be responsible for my own livelihood, and life. I
sure as hell don’t want to have to trust in the Kuwaiti government, or in this
case, the FDA to set the standards for the safety or the quality of my food.
Okay, so I know this rant was long. And probably, from a big
picture perspective, probably not even all that interesting to somebody who isn’t…
well, me. So, I hope I haven’t scared any of you off… with any of this… But now
I am going to bed, and I still promise that update tomorrow, even if I did blow
through like two weeks’ worth of word count goals writing this.
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