Those communes and hillbillys and injuns are part of America too.
Of course they are. Where did I say they weren't? I think communes and hillbillys are fan-fucking-tasic. Seriously, but it's just not my lifestyle. I enjoy the way I live. I hate the way that the Walmarts of the world are making it damn near impossible to tell one town from the next but I have no desire to grow my own vegetables or live on a farm. I like being able to go to the grocery store and pick up some potatos and even stupid childhood comfort food like Spaghettios. Does that make me evil, part of the problem, clueless, a slave to the corporate world? I do what I can to preserve my own little corners of the world. I try and support and protect and nurture things that are important to me that might not be important to you. I guess I just hate the way that the extremists on both sides seem to sit in judgement of each other.
I'm just tired of looking at the world the way that I have been for so long and I'm trying to find my own peace with it.
Anne Bonney,
From reading your posts I'd say you seem to be doing a fine job of finding your own peace. A big part of being able to do that....in my opinion.. is by not allowing other people to tell you what is right or wrong within your own life...so props to you for not allowing certain people on this board to do that.
I, like you, choose to live the best life I can in the world that exists today....not a perfect world...but one I'm grateful to wake up to everyday!
Right is right and wrong is wrong. When the tomato fields are sprayed with pesticides, it gets on the tomato pickers, it gets in the tomatoes, and it gets in the ground and the water. Then you take your tomatoes and your pesticided wheat and you make spaghettios, then you can them with mined metals, then you truck them using gasoline and oil and smogging up the air. So, while you are having a childhood reminiscence, living things are getting sick.
You can talk your therapy shit all you want, but why don't you think about the full spectrum ramifications of your actions. I don't think there are very many innocent people in America, living off the grid from all this. I am certainly not, but at least it frustrates me to no end, as it rightly should.
The more invisible the cruelty of the system, the worse it gets. I bet you didn't know that it is par for the course to spray fields while people are working in them. Not to mention the poverty and the child labor among the slave class agricultural laborers. Not to mention the inevitable inhuman conditions in the mines. Haven't you read The Grapes of Wrath? Personally, I think guilt is useful information coming from an instinct to be responsible for the effects of one's actions. Of course, if you had an extremely punitive experience where all your actions were harshly as well as nonsensically judged, well I think that's where your aversion to guilt comes from. But even if you don't want to think about other people and the fish, you might want to think about your drinking water, your liver, and your lungs.
I am speaking to "you" generally, seriously people, stop taking everything so personally. But again, right is right and wrong is wrong. On the other hand, the system is set up to perpetuate the system. If the family who picked your food lived next door to you and you saw them getting sick, you saw the kids in the fields instead of at school, if all the smog from your percentage of use of the trucking industry got belched out in front of your house, if all the pesticides from your percentage of use of the pesticide food industry ended up in your drinking water, if you at the very least had a webcam in each factory your goods come from so you could see each pale face and the long monotonous shifts in an above-ground hell, you would probably, humanly, care one way or the other and not feel that great about the money you give to perpetuate it.
When all is said and done, I am the most evil one of all. I don't really know how many Iraqi children are dead now to pay for my road trip. I turn up the stereo to hear the prophets, and I know, the war will end when I stop my car, get out and walk.
