Choice, the Best Sauce

This is from the comments of the previous post: Question: what advice could/would you give someone who truly has the desire and the will to walk away from Babylon?

I don't know. I don't know your circumstances, proclivity, resources, history, etc. It would be all too easy to suggest something or begin a diatribe that would be completely moot. So I must reduce the answer to the most basic tenet of the freeman's way of things.

The above photo is a view down the cathedral-like corridor formed by the 14' high stalks in one of the patches of corn. On the left side and about midway from top to bottom you will see one ear of corn still upright and several others behind it drooping over. When the corn is completely finished for the season, the stalk begins to turn brown and the ears droop over so that the husks form a raincoat to allow the corn to dry in the October sun. Very soon we will begin harvesting the corn, allow to to finish drying, then shell it from the cobs and put it way for kitchen use.

We actually have enough of this kitchen corn left over from last year to do us for the current year. You never know when there is going to be as bad year, so we will put most of this aside against the possibility. During the year the corn will be ground into meal as needed to make our staple food, cornbread. A variation of that is to soak the corn in lime water to make masa for tortillas and tamales. But the natural food staple of our culture is Appalachian style cornbread which along with the dried beans we also grow gives a balance of starch, protein, and fat.

These corn patches, this year one for white corn and one for red corn, are tucked away on a rather narrow shoulder, maybe 70' wide, on the hillside above the mountain hollow in a place few would deem as a place for agriculture in these modern times. The seed has been saved from crop to crop for many years now. The ground is prepared with a horse and a 100 year old plow. The ground is kept fertile by application of stable manure and leaf mold. In other words, if we padlocked the gate to this farmstead and never had any trafficking with Babylon ever again, we could still grow corn and beans in perpetuity, worlds without end, amen.

Now many of the people who read this blog, or other writings like it, turn away in horror and disgust and what they perceive as a call to recluse oneself in some remote niche of the world and subsist on a mirthless bowl of corn meal gruel all of one's days. Said people miss the point entirely.

What is this low tech, low input, subsistence economy all about, what does it mean to us? It is much like Jack Sparrow's remark to Elizabeth Swann when they were marooned on the island and he told her what the Black Pearl really was, it was freedom. Like that to us our centuries old agriculture represents for us a choice. And having a choice is the very essence and foundation of our escape from Babylon.

So this is my answer to the anonymous commenter, To walk away from Babylon, you must have choices. Alas, it is likely you don't even if you most certainly think you do. Babylon, as with any exploitative and controlling system, can only exist by limiting and eliminating your choices. After all, if you actually have choices, you may in fact choose the things that benefit and enhance you and your family rather than things that benefit Babylon.

Babylon must eliminate your ability to choose. It does so with the help of two effective ploys. First it will offer you false choices in order to distract you from the fact that you have no real choices at all. A desperate maneuver of failed parenting is when a child is adamant that he does not want to go somewhere, you say, "We need to get ready to go now, do you want to wear the blue shirt or the red one?" The hope being that the child will become absorbed in choosing which color shirt to choose and forget for the moment all his objections about going in the first place. The Nazis used this tactic to control the Jews they intended to exterminate and it is hardly less dishonorable when anyone uses it. Yet this is part and parcel the essential operations of Babylon.

For example, people are always asking us what sort of alternate electrical energy we are using, because, after all, if you are going to escape from Babylon, you surely don't want to be connected to the grid! It's a false choice to choose, say, solar electric or grid electric. If you "escape" being tied down to a monthly electric bill, you are saddled with the expense of a depreciating and deteriorating electric system you own. What is more, the amount of electricity you can feasibly realize with a home solar set up is so small that you must curtail your electric use severely if that's all you use. You will not, for example be running an electric range, electric hot water heater, electric clothes dryer, and electric furnace or heat pump on a home solar electric system. So if you are willing to live within the limits of the amount of electricity you can generate with such a system, it is such a tiny bit that it is not much expense or dependence to get it from the grid to begin with. It's a false choice. Our household is set up so that it is not dependent on electricity at all. Make no mistake, we enjoy our electricity. We like watching DVD's, using the computer, listening to the radio, running the electric dehydrator, and the convenience of early morning and late evening activities because of the electric lights. But we also are equipped to live without it. Which we have done. Ours is a true choice, it is to use electricity or not as is prudent by the circumstances. Switching from being dependent on the grid to being dependent on the makers of batteries and solar panels is not a true choice since either way you are dependent.

The second way in which Babylon enforces its no-choice policy is when there really is a choice you might make, Babylon convinces you that you really don't have that choice at all. To be able to raise any of our own food we have to borrow money for land, right! You have to go to college, right? Gotta have wheels, gotta have a credit card, right?

Wrong. Those, and many more, are all things Babylon chants over and over until the idea that you could do without them entirely is just beyond belief.

So I bring up my corn field in way of illustration of what a real choice looks like. We produce (and even prepare, grind and bake) our staple bread with no input at all from Babylon. So we always have the choice to eat that instead of what Babylon offers. We also buy wheat in bulk and make wheat bread sometimes, but if (when, as it happened this year) the transportation cost or scarcity of wheat makes the price beyond the pale, we can look at it and say, "No, not going there, we will just go home and have our cornbread and beans." Likewise we sometimes buy food from stands and stores, and on a few occasions we eat out. But we always have the choice, and if we need to, we can enforce that choice for months on end. We've heard many a Babylonian say, "A person has to eat, so no matter what we've got to get money to buy food, or else use the credit card!" No choice.

Your escape from Babylon begins when you can say, "No, I have a choice. Oh, I can dine around Babylon's table if I choose, but if the Babyonian terms and conditions are odious, then I don't have to."

That's what my cornfield means.

It's just an example. Your choices may vary. So let's go back to the beginning. What can you do? Examine the verities and realities of your existence and ask yourself plainly and honestly where you are devoid of choices. This and this alone tells you exactly where you stand. Is it the gas pump and car payment or else you are destitute with no way of earning your livelihood? Is it the Mart and agribusiness or you starve? Is it the mortgage company and real estate agent or you'd have to live under a bridge? Is it the University and its degree else no one has the least bit of credibility in you? Etc. etc. Then you are devoid of choices and this defines your thralldom to Babylon. Its policy of eliminating your choices has been most effective.

There is another curious aspect of this matter of choice. To the untutored it might appear as if it is a continuum, a matter of degrees, and so it is all a matter of balance. But it most certainly is not. There is a trigger point, a breaking point, where you are free of the stranglehold of Babylon.

I recall a conversation some years ago that was the inspiration for a post on this blog. Like so many who employ the "matter of degrees" argument, my disputant insisted that we both alike were dependent on trafficking in Babylon's coin, that ultimately I could not escape it any more than he could. The difference, which he never understood, was that the need for it controlled what he did the next morning. He had no choice. He had to put gas in the car on the morrow and go to the job or else the disaster of his personal world loomed. I on the other hand had a choice of whether I attended to the matter of Babylon's money that day, or that week, or even that year for that matter. Babylon's hold was broken. Just as I could decide to go home and eat cornbread and beans or else buy something at Babylon's markets, I could choose to bestir myself to do Babylon's dance for a few of its coins ... or not. Oh, eventually I would have to pay the property tax and and buy some kerosene. But I had weeks or years to decide how I'd like to do it. In that time many things change, many opportunities arise, and many circumstances come and go. I don't have to do it right now, you can't rush me, you can't dictate to me, you can't write the rules for me to follow. It is not a continuum or matter of degrees, it is a matter of having to do it right now under someone else's conditions and to someone else's advantage, or rather to do it in my own time, under my conditions, and to my advantage. That's what it means to live in a world of real choices. It is what it means to live free.

So, my anonymous friend, the thing you must do is provide yourself with choices. Look at your situation cold in the eye and tell where you have been backed into a choiceless corner. Then see beyond Babylon's false choices and blather that you have no choice and step to a place in each instance where you an say to Babylon, "No, not this time, I don't have to."

And most of all, don't look at the lives of the really free and see us as hulking down on a dark mountainside swilling down a bowl of mirthless gruel. No indeed. When we choose to have it, our humble fare is a feast unrivaled. It is partaken with a fine and savory sauce far beyond anything offered in Babylon's finest. That sauce is choice.