Truth Against the World

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

The SUN's Youth Rebellion




On my way to deliver the letter with the magic EIN number on it, I looked at my truck radio display and it read 3:33. My wife, whom was at home, looked at a digital clock at that same moment. The radio station 93.3, that I was listening to had decided to play Metallica's "Sad But True" for the journey. I pulled into the post office and watched that letter go down the post office box memory hole as the last chord from that song rang out. That song from my youth, when I was angry about life. It was cleansing.
 
Days before my 32nd birthday I placed my resignation letter on my supervisor's desk. This was more than just a resignation from the career I had worked for 6 years as a street medic for Piedmont EMS in the Upstate of South Carolina. This was my Resignation from the Matrix, which was picked up by Michael Ruppert and published on collapsenet as a free feature article for several months. It wasn't particularly well written, because I wrote it one night half drunk as a journal entry, and then emailed it to Ruppert. Apparently he read it and liked it. I worked a one month notice because that's what my supervisor asked of me. Her point was that I was going on vacation for two weeks on the next day, and so would I actually "work" a two week notice. Just days before resigning from my career I signed up to take part in a Permaculture class in Asheville NC called "Permaculture In Action." It was a 10 day, hands on, gathering of like minded people spread over five weekends from May to August. We learned permaculture methods while implementing design from paper to the land. We didn't create the designs, the instructors did. This was to be my new career. Permaculture. I resigned from the Matrix so that I could take permaculture seriously and devote all of my free time to it.


Starting in 2007, after reading James Howard Kunstler's, The Long Emergency, and gettin' edumacated to the concept of Peak Oil, I learned that infinite growth on a finite planet results in a particularly sordid predicament, and what was I going to do about it? Our civilization is completely dependent on a shrinking non-renewable resource. Look around you and notice all of the objects in your view. It's a safe bet that every single one of those objects has been in a trailer on the interstate at some point on it's likely over 2000 mile journey to you. It's also another good bet that some part of all of those objects has been on a large container ship from China as well. The power you are using to participate with your computer, the cup of Joe you're enjoying, and the food that keeps you alive, all have fossil fuel energy in common (even nuclear power is not possible without fossil fuel energy...at least as it's currently practiced). We have built our modern day global civilization on a limited resource! There are a LOT of ramifications from this one easily understood fact that's placed on us by the mandates of our physical reality.


Nearly five years after reading Kunstler's eye opening book, I was in front of my supervisor turning in my resignation. Five years of rabidly searching for the answer to the question "what am I going to do about our infinite growth paradigm on a finite planet?" I had become a father, and now the ante was raised by several orders of magnitude. In a label, permaculture was what I found to be the answer. Permaculture actually addresses a future where there is no longer any affordable fossil energy. It realizes the precarious nature our free energy inheritance is leaving us in. Staying alive as a material being requires energy via food. All 8 billion of us stay alive right now because we still have the cheap energy to run the large tractors and combine harvesters, and to manufacture and use the petroleum based pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and natural gas based fertilizers. Our agricultural land has become a moonscape of dead dirt that does nothing other than act as a chemical sponge. Nothing can live in the dirt except for the genetically modified organisms that we've created to withstand the chemical onslaught. The bulk of the calories that keep us alive, the wheat in our pasta and bread, the rice in our bowl, the soy bean baby formula in our dairy allergic newborns, and the hundreds of corn derived ingredients in the nutrition free high fructose petroleum sugar, and the animal meat that you eat are all possible because of our massive monocroped agriculture which requires petroleum energy to exist. Permaculture recognizes that this is not a sustainable arrangement.


Even the "organic" agriculture in this country is really just the same old "green revolution" shit dressed up in a delusional "we're gonna save the Earth" drag. They spray chemicals just like their Monsanto dependent counterparts. Granted, it's better than conventional agriculture, but it's still not enough. It's not "sustainable." Monoculture agriculture, devoid of the cheap energy, collapses under the weight of it's own gargantuan flesh. Permaculture provides the answers to this mess we're in. I'm always weary of saying such a thing. That this or that provides ALL of the answers, but it's true in this case...this is a too good to be true actually being true. Mark Shepard, the architect of "New Forest Farm" and author of Restoration Agriculture, provides proof to my claim. Perennial forest agriculture is a sustainable practice that is capable of withstanding a changing climate. It can provide us with the calories and nutrition that we need to live. The bulk of the calories in this system come from perennial tree nuts and animal products like milk, eggs, and meat. Petroleum inputs of any kind are not necessary (although they sure do help getting the system up and matured). My point is, Permaculture provides the solutions we need for the post-petroleum world that we're standing on the brink of. I know of no other entity which can make this claim.


Given that you understand the predicament we are in as a global civilization, and given that you want to do something about it rather than nothing, what are you going to do? Permaculture can save us, but it can't save us if we don't practice it and implement it on our landscapes. I have two children now, Ayden Zen whom is 3 and Harper Tribann whom is 5 months. They are collectively the most beautiful thing I have ever done (aside from the Goddess I did to create them). Next to my family the most beauty I have ever created I have done in my backyard using permaculture principles. I have no doubt in my mind that given enough time I'll be able to use this 1.6 acre lot (and hopefully the six acres that surround the Fox Den that are currently owned by in-laws) to keep my family thriving, alive and healthy, and to create a surplus to share with the surrounding community. I'll be doing this using permaculture principles and strategies. Permaculture may not provide my family and I with the money we need to buy the things we buy in this current perpetual growth paradigm, but it will provide us with the food, medicine, raw natural materials, shelter, energy, and community that we need to live a life that is more than worthwhile, but exciting and full of meaning. With any luck it will keep my tribe out of any kind of government line.


I have concluded that there is no better way to spend my time than permaculture. I can practice it every day in the company of my family while creating beauty and regeneration. I believe that is possible. It's already happening. My plan has been a two pronged plan. Practice permaculture and go to school for a nursing license in order to ensure my family will have access to the digibits that are required of us. The problem with this plan is that it lands me in another wealth care career that I will not be able to stomach. I burned out after six years on the meat wagon. But I didn't burn out because of the death, disease, and destruction that comes with knowing the Reaper intimately. I loved that part of the job. I revealed in getting to know what the Grim Reaper actually looks like, and I even got in a few fights with him.  

A quick anecdote from my real past:

 I managed to kick the Grim Reapers ass out of the back of my meat wagon once.  He made himself my business when someones grandma dropped dead while shopping at Walmart. She walked out of the hospital a couple of months later on her own two legs (well, she was wheeled out cause it was hospital policy, but she was able to walk). One time in six years I actually got a "save." I burned out due to the bureaucratically generated bull shit that came from the Bull Shit Black Hole that feeds our wealth care system. We went from being taught that our job began and ended with "patient care" to being told that we were responsible for the happiness of our "customers." That is how our rotten health care system looks at you now. You are no longer a patient to heal, but a customer to keep happy. That's because the lawyers, medical insurance, and big international pharmaceutical companies dictate the nature of our wealth care. It's ALL about making money. End of Subject.


I'm not plugging back into the Matrix. I'm going all rogue Permaculture on the Matrix's ass. And at any rate I destroyed the ports on my physical body that allow me to plug back in, anarchy happened to my Matrix equipment. I'm a permanent inhabitant of what Jason Heppenstall calls Realandia. The place you come to inhabit when you take the red pill. People are too afraid to do anything meaningful about our meaningless perpetual growth paradigm. I'm no longer afraid. I was recently told that I've "got some balls" to do what I'm doing. Giving the Matrix the finger and all. I responded to that claim, "well, they stuck my ass in a solitary cell, and fed me nothing but bread and water, due to my protest about killing thousands of people via bombs from the jets launched off of the US Navy carrier I was splitting atoms on...so I guess I know what I'm up against." Maybe I do have some balls, but I don't frame it that way. I see it as that I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. It is my responsibility to help in this transition that our species is going through. I have the tools and the mindset. I have the training. In truth, I have been bred for this my entire life. I have been searching for something worth my time ever since I can remember. Even EMS failed me, and I was able to find myself in a moral dilemma with being the help?!?! That speaks volumes to me.


This is not my resignation to the Matrix. I turned that in already. This is my "fuck you" to the Matrix. I'm not afraid of you. What I am afraid of is what you're ensuring will happen if I, and many people like me, don't do...something. If we don't resist your stupid dictates than we will get what your incompetence has planned for us all. We will get a climate that won't support human life, we'll get more and more super bugs resistant to our drugs and chemicals, we'll get nuclear contaminated radioactive material blanketing the globe (this has already happened...did you know that 14,000 deaths in America are attributed to the fall out from Fukishima Daiichi), we'll get a completely collapsed fishery as our ocean loses the ability to buffer the carbon levels due to acidification thanks to our dependence on petrochemicals, well get more and more neutered and dysfunctional governments, well get less and less nutrition in our food, and we'll get sicker and sicker as Big Pharma crams more and more frankenchemical fukitol derivatives down our collective throats. The Matrix has no answers for a world on the backside of perpetual growth.


I will not be acquiring a mursing license from the Ministry of Health. From this point forward I will be practicing permaculture principles. I'm now an agent for a non-profit corporation called the SUN Foundation (sustaining universal needs). The foundation is headquartered here, at my current residence in the Palookaville sector of Whoville. I have a gaggle of geniuses on my side over at the Doomstead Diner. Essentially the Diner has become a think tank. We talk about Realandia and what we're going to do and are doing about it. The SUN Foundation is the result of more than a year of this think tank activity. It has fermented into the SUN and I am one of it's agents. I believe that the SUN Foundation is a magnate that is attracting the most brilliant thinkers and doers available. 

We have members in Australia (which is good due to it being in the southern hemisphere, away from the potentially 15,000 times more nuclear radiation than the atom bombs dropped on Japan, ending the second world war, that is damn near fated to happen with one of the next earth quakes, or tsunamis, that are happening at increasing frequencies around Japan), England, and all over the U.S. Our ideas and tactics will go viral and we will make the Matrix obsolete. We're attempting to use the Matrix against itself by playing the game by their stupid rules. If you're interested in learning more about the SUN Foundation (we're still working on the website because we just got incorporated) you can go here and read till your hearts content. We're gonna fix this mess one tree at a time. One durable and inexpensive shelter at a time. One Foxstead at a time.


But my Fox Den is still alive and thriving, and it's beginning to multiply and grow. Like Gremlins, the more bull shit they get on us, the more we will become. The Fox Den is metamorphosing into a Foxstead which will in turn replicate into many Foxsteads. Or I'll fuckin' die trying. They're gonna have to pry my cold dead fingers off of this Fox Den. I've got a Vixen and Kits to keep healthy and happy, and I've got a community to build that can withstand the post-petroleum future they are guaranteed to inherit. What are you gonna do about that? Dear reader!



6 comments:

Jason Heppenstall said...

Excellent post Lucid! I would love Fox Wood to be in some way affiliated with SUN. BTW one thought that immediately springs to mind is to get physical postal addresses for participating 'nodes'. That way, if electronic communication packs up and goes then people will still be able to find their way there, or communicate with one another.

I am also planning to do a premie design course and then use Fox Wood as a teaching base. Plenty of things have been happening there of late. I have some new neighbours doing the same sort of thing. They scrimped and saved to buy the woodland (they are both quite young, late 20s) and live in a converted truck.

Right on cue the local Tory nimby has turned up and started threatening us. A newsletter has gone round and some people want the council to turf us off our own land!! Apparently, according to these people, it's okay to won land as long as you use it for monoculture or pheasant shooting, but using it sustainably is not allowed. Especially if you have dreadlocks, like my neighbour.

It's all gone up a gear. We have to go on a charm offensive, and then it will probably go to court. It's insane, but then insanity rules the day at the moment. I jut hope the council and courts run out of money soon and can't afford to chase down people like us with their petty rules designed to keep the land in the clutches of the wealthy.

Luciddreams said...

That's horrible Hepp. But all we can do is courageously continue following our moral North. That is the only chance we have. Turn around, and walk away from the Matrix, and do it now!!

It's passive resistance really. If enough people catch on (and that 100th monkey ain't far at this point) then they won't have the ability to imprison us all.

But this morning I was having this thought "are my children better in a free world without me, or a dystopian New World Bravely with me? My first reaction is that they are better with a father then without one...but at some point that is no longer true. Not that I'm planning on martyring myself, but passive resistance is enough for them to put you away.

At any rate, I'm not going to bend over and let these assholes destroy the planet without at least attempting to follow my bliss and have faith that doing so, in service of the Goddess, will result in health and regeneration and not a prison cell.

But I am not afraid, because somebody has to not be afraid, somebody has to plant the first tree in the Sun Youth Rebellion (which youth in this point having nothing to do with age and everything to do with possibility).

Anonymous said...

hey LD,
Followed the link from DD.
Ive gotta say its impossible to say whether its wise to not follow through on the mursing.

Getting out of debt and growing your own food and cutting fuel use etc can cut right down how much money you need. Then to do that properly I dont think it can be done just on weekends, you need to do it every day. Anyway Im a firm believer that people now have to get out of the mindset of regular paycheck with paid holidays and benefits. People need to be entreprenuerial and identify niches they can fill. Between the saving of being self sufficient and plugging niche opportunities, I think people can get by.

33 is a master number in numerology. Its my sisters life path number. Dont be surprised if you start seeing it everywhere like I do 22. or 11:11 etc.

33 upside down on an angle is sort of like FF, thats Family First which is the meaning of it. Doing whatever it takes to make sure they make it. Feels good dont it?

Hey Hep,
Ive read some of your work, got giddy with glee reading your own resignation cashing out article as I totally related to it. Im about your age and have just done exactly what you have done. Turned my back on being defined by my job and all the shiny shit asociated with so called success to take on trying to start a self sufficient farm in a remote rural locale.

Never anticipated such things as smelling like goat piss walking into the bank after pressure washing out a "stock trailer" before returning it to the hire place, and the wind and splashback semi soaking my jeans. Or wtf one chicken wont get off the nest and the rest lay eggs on top of her which she then sits on, so I get to eat none. But its all good fun. So I call the farm "The Asylum", where anyone likewise crazy can so seek asylum.

Anonymous said...

hey LD,
Followed the link from DD.
Ive gotta say its impossible to say whether its wise to not follow through on the mursing.

Getting out of debt and growing your own food and cutting fuel use etc can cut right down how much money you need. Then to do that properly I dont think it can be done just on weekends, you need to do it every day. Anyway Im a firm believer that people now have to get out of the mindset of regular paycheck with paid holidays and benefits. People need to be entreprenuerial and identify niches they can fill. Between the saving of being self sufficient and plugging niche opportunities, I think people can get by.

33 is a master number in numerology. Its my sisters life path number. Dont be surprised if you start seeing it everywhere like I do 22. or 11:11 etc.

33 upside down on an angle is sort of like FF, thats Family First which is the meaning of it. Doing whatever it takes to make sure they make it. Feels good dont it?

Hey Hep,
Ive read some of your work, got giddy with glee reading your own resignation cashing out article as I totally related to it. Im about your age and have just done exactly what you have done. Turned my back on being defined by my job and all the shiny shit asociated with so called success to take on trying to start a self sufficient farm in a remote rural locale.

Never anticipated such things as smelling like goat piss walking into the bank after pressure washing out a "stock trailer" before returning it to the hire place, and the wind and splashback semi soaking my jeans. Or wtf one chicken wont get off the nest and the rest lay eggs on top of her which she then sits on, so I get to eat none. But its all good fun. So I call the farm "The Asylum", where anyone likewise crazy can so seek asylum.

UB

Luciddreams said...

I feel your hesitation UB. Believe me...I feel it...but it's not in my bones.

This is a youth rebellion. I'm just preparing the energy by way of food that will be needed to fuel it. Cause petroleum sure as hell ain't gonna feed it.

And I'm following my bliss...so I'm certain due to the faith in what it means to follow that bliss. It's a leap of faith. That doing what I'm supposed to be doing will result in my getting what I, and my tribe, needs.

I had the thought the other night, over some craft beers, that I am right because I AM righteous.

Righteousness requires courage and confidence. I have those things. Otherwise I would never have put myself in a solitary cell receiving nothing but bread and water.

I'm just like you, UB, doing the best I can...righteously.

Anonymous said...

You're doing the right thing since it would be almost immoral to raise kids within the system as it is at this point. Of course, people who decide to stay on the gird still need to do whatever they can to take their freedoms back since newer generations will be raised to think things have always been this way by the time they're all gone.