Farmers & Builders

I was first intrigued by Buffalo when I learned that it had lost half it’s population in the last 50 years.  My first thought after having lived in NYC and Boston was; Brilliant! A city with no traffic. Five years later I still laugh inside when I hear someone complaining about having to park a couple blocks away.  If they only knew the depth of frustration and hostility, as in batshit crazy, that results from the experience of using a car regularly in a dense metropolis.

Whatever it was that led me to Buffalo the motivation was to escape from the epicenter of the pending global financial meltdown.  At the time, all that remained in the punchbowl was sweet congealed syrup, but the party was still rockin on.  Most of my friends and coworkers thought I was a lunatic for thinking Wall Street would collapse, but to me, after seeing house prices rise 20% year-after-year it felt like the national psyche was lunatic.  How could that have possibly ended well?  There must come a point where people can simply no longer afford to buy a home. And that point came.

What a different world I live in now!  Buffalo’s East Side might as well be a different country from where I came from in Brooklyn.  Technically, I live in Allentown, where I bought a home shortly after moving to Buffalo but now spend most of my time on the East Side.  It is the land of opportunity.  You can grow your own food in the city, fix up a house that costs $1 and live with minimal expenses.  You can choose not to be a slave to a mortgage, employment, or a traffic jam.

The path to freedom and happiness is not making more money but needing less.  In Buffalo, that path is easy to find.

Social media?  How about unsocial media.

Whatever benefits might come from social media they seem to be far outweighed by what is sacrificed, such as genuine, physical social interaction.  Online communities of interest can be very useful and lead to productive activities but general sites like Facebook and Twitter more often detract from the them. People rave about the virtues of social media while most of the time it’s nothing more then a forum of social commentators commenting upon commentary… often emotionally charged and overly opinionated.

From a blog post I read this morning describing how social media tends to drag us downward,  “It’s connected to the same MTV-corrupted, short circuited, intelligence-reducing part of our culture which celebrates a collective attention span doting upon one mildly diverting, totally unessential thing after another, in an endless, vicarious search for the new, the purpose of which (almost always) is to avoid confronting the baseless and banal constructs of our own vacant lives.”  Harsh, perhaps, but the point is clear.

Some people find value in social media and it doesn’t make anyone a bad person.  What matters at the end of the day, however, is who shows up and how they participate/interact in the real world.

Our lives revolve around the basic sequence: go to school, get a job, retire. Seems logical, right?  You’ve got to learn something before you can be productive, then you’ve got to earn your keep in the world before you can spend your days in leisure.  It is logical… in an institutionalized and industrialized world, where learning is a school thing, earning your keep means being part of the “labor force” and your days of leisure are spent in a nursing home.

If we were to replace institutions with friends, family and neighbors there would be no sequence.  Learning would be a lifelong exercise based on need and desire.  Earning your keep in the world would start soon after you can walk and end after you can no longer walk. Life would not be centered on participation in the labor force.

We are so far detached from the pre-industrial world that we no longer question or even recognize how our way of life has been drastically altered.  The developed world has become one giant institution.  But it was built upon the paradox of perpetual growth in a finite world and its days are now numbered.  We will learn once again how much more meaningful pre-industrial life was.

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.   Ned Beatty, The Network

As our growth dependent economy becomes increasingly derailed in a slow motion train wreck we must use the resources available to us now to build alternatives, before scarcity shifts from something more contrived to something much more real.   Only after the last train car crashes and burns will it be widely recognized as a wreck.  On one hand it’s unfortunate that the ongoing disaster goes unseen by most, though crowds are certainly starting to gather.   On the other hand, the undying confidence in the status quo provides an opportunity to maneuver while maneuvering is still possible.

Farmers & Builders is a platform to explore and create alternatives to the current political-economic paradigm.  The platform is simply a set of shared values as reflected in our Manifesto and a shared vision that is often described throughout the pages of this blog.  It is also a common brand.  The brand, Farmers & Builders, is intended to help interface with the outgoing paradigm for trading and attracting more like-minded people.

F&B is broad in scope and therefore is not suitable as an organization.  Successful organizations are limited by mission or profit.  They combine governance, management and membership (or customers) to accomplish specific goals.  F&B is intended to foster a wide spectrum of activities that together may form an alternative political and economic system.  The shared values and vision help to ensure that the outcome is resilient communities, economic freedom and personal autonomy.

F&B isn’t about the professions of farming and building.  We’re not a trade group, nor is the goal to promote a career path on the tractor or in construction.  You don’t have to farm for a living to be a farmer. Ditto for builders. F&B is about the fundamental role of food and shelter in a community.

We are farmers & builders because we don’t believe food and shelter should be outsourced or commoditized.  They are inherently a shared responsibility within a family or community. And it is the shared responsibilities and shared experiences that allow communities to flourish.

Our communities are broke. They’ve been hollowed out and gutted by consumerism, individualism and hyper-mobility, all of which are, in part, an indirect result of the outsourcing and commoditization of food and shelter.  The effects and consequences of broken communities are far and wide.  The decline in our physical and emotional health has reached epidemic proportions. Insecurity, anxiety and defeatism is the norm.  We have less and less time for meaningful activities.

Our sociocultural regression has manifested to the point where basic communication and human interaction is challenged. We’re overly defensive and quick to assume the worst in people.  We often feel cheated or slighted.  Our natural instincts to defend and protect ourselves have kicked into high gear.  Denial as a means of emotional self-defense has become so powerful.  Anxiety attacks, which are caused by a natural fight-or-flight defense mechanism, are commonplace.

Nothing that we can fix in our political-economic system will address the more fundamental issue of broken communities.  We must focus our efforts on the heart of the matter.  If we are able to heal our communities then we’ll have the power to create the political and economic institutions that serve our needs.  Food & shelter is where it began once before and it is where it must begin again.  Recognizing and acting upon the importance of shared responsibility and shared experience is all takes to be a Farmer & Builder.  More importantly, it’s what makes a community.