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A Small Medium At Large – by Galen Chadwick

It Ain’t Rocket Surgery. Does it feel Solipsistic in here, or is it just me?  I don’t know, but I must assume, that we all share the urge to bail out of the TV nightly news when the verbal waterboarding hits the bright red line of unhelpful repetition.  Strange things have resulted upon hearing that schoolyard taunt, “Biden’s oligarch can lick Trump’s oligarch!” I, for one, often run to the fridge just to compensate.

It gets worse. Like a scene right out of Dante’s Inferno, an unlikely chain of events combined to make our world out of dust bunnies in the early solar system. Then, untold black budget trillions later, a molten cloud of waste, fraud and abuse gathered to form the embryonic Deep State. This grew to eight admin hives located deep beneath the atomic blast craters that enemy incoming might create.

Then huge bolts of lightning fused a vast ocean of fake news into solid rock the size of city blocks, giving us today’s impact theory of government. It’s also how we know the gravitational effect of the vast, if lopsided pile of mathematics that it takes to make a rocky planet. So why, then, are we left to ask ourselves “Is this all? Where’s the comprehensive food ethic? Who’s running this swamp, anyway?” 

The lack of satisfactory answers offers yet one more reason why my huddled adverbs are tired of feeling more morosely than ever. Equally sad, the prospect of getting increased funding for this column’s counter-terrorism efforts remains bleak.  At least the house vote on the impeachment rope-a-dope happens today.  

Alas, dear reader, it’s been a gray, cold week and it’s time to set aside the politics for a moment. I don’t know what you think about upon first wakening, but for me there’s nothing harder on the ears than the forced use of redundant pronouns. I have done a lot of personal work in this area so let us, in the spirit of understanding, set aside our media orchestrated contentions in order to contemplate how nice it would be if visitors just talked like they’re supposed to.

Nobody should be allowed to say “you ‘uns” or “all y’all” if other important regional identity traits don’t otherwise line up. Anyone who minimizes the impact of this abuse on long suffering natives doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Why would anyone who is actually “from here” think that you are too, when you’re clearly not? Particularly if you’re gonna extol the virtues of that unreality antidote “No one’s above the law!” Really? When did that start?

Forget the Bankster bailouts, cover-ups, assassinations, chem trails and smashed text messages. Forget the washboard roads and moonshine runs. Just check out the definition of “Divine Right” of kings. It’s the doctrine of absolute right of a monarch. There are still 44 monarchies clinging to the planet, if you include the Vatican, so it’s still a big deal.  

Our “special relationship” to England remains premised on the belief that an individual’s tenure as monarch- here we call it Congress- is an act of God. Thus the King or Senator can set the law, or ignore or change the law as may have been set up by a representational parliament or “representational congress” as we like to say in American English.  

The Crown- as a prototypical model of the Swamp- amassed enormous wealth over the centuries, largely by pioneering insider land acquisitions, conquest, “forfeitures,” taxes, murder and when all else fails, outright purchases. To be fair, the hidden cost of cover ups, pay-to-play fees and divorce grew over time as well.

I watch the venerable Today show just to keep up with those who don’t have to live by the same rules. It features a daily fluff segment about British Royalty. “The Adorable Prince Archie ate his first booger at the Royal Track at 9:48 this morning. The Queen, carrying a gun metal purse, is believed to be signaling support to Citi Bank and her legions of anti-Brexit supporters.” 

Ok, so I’ve slid back into politics.  Probably (to be honest) I’m trying to wish common sense back into being by sheer dint of repetition. Take Christopher Steele, the “retired MI6 agent” who ran MI6’s Russia desk from 2006-2009, then was later paid $168K for Fusion GPS research on Trump’s dirt by the Clinton campaign. Nobody at MI6 ever “retires” but continues to serve the geopolitical aims of the Crown to the last.

But fooling all the people all of the time is not where I was going with this. For now, I’m trying to go at least a day without being reminded of Trump or Schiff, or Prince Archie. None of the political parties recognize food as a common good, that ethical food should be part of a revived commons. They use recurrent concepts like “sustainable” and “local” as marketing tools as opposed to representing a new social movement.

At what point did we plan to have this conversation about our lost unity? Who still believes we have a representative government?  There are objective measurements for measuring the speed by which we have gone from a free-standing people to universal techno-peasantry. 

It’s why I write about the loss of food independence and the capabilities and common sense that comes with it. Just 100 years ago our entire civil society raised, tended and harvested what we put in our mouths. The significance of a grassroots remedy, as opposed to a governmental one, is that it institutes flexible and informal rules instead of formal ones.

Unfortunately, the collapse of our intellectual capacities has closely followed a grassroots collapse of civility that is too big to readily comprehend.  They say it’s all about the money. That is why I point out that the size of our fungible asset base, in the form of our real assets and will provisions, could quickly leverage the return to a form of actual democracy.  

Here’s how to get some perspective on it: It takes about eleven days to count to one million dollars (1,000,000) at one dollar per second. A billion dollars (1,000,000,000) takes some 31 years to count.  To get to one and a half trillion, or 1,500,000,000,000, takes about 48 thousand years.  

We have considerably more on hand than all the taxes, expenditures and pay-for play monies that have fueled everything done by all Missouri politicians put together. We don’t need to operate below a certain level permitted to us. We already have the tools to change.  We don’t need a monarch to direct our thinking.  

Maybe this level of clarity is no longer recognizable. Maybe we enjoy paying out the wazoo for lousy results. But maybe the call to restore food freedom will activate the love behind a velvet revolution.  Love conquers all, right?  We’re all for love, right?

Today’s higher net return on intensively managed organic farms comes from the efficiency with which regenerative practices, methods and enterprises are integrated together. That’s the key to real farm independence, for the return of food ownership- and real health- to the people.

Soft power is a concept whose time has come. One form of it can come from using a little of our own money to motivate bigger outcomes in our civic service and religious organizations. These forums are positioned to unite the efforts to locally supply local institutions, restaurants and small town populations.  It is in our own interests to boost the remaining handful of food independent farms while promoting common sense standards for the high degree of product uniformity, consistency and volume that retailers require. 

Small producers must stir themselves to self-organize. No one else can do it. But even pooling resources – an inconceivable notion to most modern minds – is hardly enough to create decentralized cooling, storage and distribution hubs. It takes watershed level planning to secure direct financing through retail grocers. “Just field a team, for God sakes!” they tell us. We can stop complaining about clueless politicians and this changes the picture the moment that we do.

Unity is a time-proven condition of the vast American heart.  When did the tacit acceptance of perpetual juvenility become the normal condition? If only we could understand the higher truth of relationship, and vow to restore our integrity before the trucks stop rolling or the grid goes down. 

Unity is not something we need to create and it operates below the noise level of all other issues. More and more people are realizing that our divisions are very destructive of any kind of well-being. It is also clear that the profound polarization of American politics is managed, the system is rigged, but it can also structure our awakening. Douglas County once exported its extra oats and wheat. To break bread again independently of the Nanny State means to roll up our sleeves, introduce ourselves to the neighbors, and bring new hope for the future .