Food For Thought

I couldn't sleep because of all the angst in my soul about the sorry state of just about anything environmental in this world.

This is an excerpt from the book that I'm now reading:

" 'The minute you begin to view the public as something that doesn't operate rationally, your job as a publicist or journalist changes,"  Stewart Ewen observes.  'The Pivotal moment was when those who provided the public with it's intelligence no longer believed the public had any intelligence.'   It is disturbing to see how frequently this ideology, which corrodes the democratic values in an acid bath of cynicism, surfaces today among the political insiders who claim to govern in the name of democracy and popular sovereignty.   On issue after issue, the public is belittled as self indulgent and misinformed, incapable of grasping the larger complexities known to the policy makers and the circles of experts surrounding them,' observed author William Greider in, Who Will Tell the People, his 1992 study of the Washington political establishment.' "


It really is time for us all to start talking to each other, mending fences and getting some of the people who are ruining our dreams out of that lobby at the white house.   We need to start thinking about the horrible future they have planned for "commoners", which is what they think of us as being.  If we stay isolated from each other, we can't do very much.  That's why things have gotten into the state they are in.  We have been divided against each other with labels slapped on us by corporate media for decades now.    But United, we can do this!  We can have more responsive representatives in our government, ones who aren't continually out of touch with our realities and our wishes.  We pay their salaries and they treat us as if we are imbeciles who need talked down to?


As to becoming re-united with one another, if we were to start right at the local level and take back our own Agriculture,  planning what our families are going to be eating around what can be grown locally, we start supporting local farmers who need our markets.  Both we and the farmers will find ourselves with more power to do other things that will benefit every region of this country.

The Slow Foods movement started back in the 50's, at least.  It's been working to keep food unprocessed, fresh and local throughout the consolidation of Agriculture into Agribusiness, which, incidentally,  is not a consolidation that is good  for the Earth, nor is it good for people.   There is a documentary entitled, "Ingredients", that shows how our food distribution system can be changed for the better.

Let's start with the small things close to home.  We don't have to become isolated regionally but we can learn how to keep the small farmers on their land!  And we can stop the huge and  wasteful corporate multi-nationals from sucking the life out of our little cities, and giving us absolute crap to eat and feed to our children.

It's obviously not going to be easy.  We have to talk to each other and work together to do it.  But, this is America!  It's ours!  We can do this thing! I believe in you, and your "smarts".  Don't let them tell you that you can't understand anything you set out to understand.  Go for it! 


Now for something beautiful for you to look at.  Local flowers at local farmers markets.  And some other little local plants.

Cosmos at Santa Cruz Farmer's Market

Tiny succulent "wall" at the Succulent Nursery in Elk-horn Slough area.. make it BIG!

Amazing Blue Poppy in the San Francisco Arboretum

May you walk with Beauty all around you!  I love you all!