Toughsledding

This week, while shelving books in my repainted and carpeted home office, I came across one titled "The Making of a Counter Culture" by Theodore Roszak published in 1969.
Roszak discusses the social, political and spiritual philosophies of 20th century thinkers Paul Goodman, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg and others. Here's a sample of Roszak referring to Goodman's ideas:
"Where is the life-sustaining receptacle that can nourish and protect good citizenship?
"The answer is: you make up a community of those you love and respect, where there can be enduring friendships, children, and, by mutual aid, three meals a day scraped together by honorable and enjoyable labor. Nobody knows quite how it is to be done. There are not many reliable models. The old radicals are no help: they talked about socializing whole economies, or launching third parties, or strengthening the unions, but not about building communities" (203).
Therein lies the germ of thought that spawned the Back-to-the-Land-Movement of the 1960s and 1970s hippie "families" returning to a kind of Jeffersonian agrarian America, refurbishing small abandoned farms, scraping together three meals a day "by honorable and enjoyable labor", that is, by engaging in gardening, foraging, hunting
and small-scale animal husbandry.
In those exciting days, the promises of the city, of technology, were revealed through experience as just so much propaganda.
While perhaps allowing for freedom from hard physical labor, many of these jobs propagate dissatisfaction, hollow lives lived in cubicles staring at Ray Bradbury-style screens sorting data that workers can rarely, if ever, relate to a whole — a form of wage slavery.
Referring to those Americans living lives of "quiet desperation" in an unsatisfying economy, Goodman "had hit on a painfully American answer, 'do it yourself.' If there is no community for you, young man, young [woman], make it yourself."
We may not think of Uncle Jake's backyard vegetable garden, or our own, as political statements, but they are. By producing a portion of our own food, we are "dropping out" of America's food system rat race. If we insist upon using open-pollinated varieties of vegetables and saving our own seeds, we are adding another political layer to the project.
America's corporations go out of their way to capitalize (ultimately ruin and destroy) every means Americans devise to live simple, sensible, satisfying lives. Now that so many mineable, cutable, drillable, resources are disappearing, corporations are looking for other targets of exploitation, and our food supply/system is high on the list.
If we wage slaves are kept busy running through chaotic mazes and become dependent upon fast foods, we may not notice how corporations are undermining our food supply through seed-patenting, terminator genes, genetic modification, ordinances prohibiting home food production, fear-induced belief systems that convince people only packaged, processed food is safe, etc.
But there may be hope in organizations like the Slow Food Movement and Kitchen Gardeners International. These groups recognize the connections inherent in how we feed ourselves, the importance of meaningful labor and the elements required to live satisfying lives.
Because of my own coming of age during the dear and turbulent 1960s, I like to think of these movements as a kind of Neo-Hippiedom, a return to the joy found in every day survival activities — gaining a measure of independence through producing our own food, taking time to prepare a nutritious meal and share it with dinner conversation, spinning our own threads and weaving them into clothing, instead of total, blind dependence.
I enjoy a recurring vision that I've worked most of my life to achieve:
I am standing in an open cook shack in an immense garden in a clearing surrounded by a lush forest. The shack has wooden tables and benches. I have prepared a meal of fresh garden greens, bowls of hearty vegetable soup served in hand-thrown clay bowls and slices of whole grain bread. People come in from working in the garden to eat lunch. We talk quietly while we eat, laugh at jokes; the feeling is one of respectful camaraderie. It starts to rain. We break from our work to enjoy the gentle summer rain, nature's refreshment.
Political action doesn't necessarily require running for office or marching on a Capitol, but merely making time to slow down and reacquaint ourselves with what it means to be a human animal as opposed to an unhappy servant of corporate power.