When it rains.....

I have reached a point in the summer.  That point where it is too hot, too dry, too busy, too much sun, too many crops to keep up with - in short, I have hit the summer wall.  It is a point that I personally think of as the "freeze point,"  or that frame of mind that I find myself in when I think, 'if it were to all just freeze now, I would be okay with that!'  This year is especially bad, however and my best efforts to ride out this pessimism are not working out so well.

I need a good thunderstorm to break up the tension a little and water my gardens, ...but it doesn't and then I get upset with the weather (generally an exercise in futility if there ever was one), and then I get mad at people because we are at (or past - depending upon my level of fatalism on a particular day) the tipping point of climate change and it will all only be a slow, hot, depressing decline from this point on with all the media outlets and government officials talking about it, but people in general essentially doing nothing about it.

I tend to become especially cynical when hot and frustrated.

I thought of making a quick list of all the problems at the top of my mind regarding the climate and farming, but quickly realized that the list was entirely too long and really didn't help improve my outlook much, but then I thought of my grandparents.  Farmers, the lot of them.  They lived through the dust bowl, the depression, WWII, and all of the fear mongering that followed with the Cold War.  If ever there was a case of "when it rains, it pours" problems piling up, this era would have been it.  I find myself wondering sometimes if they ever thought the end of the world was coming, and if so, how did they continue to get up every morning and affect some change?  Maybe the world was just different back then.  Maybe not knowing all the world news and hearing of all the horrors that are happening in far off regions made it easier to ride out your own problems.  Maybe not having access to as many people (many both more educated and significantly less educated than you yourself are) was beneficial to focusing on the present local problems.  I find that I have almost completely given up listening to the news and I have to stop myself from reading the asinine comments on the news articles that I do read - as filled with hate and fear as they are.

 I fully understand that this sense of dread about the environment and the food we produce and eat doesn't permeate very deeply into the populace at large, but there is a sense amongst many of us on this "survivalist bandwagon" that the doors of opportunities that my grandparents and parents had opening in front of them are slowly closing for us.  It is very sad to see some of the predictions of environmental disaster that were pooh-poohed by so many slowly coming true. It is like being told the Titanic was too big to sink....and yet she sits on the bottom of the Atlantic floor.

But what, exactly is one person to do? This is the most troubling question.  How is one person to make a difference that turns the world around from this horribly destructive course?  How does a person look her kids in the face and say, "Sorry guys, good luck!" How, then, do I wake up every morning and hope to affect any change?

I have to believe that small steps, repeated millions of times by people all over the world, together can change the way our governments work, our food is produced, our people are fed and our children educated.  The alternative, which has mainly been big business monopolies running the corporate food network (and the government), is simply not working - it is bankrupting our land and the people who live on it.  The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again hoping to get a different result.  It isn't working.  It is time to change.  Horton hears the Who, but until every last shirker, every last JoJo, is yowling and yapping, chances are we will not be heard.

Yap!