Keeping up with yesterday...
I've been taken lately with the concept of autarky. It's strikes me as such a self evident good thing for a country to aspire to that it baffles me NO ONE is doing it..What's up with that? I guess North Korea is the only country that has such a policy (juche) but that I think is born more out of craziness and outside circumstances than a healthy desire for self sufficiency. With all this unrest resulting from rising food prices you would think this would be a country's number one priority. And it doesn't have to be complete autarky... just so in areas that a country absolutely relies upon to survive..But everyone insist on going headlong into this globalism crap!
And the biggest factor in the rise of these food prices is speculation in commodities markets. How is trading food futures even allowed? This is what people rely on to LIVE and we are trading and hedging and betting on corn, wheat, and pork bellies as if they were abstractions.. and causing a lot of misery in the process..It seems and is completely insane....The whole thing needs to be abolished...It's the source of so much misery! It's an awful institution.
But anyway back to autarky. I've been reading an incredible book about 19th century France and how the ideas of the Revolution were working their way and through the rest of the country outside of urban areas. And it talks about how every village was independent a "little citadel, morally and physically independent." Which in todays language means they were very insular and bigoted. I can talk about this forever..and maybe someday I will...I think its very important.. Especially when it comes to such things as freedom, culture, and beauty...But yes autarky..relying on ones self or family or neighbors and not too much beyond them....
This is a concept we moderns have little ability to understand. Everything about it is repulsive to our minds, because we have been conditioned to look at life from a perspective that is so skewed and so very far removed from actual life itself. In school we are not taught history from the ground up. So very few of us are taught the history of a town or community we've grown up in or even our family history. Instead we are taught the history of the nation or world. We learn the geography of everyplace but our own backyard..And no wonder we don't appreciate the only things we actually have the means and power to improve.. We are conditioned to look at and appreciate things from a national or global perspective. And this more often than not means we are never satisfied unless our lives are lived on or are acting on that scale. All this reminds me of, you guessed it, a wonderful poem !This one is written by the consumate Englishman John Betjeman..Here goes:
..the children have a motor-bus instead,
and in a town eleven miles away
We train them to be "Citizens of Today."
And many a cultivated hour they pass
In a fine school with walls of vita-glass.
Civics, eurhythmics, economics, Marx,
How-to-respect-wild-life-in-National-parks;
Plastics, gymnastics- thus they learn to scorn
The old thatch'd cottages where they were born.
The girls, ambitious to begin their lives
Serving in WOOLWORTH'S, rather than as wives;
The boys, who cannot yet escape the land,
At driving tractors lend a clumsy hand.....
HAPPY SUNDAY!