Submitted by Hardscrabble Farmer [4], courtesy of The Burning Platform [5] [5]
There is a growing divide in the country and day by day it grows deeper and more irrevocable. All around us we see the signs, if we look for them, of decay and collapse built into the very system itself.
If you reward indolence, it will become the norm, if we practice wholesale slaughter from the womb to a foreign wedding party others will take the cue. If we celebrate slatterns and degenerates and ridicule the wholesome and traditional we will wind up with more of one and less of another.
The further an organism lives from it’s natural state, the more adaptable the organism will become to that which is unnatural.
Yesterday an older farmer came to pick up his cow from my farm. She had been a guest of ours for several days to be bred by my bull and when he arrived I asked him to pull his trailer to the lower trail beside the stream and open the rear door. I explained that I would be opening a gate from one pasture and leading the animals to another, that his animals- the cow and her young heifer- would follow at the rear of the herd and when he saw them approach he would simply close the pasture gate behind them and allow them to load back in his trailer. The cattle dogs watched my every move, excited to work and anxious for their opportunity to show off to my friend. I called out to the cows- mooing to them from the trailhead- and they quickly assembled at the gate, mooing in return.
I opened the gate, placing my hands with palms extended behind me and walked them along the trail towards the upper field. The dogs, without instruction, took up places at the right and left of the herd, keeping a close eye on the calves. When the last calves passed through the gates the dogs trotted alongside them without a sound and followed them the length of the passage. My friend stood by his trailer watching for his animals and as my herd moved into the upper pasture they spread out and put their heads down to the grass walking slowly uphill.
The calves, younger and full of energy shot ahead past his animals and sprinted through the gate to catch up with their mothers on the green field and like clockwork his two cows passed the edge of his trailer and made a sharp right and climbed into the trailer without a hitch. The dogs came in for a pat and a couple of “good dogs!”, panting happily.
He shut the door behind them and looked at me with a rare smile on his face, genuine and slightly surprised.
Any cow in it’s natural state, well fed, not stressed, kept on pasture rather than in confinement and handled with respect are trouble free. They thrive. They get along. They breed easily, deliver strong calves, put on muscle with ease, and are generally a pleasure to be around. Human beings share a very similar set of needs and requirements as most domesticated livestock- domesticated livestock being a creation of humans, adapted to human use and care throughout the centuries and to human habits and behaviors.
In progressive farming- yes, that’s what industrial agriculture calls itself- animals are kept in confinement, fed diets that contain little or no grass in order to fatten them quickly not with protein rich muscle but with tallow. They are pumped full of antibiotics- not to keep sickness at bay but to kill the digestive microbes in their guts so that each pound of feed is more readily converted to a pound of fat. They stand not in fields of grass but in knee deep paddocks filled with manure. They are moved about not by family farmers who have known them since birth, respectfully and with ease, but by hirelings who shout and push them and use taser like devices to shock them into compliance from on overcrowded paddock to another, filled with fear, their bodies flooded by hormones before slaughter.
How do we fail to make the connection? How do we not see that the further we drift from what we were meant to be and to do as human beings the more we become disoriented, obese, dysfunctional, angry, depressed, violent or passive in the extreme. These responses are the natural outcome of unnatural circumstances and we should be in no way surprised that the more we extol and promote such systems the more often we will see such behaviors. It isn’t surprising, it doesn’t require any in depth studies or introspection beyond the obvious.
We are a product of our time and place. We live in a dystopian future that makes Brave New World look positively mundane in comparison. Mass shootings are the natural outcome of a society that mentally shackles its population while pumping it full of psychotropic drugs and violent imagery. It tells us to turn away from bullying while it dumps payloads of high explosives on hospitals and schools. It tells us to empathize with women while objectifying them via pornography and then denies young adult males the benefits of a loving wife and family unless he meets an impossible standard or forces him in direct competition with females both academically and in the workplace, putting off family formation until such a time as a woman is near menopause.
I could go on but you get the picture.
What is happening is- in my opinion- is engineered. You couldn’t do more if you personally placed the gun in the young man’s hand and gave him a lawful order to kill everyone in that school- and ironically is that not what we do to our drone pilots, only in different locations?
We are being led, deliberately and inexorably to the abattoir. The only question is, are you willing to submit?
