Cindy Winkleman, your point about having all this information and it’s just locked up inside is one I make to myself all the time. I read, read, and read some more with a frenzied obsession, about all that is and must come to pass, but it stays locked up inside, eating away at my spirit.

What’s an old woman of limited means to do on her own? I have minimal influence on my sons or anyone within my social sphere. How do we find our little community if we don’t already have it? We can’t just go waltzing into someone else’s community at a moment’s notice and expect to fit in. (Well, maybe Gaviotas is a possibility.)

Relationships take years to build and if we’ve spent the better part of our lives among the wrong sorts of people, well then what?

I admit to misty-eyed dreams of a little ecotopia with extended family and other kindred spirits living in small houses on the land–like Vera’s old European villages, but my reality is impossibly far from that. My sons think I’m crazy so they’re unlikely to go along with any such nonsense.

I don’t know how to leap across that gap (abyss?) into the lifeboat, so I’ve largely resigned myself to going down with the ship, but perhaps trying to do some human good for others along the way. I know my life isn’t worth warm spit in the overall scheme of things.

I’m not going to share my personal story here, as you’ve provoked so many of your followers to do with this post. (Does “followers” sound cultish to you?). Instead, I will try to influence you with my words because I think it’s possible. I disagree with you when you negate Albert Einstein’s proverb, “Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.” You set a high standard through your example, no doubt causing those around you to reexamine themselves, and their lives.

As your student, I’m here to tell you that I want to learn how to survive without cushy conveniences in the way that you do. I want to learn how to form community bonds while foraging for fruits or while planting a food forest. In fact, I think it’s perfectly clear that many of us do. Many young people do feel the impending doom of the economy and the hopelessness of actual change in modern society. There’s a food revolution building in the urban sphere. What’s more, people are finding innovative ways to use “wastes” (food and other) generated by the industrialized masses to sustain little slices of nature and to create communities of like-minded naturalists anywhere they can.

I don’t believe you mean it when you say, “we shouldn’t expect words to change others”. Words are the most powerful agent of change, they give structure to the voice of movements and revolutions, but their power is contingent upon their audience. I think if you wrote more about your hands-to-dirt efforts and less about The Fall (or Correction, according to Vertalio), you’d see your efforts to incite change aren’t as futile as you make them sound. You do have an impact. But don’t get any ideas about starting a cult…

As you read these posts along with mine, you no doubt realize that you’re not disconnected at all. You write-preach out here in the blogsphere to a sympathetic and engaged audience. And so, you’ve not abandoned your influential role as a teacher, only your bureaucratic position as an educator.

It may benefit you to open your eyes to the students, to remember us as your audience. In other words, take that damned doombucket off for us once in a while (let us see your pretty side, with your funny mustache).

Side note: Mr. Vertalio, where is your magnificent food forest?

It’s tempting to actually respond to this posting here, but it’s hard to tell if you’re just having a bad week/month or if you’re actually really trying to figure out if you’re taking the right path.

Oh, and speaking of paths, make sure to pick up Legge’s Tao Teh Ching and Chuang Tzu, usually found in two volumes as The Texts of Taoism, Dover has them, easy to find. A lot of the problems we think are all new and exciting really aren’t that new or exciting, though they are to us, because they are happening now, here, to us, but there’s not a lot about this situation that I can see, except for the global scales involved, that is actually that new. Then when the crash we expect drags out and doesn’t go bang like we were hoping there’s this sort of anticlimactic letdown.

I’m noticing a lot of pretty major timing errors, came across this piece on depression/recession seems fairly realistic re the time scales involved here, minus discussion of the peak commodity issues.

But the actual question you ask here, it’s interesting, but the answers are not well suited for glib internet polemics I think, something all too jaded about this method of communication.. as with TV, on the internet too, at some point you have to notice that the medium is the message, and then start to wonder about the medium itself. No answers, but just saying, there are patterns here too.

get cracking!

I owe you an apology. I did not have to be rude and condescending. I keep forgetting the rule: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” In the future I’ll try to take deep breaths and think before I spew vitriol.

Michael Irving

I am dismayed you point us to Chris Hodges’ rant. I am sick to my soul of people who are invested in heaping abuse on the rightwingers and the religious. When in doubt, blame the right! The IRS is our friend! WTF? And he is an idiot for calling for “open and direct defiance” — yeah, I am sick of intellectuals calling for others to man the barricades while they stay safe away from them. Moral autonomy is not about throwing yourself into the gears of the Machine. That’s just doing again and again the same thing that has not worked out so well, for thousands of years now. Well, sorry to go on about Hodges, I am bummed you like that sort of thing. I was under the impression that I am more in sync with you.

Also, I do not think we humans have the ability to protect the living planet. But she can protect herself and will. Time is on her side.

You want to have more impact? Here are some questions: Are you trying to be a hero… as you saw yourself in the university setting, perhaps? Does this make sense in the new setting your have chosen? Are you lonely? Is the cloud in your heart connected more to that than what you are actually doing? And could it be that the path you have taken is the right one, it’s just that some significant piece of it has not been added yet?

Thank you for the sounds of the cranes. Made my morning!

The reason I say this is that you point it out yourself. The distance you feel between yourself and the habitat outside your mud hut is the same distance you feel between yourself and the world of technology through the “window” of the computer.

Close the distance.

By taking yourself out of the man-made world, you’ve removed your influence from the lives of the students you formerly taught. Unless you’re posting on Facebook 100x per day, or doing some other multi-media guerrilla assault on culture (which isn’t a bad idea…), you aren’t reaching those minds anymore.

And so you’ve removed yourself, to complain about what is, but have no effect on it.

Sorry to be so blunt, but I’d rather (selfishly) see you and everyone else with similar feelings coming together within the Sities…finding solutions…promoting real change.