Tuesday, April 04, 2023

FROM "EASY MONEY" TO " A CASHLESS SOCIETY"



 

There is no good reason, economic or otherwise, to wish forthe “recovery” and continuation of the economy we have had.There is no reason, really, to expect it to recover and continue, for it has depended too much on fantasy. An economy cannot “grow” forever on limited resources. Energy and food cannot stay cheap forever. We cannot continue forever as a tax-dependent people who do not wish to pay taxes. Delusion and the future cannot serve forever as collateral. An untrustworthy economy dependent on trust cannot beguile the people’s trust forever.


The old props have been kicked away. The days when wecould be safely crazy are over. Our airborne economy has turned into a deadfall, and we have got to jack it down. The problem is that all of us are under it, and so we have got to jack it down with the least possible suffering to our land and people.

I don’t know how this is to be done, and I am inclined to doubt that anybody does. You can’t very skillfully jack something down if you didn’t know what you were doing when you jacked it up.

 

But we have got to begin by treating our land with the practical and effective love that alone deserves the name of patriotism.From now on, if we would like to continue here, our use of our land will have to be ruled by the principles of stewardship and thrift, using as the indispensable measure not monetary profit or industrial efficiency or professional success but ecological health.

 

WENDELL BERRY is a writer and farmer living in Kentucky

 

This article first appeared in The Progressive (September 2009)

Nuestra economía en el aire se ha transformado en una caída mortal, y nos disponemos a traerla debajo. El problema es que todos estamos bajo ella, y así tenemos que traerla debajo con el menor sufrimiento posible para nuestra tierra y nuestra gente. No sé cómo puede hacerse, y me inclino a pensar que nadie lo sabe. No puedes confiadamente traer algo abajo si no supiste qué hacías cuando lo elevaste.

(WB)

 

"Much has been said about American slavery, but I think that we do not even yet realize what slavery is. If I were seriously to propose to Congress to make mankind into sausages, I have no doubt that most of the members would smile at my proposition, and if any believed me to be in earnest, they would think that I proposed something much worse than Congress had ever done. But if any of them will tell me that to make a man into a sausage would be much worse — would be any worse — than to make him into a slave — than it was to enact the Fugitive Slave Law, I will accuse him of foolishness, of intellectual incapacity, of making a distinction without a difference. The one is just as sensible a proposition as the other.

(…)

The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal. 

Slavery and servility have produced no sweet-scented flower annually, to charm the senses of men, for they have no real life: they are merely a decaying and a death, offensive to all healthy nostrils. We do not complain that they live, but that they do not get buried. Let the living bury them: even they are good for manure."


Slavery in Massachusetts
 
by Henry David Thoreau


ThoreauTransforms His Journal into “Slavery in Massachusetts”

I think the real lesson Thoreau intended is not his life-style; not even his two-year prescription for cure. It is his attitude. And of this, as the Editors of Time remind us, Walt Whitman's portrait is the best: "Thoreau's lawlessness -- his dissent -- his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses". This, I think, has been a distinguishing mark of the American character, ever present in its folklore, its politics, its classical and popular art, even in what Americans admire of other cultures -- just watch, if not, Hallmark's production of Merlin."

Notes on the "Complemental Verse" 

by René Pinet (Bahia, Mexico)



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