Days of Plundering are Over

by Grandma KoKo author of More to Come, Part 1 is available.

Plunder, pillage, loot, rob, raid, ransack, despoil, strip, ravage, lay waste, devastate, sack, rape. 

There are two ways to acquire wealth, and only two – production, or plunder. 

You either create something of value for others, or you take it away.

Painting of Columbia symbolizing Manifest Destiny called "American Progress," by John Gast, 1872

I feel sorry for the young people who have been raised to be plunderers. Their species of creature is already endangered and soon to be extinct. Sadly this dominator-plundering culture is devouring its own self. I also feel sorry for me. I am a somewhat older person who has been raised to be a good plunderer, yet now I want to find a way out of that reality.

I recently had the opportunity to meet and speak with a couple of young men in their early twenties. They were both in a place of not wanting to live as a plunderer. One had worked in sales in the big city and hated it. Both had started college and not found happiness there so they were exploring a more sustainable lifestyle by using WWOOF and visiting homesteads in order to learn more about organic growing and homesteading.

I love the optimism of youth, so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Our young plunderers are taught, as I was, that they are entitled to a life of ease, regardless of any inconvenience, trouble or even death of others. As long as the plunderer is comfortable, then all is right with the world. Nature is viewed as something to provide goods for the plunderer after it has been dominated. Add to that the belief that any “problem” caused by other people or nature itself can be readily and easily solved-fixed by yet another marvelous tech-no-fix.

One thing that stood out in their approach to learning about growing your own and homesteading was the over-riding interest in how to make a profit. One was planning to grow hemp whenever that may become legal. They were not asking the more interesting questions. How do we manage the land in right relation to nature? How do we grow food that will be nourishing and contribute to health and happiness? How to we live in a new and better way as community rather than separate individuals? The plunderer mentality assures us that if we have lots of money or rather enough money (Is there ever enough? Do you know anyone who says they have enough money?) then all other things, like happiness and love and good food will be possible.

By focusing on how to make a profit they simply want to continue the plundering lifestyle as a country gentleman, countrified gentry. The only way to do that is with slaves. The plunderer always requires slaves, preferable friendly, happy slaves who work hard for little reward.

A Society of Plunder
As a parasitic society falls from the festering corruption of systematic legal plunder, the number of parasites grows while the number of producers falls, until the producers can no longer sustain the parasites – and then society falls apart.

 They feel the earth calling them to leave behind this false sense of security created by the plundering culture and the worship of money. Having been raised to live among the wealthy and eat at the plunderers table it’s hard to imagine another way. Yet the young ones are finding not only are there fewer and fewer seats available at that feasting table, the food offered there tastes nasty and offers little nourishment for either body, mind or soul.

So the young plunderer is faced with a dilemma. The path before them should they continue as the plunderer they were raised to be, requires them to harden their heart and loose their soul to the deity of “infinite growth” that promises an opulent lifestyle and ‘better living through chemistry’ tech-no-fixes. They haven’t yet learned that the offer of infinite growth is a limited offer available only to the plunderers who got there first and the plunderers who have lived before now have already taken most all of the resources. Worse still they have left behind a cesspool of trashy mess for the rest of us. They haven’t yet learned that while a few do get rich and fewer still get filthy rich, most of the rest of us get to eat shit and die. Their raising taught them if they just live right and work hard they too can be one of the rich, the American dream is available to everyone, right?

Wrong

It’s time to look for new stories about health and happiness, stories that do not include making money or making a profit. And that means it’s time to look for a different sense of self and a better culture to support our desire to live. It is time to choose, for all of humanity to choose, do we want to live or die? If we choose, collectively, as we now are to continue plundering the earths resources, then that choice leads to certain death for all living things as we now know them.

It’s all about having a different sense of self and the relationship of self to community and planet. Here are a few of the values or memes that shape a cultural milieu.

Dominator Plunderer memes	We are all connected memes
ME ME ME only me and mine are important, not others.	We are all connected.
Nature creates ‘problems’ that need to be fixed.	Nature is the source of all.
We have to ‘fix’ or ‘harness’ nature	We want to live in harmony with Nature.
When I want what you have I can take it because I have more guns and money.	Sharing is caring and together we have enough.
My trash and junk can be left for others to clean up.	First, cause no harm
It’s OK, even expected, to con and manipulate to get what I want.	We want to live in right agreement with all living things, including ourselves.
And the list goes on and on… Survival of the fittest It’s a dog eat dog world Children are meant to be seen and not heard. Spare the rod and spoil the child	Cooperation, caring and compassion light our way.

I know what the young people will find as they move to approach ‘right livelihood’ in the good ‘ole USofA. They will find laws and economic sanctions that make it almost impossible to proceed with almost everything important about what really needs to be happening. The list is long. There are laws preventing building ‘by hand’ using natural materials. There are laws against all kinds of natural things like raw milk, growing your own, even collection rain water or wanting to live off grid. Joel Salatin wrote a book published Sep 17, 2007 called ‘Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front’.

  

Fight for the Right to Grow Food: Orlando Man Cited for Illegal Gardening

Local food production can’t compete in making a profit because of so much cultural-government support and economic sanctions for Corporate Farming also known as Big Ag (Big Agriculture). If we simply had a level playing field, meaning no subsidies and support for Big Ag and remove the oppression towards family run homesteads and small farms. The current practices of Big Ag are inhumane, nasty, and wasteful; they require large amounts of fossil fuel and resources to produce LOTS of GMO corn and soy, and lots of BEEF and bacon. Big Ag alone is responsible for a vast amount of damage to the planet that we are currently experiencing.

If we could level the playing field I propose:

• Local grown food would cost less than the processed foods that travel thousands of miles before they reach the shelves of your supermarket.
• Local food could be grown for better taste and appeal, rather than conformity of product and ease of shipping.
• People eating local food will be healthier and happier.

But the playing field is stacked by the dealer, the dominating plunderer.

As I said before I feel sorry for the young plunderers as they examine their lives and find that walking away from Empire ain’t no easy cake walk. When really I’m feeling sorry for myself as I move, like many others, to simply walk away from empire. I don’t want to be a plunderer any more, but there is so much about the culture that lives on as my own way of being. I don’t believe we can get there as individuals we have to travel there as a culture, all together doing things in a different way.

I know I have great gifts to give and I know that the Universe will rush in to provide and support all that I need to do the ‘mission’ I was born to do. I was born here on earth, as every other baby ever born, for a purpose. I need to learn to express my true authentic humane self, or die. But guess what? There is no steady paycheck – yet – or probably ever, for what I do best. So I’m looking at a life without a steady paycheck, no retirement benefits, no sick leave or paid vacation. “Oh My!”

Lions and tigers and bears, Oh My!

It’s time to look to each other for the courage and wisdom to take care of each other, build community. Local food is our strength for surviving these confusing times of great change.

Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm.
Self-labeled as the "lunatic farmer",
Joel pushes the envelope more than a little in the field of agriculture. 

There is no place like home, and home is this planet, the whole planet. We’ve been wearing the ruby slippers all along. We are born great, complete, whole. Human beings are so much more powerful and creative than we have been taught by the Dominator-Plunderers who want to ‘grow’ slaves and not humans.

We can reclaim our birthright of being created equal. Equal with the universe, equal with the stars, each other and all things great and small, from the tiniest particle of the smallest atom to the biggest galaxy in all of creation, we are all connected and no one thing is more important than another. EQUAL, no one life is more important than another.

These are the questions we need to be asking, and finding more meaningful answers, bigger answers that Dominator-Plunderer can provide:

Who am I?

Where did I come from?

Why am I here?

Where am I going?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could recognize the Dominator-Plunderer aspect as it has encroached into our own psyches? And learn to ‘lovingly’ assist one another to catch the behavior and all its implications. The first step is to identify Plundering thoughts and behaviors in our own self and others. Then we could give it a shorthand and call it D-P, so we could just say, “oh, stop being so d-p, it ain’t cute, not fun anymore.”

Wouldn’t it be even greater to recognize it in our political and economic realm and be able to say, “Just stop already, you big bully”.