Sorry, this turned into a long rant, but here it is. I watched this video this morning, after working in my container garden a couple hours. I’ve watched Doug and Stacy videos for quite a while, even though I have no desire to live off-grid and I live in a residential area with a backyard space to garden. I learn a lot from many of the online homesteaders, just like I learn a lot from online gardeners, preppers, frugal-living people, and needleworkers. Doug was trying to avoid the politics in this video and urging people to get up and start doing now, before the economic crisis worsens. He’s absolutely right. Here’s the video and then I’m going to make some comments about the politics:
In regards to the politics, while certainly I believe the Biden administration policies have been disastrous for the American economy and I also have believed since the Obama years, that there’s a multi-faceted culture war raging that encompasses not only hot button issues like race and gender politics, but also the climate change activism and world-wide economic changes. Among the far-left there’s been a belief in “collapsing the system” to force cultural, political, and economic transformation in America since probably as far back as the late 1960s-early 1970s.
None of the things President Obama talked about were new ideas among the radical left, even though American right-wing media became obsessed with generating hysteria, fear and plenty of idiotic Obama conspiracy theories (that birther crap was nuts – Obama’s mother was an American citizen, so that gave her child a right to American citizenship, wherever he was born). Many of these right-wing talkers’ millions of loyal groupies along with the right-wing pundit celebrity culture is as destructive as the Oprah/TV talk show culture was to American culture, where Americans were conditioned to airing all of their most private dirty laundry in public and betraying their closest family members on stage, all under the guise of sharing pain and family problems.
So right now, right-wing media and social media content creators gravitate toward hyping a lot of “news” that is little more than unsubstantiated innuendo and conspiracy theories, while other like-minded people in right-wing media and social media repeat all of this stuff without any independent verification whatsoever. It’s a vicious information cycle, where people add their own bits and takes to it, just like the game of telephone with kids sitting in a circle and whispering something to each other, around the circle. What the last kid hears is nothing like what the first kid whispered.
Absolutely, President Obama had a long history of supporting radical leftist ideologies and within his administration were many people I considered far-left kooks and a few were even hardline communists, but even more of them were mainly corrupt politicians. President Biden has many of the same people in his inner-circle and I don’t expect any changes in policy direction from this White House. They’re committed to the same fundamental transformation as I’ve heard blabbed about since the 1970s, although the latest iteration is the “great reset.” It’s the same radical leftist ideology repackaged with new lingo.
Trump and his administration also contained many corrupt charlatans, corrupt politicians and kooks too. Ditto that for the GOP. That’s why I don’t expect a Republican win this fall or in 2024 to create some miraculous change, unless enough Americans start facing the out-of-control corruption (and spending) in our politics and in our culture. That starts with ourselves – we’ve got to stop blaming other people for everything that’s going wrong and start becoming more committed to changing ourselves and working on improving our own lives.
What I want to talk about is thinking about how much of your energy and time you’re choosing to invest in things you can change and have the power to control in your own life vs. how much time and energy you’re choosing to invest in fear, panic, anger or rage at daily political hot air and online-fueled hysteria?
I see several prepper channels pop up in my YouTube feed, where they cover the political happenings several times a day, claiming they have inside sources, and I keep wondering how much time they have to work at their own preparedness efforts with their almost constant social media presence?
I don’t have time to read as much news, reports and follow the spin war garbage as I did when I spent many hours sitting beside my husband’s hospice bed every day and where my daily chores involved being inside the house almost all of the time, carrying a baby monitor with me, so I could hear him if he needed anything and to make sure he was okay. His 13-month hospice ordeal was horrific for him (it wasn’t a picnic for me either) – he was completely bed-bound. I had to help him sit up on days where he wasn’t strong enough to do that and other days it was turning him and using pillows to rotate his position every couple hours to avoid pressure sores. He was a very independent person and hated every minute being trapped in that bed, but he kept fighting to pull himself up to a sitting position by himself and he kept trying to eat to get stronger. I would have given up the fight within days, but he fought to the last moments.
I write a lot about the truth and here’s a home-truth for myself – I am not in good health and in many serious crisis situations the odds are stacked against me surviving. I have no delusions about being the last person standing in a crisis, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sit around and do nothing to prepare or to try to better my odds. I have children and grandchildren. I want to make sure they survive.
I’ve been working on losing weight, working on trying to become more physically fit, but as I’ve mentioned before I’m an insulin-dependent diabetic with heart problems, which makes me very dependent on our medical supply chain and even my insulin has to be refrigerated. My doctor has lowered my insulin dosage twice since I started losing some weight and I am hoping I can continue on this path of losing weight, controlling my blood sugar, and lowering my reliance on insulin. Everyone can work a little bit at a time toward becoming more self-sustainable and self-reliant.
There are millions of people in America who have various medical needs and disabilities, which require a heavy dependence on our medical supply chain and modern technology. If you are reliant on medications or medical supplies, it’s prudent to try to increase the amount of medication and supplies you have on hand to create a buffer in case of shortages. Often, doctors, medical insurance and costs can limit how much medication you can have on hand.
There are probably even more Americans who live in delusion-land about the economic crisis that’s already beginning to impact America and who believe there’s not a serious economic “hurricane” headed our way. They’re like the people at the beach the day before a hurricane touches land, where the surf is getting choppy and rough, but hey the sun’s shining, so everything’s fine…
America likely won’t face the same levels of devastation as some countries like Sri Lanka or Turkey, where Sri Lanka has food riots and the Turkish economy is collapsing, but we’re not immune from having our self-indulgent consumer culture upended. America is a land with immense resources, even though we’ve outsourced so much of manufacturing and become reliant on cheap foreign imports. We might be able to avoid some of the horrific devastation many countries will be facing as this global economic crisis and food shortage crisis hit. However, the rainbows and sunshine, head-in-the-clouds folks will probably be in total panic mode when they realize they should have prepared and that the political leaders they trusted, were blowing smoke up their you know what
If you wonder how on earth anyone can still believe everything is going great and that we’re not headed toward a serious economic crisis, well, this came from the White House press secretary a few days ago:
It’s not until more and more Americans take off the partisan political blinders and realize Washington and our political class (across the aisle) are the problem and not the solutions, that any meaningful political change will happen in America. It’s not a matter of “red” America or “blue” America winning, it’s about when the American people start talking to their neighbors, friends and each other and working together to survive the coming crises, that perhaps our country can start moving in another direction.
I hope more people can put aside anger, rage, reacting to media-generated hysteria and move toward trusting in ourselves, each other and in working hard every day to be stronger, better-prepared, more resilient. and most of all I hope we can all work hard on being more grateful for the many blessings living in America has afforded us. I hope we can be more gracious to each other, even the people who hold differing views.
How about each day find a few things in your own life and home that you can do to improve you and your family’s quality of life and to become more self-sustainable. Instead of spending hours enraged about the latest hysterical topic social media is buzzing about or about shortage situations all over America or trying to follow every empty store shelf report, perhaps put that energy toward something positive in your own life.
The reality is the shortage situation is likely to get worse and that means everyone will need to have a personal strategy – whether it’s adequate food storage to buffer the impact, growing more of their own food, or a localized information and food supply chain to deal with that. It doesn’t do me any good to get worked up about empty shelf videos of grocery stores in CA or all around America, when I live in GA. It also is wasted energy. I want to shop less often and make less trips to the store, not run around every day in a panic looking for this item or that item. My first thought when I realize I am out of an item is to think, “Do I have something else in my house that will work?”
My little container garden isn’t going to provide enough produce for me to live on, but this morning I picked more kale to dehydrate (third kale harvest from this kale) and I can probably get one more harvest from that before it bolts. I have more kale growing. I’ve picked enough cherry tomatoes for salads in the past couple weeks and frozen two quart-size bags. I’ve picked green beans twice from five grow bags with green beans – enough for meals, cucumbers, squash, onions and I’ve been dehydrating sweet basil and lemon basil this week. I intend to work on gardening year-round again (zone 8b that is possible) and planting more vegetables in my backyard space. I bought blueberry and blackberry bushes and I’ve got one raspberry. I bought a grape vine and strawberries. It’s a small start at gardening, but I’ll probably have enough cucumbers, bell peppers and cherry tomatoes to give some to neighbors. My squash looked great until the squash vine borers arrived and now it’s a battle. I replanted zucchini. I’ve been planning what I’m going to plant in late-July and August for fall vegetables.
I’d rather be working on things I can change, not spending days on end worrying or fuming about politics and things that I can’t change. More people are waking up to the reality of the economic hurricane heading our way, but assuredly there will be some fools (like liberal pundits on Twitter) still floundering about wondering why there aren’t minimum wage delivery people to cart their groceries to their front door in this crisis, like back in 2020, when their cushy jobs allowed them to work from home. In fact, many of the liberal elites might be waking up to realizing that they no longer have that cushy job at all. The reality of a serious economic and food shortage crisis is inescapable, even for those who live in ivory towers.
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