Animal Farm Animals

Perhaps I was a bit too harsh to feminists, products of time as I am of mine. My romantic spleen longs for true groundswells of change, and I am angered by partisan politics and the some at the expense of some. Perhaps if I wax choleric I will prompt responses in kind, and who does not love kind responses and flamewars.

Maybe it is just that my frame of mind is dependant on that impossible blank slate. Bring me an eraser. Oh to be young in a young country! Give me destiny and an open frontier and I'll do my best Jefforson. It is only amidst concrete walls and decay that we must act the Lenins of the world, or the Stalins. If an age of I-beams demands men of steel I should be unsurprised that a copper-wire century creates bronze and calculating change.

The Thanksgiving season is on us. A season for gorging on turkey, tripping on triptophan and falling asleep in front of the football game. Thanksgiving was once the celebration of survival and a fresh chance in a firewashed land. All it took was the accidental genocide of a thousand peoples (and the calculated genocide of a thousand more) to give us two or three centuries of frontier. What is the new frontier? It took less than a decade for the digital prarie to become corn-growing land. Is space that final frontier? I think not in my generation.

The Jefforsonian ideal is predicated on indpendant incomes. The Friedanian ideal is predicated on independant incomes. The difficulty is that we now live in a society with no real frontier, where jobs are the product of amorphous corporates and bureacracy. Working outside the home gives a woman independance from her husband, but not full freedom. Dependance is merely shifted from one employer to another. Under the market economy, we are all dependants on the cheifs of industry; our corporate fathers take home the lions share of the bacon while we are left to clean the slaughterhouse.

At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, perhaps farms are the answer. If vegitarianism was mandated, or at least meat made a luxury, corporate farms would not be so requisite. Less land is needed for crops if they are eaten before being processed through the meat machine. More land could be left fallow for prarie or woodlands. Water rights would be less problematic in the West. We could hunt for pleasure and for the occasional meat, but grow most food on local farms. Urban areas could set up empty lots for community vegetable plots. A small slice of farm is a great fall-back for lean times. At the same time, because we are so connected through the interwaves of the wired aether, we could remain connected and continue the majority of jobs from localities.

This is a dream. We are the products of our time, and this type of sea change would require a generation of pigs who had not known farmers to stand on their hind legs.