How Did We Become So Dependent on the System & What happens when the System Breaks Down

I watched a YouTube video the other day that said there are people that have never picked food off a plant and then eaten it. I grew up in the suburbs, one year mom grew an amazing garden that was my first experience seeing a food garden. On vacations we used to pick raspberries and blueberries. Sometimes we went fishing, but we always threw the fish back. This is not the experience for every American. Many people live in densely populated cities with no access to even a grassy field to play in and not a single tree to climb.

I started off writing this hoping to point out how we really aren’t self-reliant. We depend on the power station miles away to charge our cell phones. Someone else has to tell us where to go and we depend on the GPS to tell us how to get there. We need someone to repair our cars, deliver water to our homes through pipes, someone we never see grows our food and delivers it to a store where we select what we want. Now you can even have grocery items delivered to your doorstep. Where did all this dependence come from?

Perhaps we are living in a society that trains us to be dependent.

When you go to an American Public School you learn very quickly that you must fit in with the rest of the students. They even want the children to have identical school supplies to the rest of the children down to the brand of crayons and the color of notebooks. If you have to use the restroom you have to get a hall pass granting permission to pass through the hallway to the restroom. Apparently children can not be trusted to go to the restroom and then return to the classroom.

This was not the case at my school. I went to a Catholic elementary school and a private all-girls high school. Yes, you needed to ask permission before leaving the classroom in the elementary school. But, in high school you were expected to slip out of the room and then return without interrupting the class. There was a measure of respect shown to us. I find it appalling that in the public schools children aren’t shown any level of respect on the child’s individual merits. A well behaved child ought to be trusted enough not to need a pass to leave the room.

The children are punished on a group basis. One child misbehaves and the whole class is punished. Every year when I fill out the school survey I make it known that I find this very unfair. I’m not even sure what it seeks to accomplish. Except that the group should seek to bully the naughty child into behaving like the other good little citizens.

The American Public School are funded through property tax dollars and in some states a lottery that steals (tricks away) wealth from the poor and redistributes it back to the children of the poor by paying for their schooling. Lotteries are in general a thing which I have negative feelings about. I feel they unfairly target the most unequal among us. The poor not only pay property taxes through the rent paid to the landlord but then pay again if they buy into the lottery,

BE A GOOD LITTLE CITIZEN

You come out of the school system with the idea that a good citizen like you will write up a resume and look for someone else to GIVE you a job. You will go to a job at the hours the boss specifies and then you will punch a card that puts a time stamp in proving you arrived on time. Then you will sit where you are told and do what you are told. When the boss says it’s time for you to eat, you leave your desk, punch out your time card and can move about for 30 minutes and eat what you brought in the lunchroom or seek out sustenance elsewhere.

I had a job in a factory at one time. We were treated like cattle. When the door buzzed open it was time for the prior shift workers to leave and for my shift to start. We would file in. As a group we were given instructions and directed to a stall… I mean a workbench. We were expected only to use the restrooms during designated break times. We would break for a meal when a bell rang and then return to our workbenches when the next bell rang. When the final bell rang we would leave the barn, I mean factory. Moo…

Having not come from a public school system directly like most of the other workers, I was kind of shocked by the order or it all. By the simplicity of just going where you are told and doing what you are told, when you are told. Other people seemed to understand the “rules” and fit right in to this order of business. I was never one of those people. I tended to just head for the bathroom if nature called.

See that’s exactly it… nature. Nature was calling to me. Even as I moved on to a job in banking I would long to be outside. So I moved to be near the ocean… nature was calling me.

Sometimes we get stuck thinking that we can’t ever get rich and free. That hard work and making good choices won’t send us in the right direction. Makes them think playing the lottery is the only answer. I think of people who were born into a community that told itself that they were oppressed. Maybe they in fact are not so much oppressed as repressed, held down and restrained by the lack of access to nature. Having never experienced the freedom of picking fruit off a tree that they didn’t have to pay for. Just reaching up and grabbing that which nature provides without any sort of enslavement to the system.

If nature calls the repressed they wouldn’t even know it.

Here’s how public schooling is very unfair (though I have no plan for a better system…)
The rich kids get trained to be independent. We got to go to a school that taught us to rely on ourselves. We were given trust and autonomy. The public schools taught my son to follow the rules and behave like all the other good citizens. This scares me. I want him to be more adventurous in what he chooses to do with his life. At home, he chases around chickens, collects eggs from nesting boxes and helps to water the gardens. I feel sad for those children in the cities who don’t have any grass or trees to play in. Do they stay indoors playing video games and watching television like good little citizens?

Access to nature is not distributed equally. The rich can buy land or travel and visit nature. The urban poor are do not have the opportunity to experience nature. Recently I met a lady who told me as a kid she never had access to a swimming pool. My family didn’t own a pool but we had access to friend’s pools and later we had a vacation home in a community with a shared pool.

What a different experience of the world the urban poor have had in comparison to my suburban upbringing. I think of the urban poor as being completely dependent. Someone grows their food, provides a unit for them to rent and live in, water is cheaply delivered to their unit and waste water is removed, public transportation takes them from place to place for nominal fees and someone comes to get the trash from the curb.

SOME PEOPLE ARE FAR LESS DEPENDENT THAN OTHER PEOPLE

In the rural area where I now live, we too have someone to come get the trash, water comes via pipes, and we buy food at the grocery. We do not have public transportation or even Uber. Not a single retail location is available in under a half hours walking distance. We can grow some of our own food. Many people have their own access to wells, if it breaks they must pay to repair it. We collect rainwater. We are fortunate to have a company to collect our trash. Some rural areas do not and the people who live there need to find somewhere to take their trash or pile it up or burn it themselves. There are place here without access to internet (except by cell phone.) We are less dependent here but still not very self-reliant.

I remember in High School being introduced to the ideas of Henry David Thoreau and not taking any particular interest in a man who chose to live a solitary and self-reliant life on Walden Pond.
Henry, let’s call him (my dog’s name) lived by selling beans and doing small amounts of labor just a few hours a week in order to buy the few things he needed. He was a lot like these modern minimalists we keep hearing about. And so much more like the tiny living people that have such low costs of living that they need not have full time work in order to get by.

I often picture different categories of people fitting into different overlapping rings.

Let me try and draw them…

I think of all these types of people who don’t fit the “normal citizen” mold and how some of their ideas overlap with the ideas of different groups ideas. I think it’s helpful to categorize ideas and people. Just to generalize and make them easier to discuss.

The people in my chart have gone another way. They heard the call to do something different. Not to buy into the idea that they had to do what everyone else was doing. They didn’t have to punch the time card. They had a choice. They struggled against the way everyone else was living and working and decided to live on their own terms. Often I see homesteaders, minimalists, preppers and everyone who wants freedom talk about how debt enslaves people. There couldn’t be a truth more self-evident than that. A mortgage- or so they say- “mort” means death and “gage” means grip. A mortgage is death grip. It traps you into staying put and working that desk job. Maybe it’s time to reject that mortgage and live the small and simple life like Thoreau. But then I think, Henry could not have lived his simple life chopping wood and growing food if he wasn’t living on someone else’s property for free.

I think that so many homesteaders also home school their children as a way of allowing their children to grow up free of the ideas that the system wants to develop in them. I don’t know if it’s an intentional plan by the government to control and create what they deem to be good citizens or if it just the way that the system evolved over time. Either way, i find it interesting to consider what we are creating when we institutionalize our children in the public education system. Lucky for us, people are not so easy to mold. People will always have new ideas and think for themselves. Some people living in towering cement boxes in cities might hear the call of nature and find their ways out of the urban jungle. They might seek to find where their food and water comes from. They might take it upon themselves to enjoy the simple life. Or they might just go on living like they always have.

If that bad thing happens… whatever it might be, the event or set of events that most preppers worry about and prepare for, some of us are more prepared to rely on ourselves. None of us are fully self-reliant but however unfair that it will seem and is, the most dependent people will have much more difficulty adapting and surviving than others.

If the food and water stops coming and the lights go out… the cities will empty into the countryside.

I love this quote. It makes me feel powerful. If I fall, I can just brush off and head another way.