money vs people

As the recent trade agreement kabuki show in Congress demonstrates, when many people pit themselves against big money, they generally lose.  Why should that happen in a democracy?  Political corruption is the easy immediate answer and it is not wise to discount that.  But what makes the corruption so apt to win?

One way of looking at the last four or five decades in America is in terms of the victory of extreme individualism over community.  Unions have failed miserably.  Churches, especially Protestant ones have splintered with the traditional denominations suffering while the newer more evangelical types pursue their vision of individual salvation while the community and indeed the earth itself deteriorates.  There no longer seems to be any commitment to a strong system of public education available to all.  Our sports playpens built with huge dollops of taxpayer money, bear the names of whatever corporation donated the last few dollars.

We do not draft to fight our wars.  Killing (and dying) is now a profession.  In our small towns, it gets to be harder and harder to run the necessary public services such as fire fighting and ambulance.  We all spend more and more time at our keyboards and less time visiting with neighbors.  Consequently, we do not look out for each other.  A failed Facebook friend can be replaced by another.  But we do not recognize a failed relationship with a physical neighbor as the burden and tragedy it is.  And the difficulty is that without this firm grounding in a community, we are apt to "forget", to have our minds so overloaded by one or another of our own individual circumstances, that we will not make good on our current resolve to turn the fools who are selling us out, out of Congress.  We need that group, that grounding. 

Those of us who are trying to move into a different and better way of farming have found that the community and communitarian impulse formerly so common are something we cannot do without.  Starting with the basic and central fact that we need the people who have decided to make a difference by how they spend their food dollars, we find that in order to supply that demand, we must rely on others, be they processing companies, independent haulers, or like minded farmers who can help fill holes in supply and so forth.  We rely on activists to try to make the way clear for us legislatively, and also people who will hear and understand our arguments about how the health of food is more linked with its production even than with its handling.

We really all are in this together and it looks as if we will need to do without our government for awhile.  But while we get that fixed and functioning again, we dare not give up our efforts to closely link farmers with eaters, consumption with production.  There really is no going back.  We have come too far.  And it is more important than anything happening in DC.

Jim