William and Ian, I want to leave you a better world than the one that was left for me, but I fear that is impossible and beyond my ability to control. I hope and pray that I am a Father that you can look up too and admire. I will try to be the kind of man that I want you to be, and I will tell you of my struggles and failings so that you will not have as hard of a time as I have.
I would like for you to say what you mean and more importantly mean what you say. That you treat people with respect, especially those that society doesn’t think deserves respect. Respect doesn’t mean being “nice” but treating someone with dignity.
All living things deserve to be treated with dignity no matter if they are a human, dog or plant. We should always remember that the breath of life that God breathed into us, he also blew into them. If we harvest a plant or animal for food we should honor it and give it the best life and least traumatic death that we possibly can. If we have to take a life because of necessity (whether weeding our garden or defending the life of another) we should mourn that life.
We should try to live our life without exploiting others, even if that causes us difficulty. We should be ashamed if our standard of living is only possible because we are abusing and using others. While we cannot change the world we can change the way we impact it and hope that our example convinces others to do the same.
You should never feel that you are better than someone because you have more knowledge, money, clothes etc…. One person’s life is not worth more than another; I say this even though I would gladly choose my Loved ones over anyone else and not feel guilty. Treat all people with respect, especially those who do not show you respect.
Try to think before you act, this will save you much grief and hardship. Remember that once something is done, it may be impossible to undo. So use as much forethought as time will allow. I will warn you that I have found that action is almost always better than inaction. I will endeavor to give you the tools you need to act wisely to the situations that life gives you and the experiences necessary to develop that wisdom. I hope this will enable you to think while you are acting and prevent you from the paralysis of indecision.
Violence never solves problems but only creates new ones. But you might encounter a time when violence is the only viable option that you have. When that is the case use as much as you can summon as quickly as possible, while this may seem counter intuitive it will save pain and suffering to all parties involved.
Try to leave every place you go better than when you found it. Help others when you can, but remember that often the best way to help others is to teach them to help themselves. Making someone dependent on your aid is not good for either your or their dignity. There will be those who try to take advantage of your kindness and willingness to help. This is a price you have to pay and you will become better at identifying those who would abuse your generosity as time goes on. Just remember that if you are in doubt about a person’s motivation it is better to ere on the side of giving until proven otherwise.
Success in life can only be measured by happiness and your sense of self worth. What is simple is not always easy, and the right thing to do often is hard and painful. Do not decide on an action just because it is easy or painless but try to do what is right and just. Try not to leave problems for others to solve if you can fix them now. When you are looking for a solution to a problem try to find a simple one, because simple usually works out better than complex.
I will always try to be the father that you deserve to have and give you the tools that you need to have a happy and successful life. I will fail at times, but I will never stop trying and I will never stop loving you. The two of you are the greatest blessings that God has ever bestowed upon me and I will try to always treat you as such.
I Love You Ian and William, and even though I wish that you could stay small forever, I also look forward into meeting the Men that you will become.
With all of my Love,
Daddy
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Earth day?
It is earth day and the college campus where I work is having a celebration, were they are giving out free bottled water and hot dogs and hamburgers on Styrofoam plates, with napkins, plastic forks etc….. Why do people not understand that it is our over consumptive lifestyle that is causing not just our environmental problems but our financial problems as well.
We have lived in an era of abundance for so long that now that we have out grown our ability to extract resources from the earth at a pace that equals our consumption, we are experiencing price increases as a result of raw material scarcity. Not only is our demand out stripping our ability to extract resources but the resources themselves, whether it is fish in the ocean or oil in the ground. But most everyone seems to be in denial about what our problems are and the impact that we as individuals (in first world countries) have upon our environment.
We seem to believe that we can keep buying HD big screen TV’s, iPhones, discarding our last years (still functioning) electronics for new ones, trading our movies on VHS for the same movie on DVD. We do not even think about the conditions in which the people who made these items worked and lived. We tell ourselves lies like “you can live like a king on $5.00 a day in Indonesia” without us ever having been there or even knowing anyone who has lived there. We deny and lie to ourselves about these things because if we ever took the time to look and really think about our impacts we would feel guilty (if we have any empathy left), and we do not like feeling guilty. We do not want to admit that our standard of living is only possible by the exploitation of our fellow human beings, and the only reason that we tolerate this system is that we do not have to see the people we are exploiting.
Thanks to globalization we have moved the wage slavery jobs from our nation to developing countries, we even convince ourselves that building a T-shirt factory in Haiti is a development project and helps Haitians. We fail to simply look at Haiti and ask if they really need a T-shirt factory to increase the income of a few thousand Haitians or agricultural development so they can feed themselves. What we do is use cheap labor and no environmental regualtions or worker safety laws to make cheap t-shirts will flooding the Haitian market with cheap “Food Aid” grain which drives grain prices down causing more farmers to leave their farms and move to the city which lowers wages even more. To further increase the profit margin we “provide” the workers with company housing and a company commissary in which we deduct these costs from their paychecks. Even the cotton that is used in the t-shirts is grown here and exported to Haiti and priced under the local market value due to our very generous subsidies that we pay our farmers. All we have to do to realize this is ask ourselves why we can buy a 4 pack of t-shirts for $10 at Wal-Mart.
As our standard of living has become harder to maintain we have gone from single income families to dual income families, we have outsourced our production capacity to cheapen labor and production costs. We have been sold a bill of goods to consume even more, become more energy efficient by replacing your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs. You never hear that a better way to become energy efficient is to use less light bulbs and less energy. That if you really want to help the environment then don’t buy a new TV or cell phone if your old one still works. Life and business functioned just fine before Blackberries and HD TV’s. If you ask the average Western consumer what they would want more off most will say time. We buy all of types of “time saving” devices but spend the time if any that we gain from using them working to pay for them. We have completely lost touch not only with the earth but also with ourselves.
If you want to really do something to help the Earth, then turn off the TV and read a book, or play outside with your children.
We have lived in an era of abundance for so long that now that we have out grown our ability to extract resources from the earth at a pace that equals our consumption, we are experiencing price increases as a result of raw material scarcity. Not only is our demand out stripping our ability to extract resources but the resources themselves, whether it is fish in the ocean or oil in the ground. But most everyone seems to be in denial about what our problems are and the impact that we as individuals (in first world countries) have upon our environment.
We seem to believe that we can keep buying HD big screen TV’s, iPhones, discarding our last years (still functioning) electronics for new ones, trading our movies on VHS for the same movie on DVD. We do not even think about the conditions in which the people who made these items worked and lived. We tell ourselves lies like “you can live like a king on $5.00 a day in Indonesia” without us ever having been there or even knowing anyone who has lived there. We deny and lie to ourselves about these things because if we ever took the time to look and really think about our impacts we would feel guilty (if we have any empathy left), and we do not like feeling guilty. We do not want to admit that our standard of living is only possible by the exploitation of our fellow human beings, and the only reason that we tolerate this system is that we do not have to see the people we are exploiting.
Thanks to globalization we have moved the wage slavery jobs from our nation to developing countries, we even convince ourselves that building a T-shirt factory in Haiti is a development project and helps Haitians. We fail to simply look at Haiti and ask if they really need a T-shirt factory to increase the income of a few thousand Haitians or agricultural development so they can feed themselves. What we do is use cheap labor and no environmental regualtions or worker safety laws to make cheap t-shirts will flooding the Haitian market with cheap “Food Aid” grain which drives grain prices down causing more farmers to leave their farms and move to the city which lowers wages even more. To further increase the profit margin we “provide” the workers with company housing and a company commissary in which we deduct these costs from their paychecks. Even the cotton that is used in the t-shirts is grown here and exported to Haiti and priced under the local market value due to our very generous subsidies that we pay our farmers. All we have to do to realize this is ask ourselves why we can buy a 4 pack of t-shirts for $10 at Wal-Mart.
As our standard of living has become harder to maintain we have gone from single income families to dual income families, we have outsourced our production capacity to cheapen labor and production costs. We have been sold a bill of goods to consume even more, become more energy efficient by replacing your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs. You never hear that a better way to become energy efficient is to use less light bulbs and less energy. That if you really want to help the environment then don’t buy a new TV or cell phone if your old one still works. Life and business functioned just fine before Blackberries and HD TV’s. If you ask the average Western consumer what they would want more off most will say time. We buy all of types of “time saving” devices but spend the time if any that we gain from using them working to pay for them. We have completely lost touch not only with the earth but also with ourselves.
If you want to really do something to help the Earth, then turn off the TV and read a book, or play outside with your children.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Growing your own food
True security is being self sufficient in food, even though we are a long way from being able to produce enough food to feed our family; we have taken a big step to increasing our own food production.
We went from one raised bed to a couple of larger dug beds. Since we live in a historical district some of our beans are ornamental as well as food, we have concentrated on growing mainly beans because that is the hardest thing for us to find locally. We love dried beans and eat a lot of them, and have been searching for a source of local beans for a couple of years now and have had no luck.
So this year we planted Nance and Purple Queen bush beans, Scarlet Runner, Rattlesnake, and Lazy Housewife pole beans. We have also planted several herbs, mango melons, Cherokee Long Ear pop corn (we will see how out little patch does) and turnip greens and some more stuff that I am forgetting. Of course we have the Pecan tree, muskadine vine, blueberry, black berry and raspberry bushes as our perennials.
Next year we want to expand our garden a little more and if some of the beans and food producing plants are decorative too they will go in the front yard and a beehive (either top bar or traditional) and eventually maybe some bantam hens and a dog. I hope to disguise a lot of our food garden as a decorative garden and intersperse a lot of decorative plants in our food garden so we are foodscaping our yard for the next few years.
Bean patch
Pole for Rattlesnake and Lazy Housewife and the little corn pacth in the background
little herb garden
Scarlet Runner beans, mango melons, turnip greens and some more herbs and flowers
We went from one raised bed to a couple of larger dug beds. Since we live in a historical district some of our beans are ornamental as well as food, we have concentrated on growing mainly beans because that is the hardest thing for us to find locally. We love dried beans and eat a lot of them, and have been searching for a source of local beans for a couple of years now and have had no luck.
So this year we planted Nance and Purple Queen bush beans, Scarlet Runner, Rattlesnake, and Lazy Housewife pole beans. We have also planted several herbs, mango melons, Cherokee Long Ear pop corn (we will see how out little patch does) and turnip greens and some more stuff that I am forgetting. Of course we have the Pecan tree, muskadine vine, blueberry, black berry and raspberry bushes as our perennials.
Next year we want to expand our garden a little more and if some of the beans and food producing plants are decorative too they will go in the front yard and a beehive (either top bar or traditional) and eventually maybe some bantam hens and a dog. I hope to disguise a lot of our food garden as a decorative garden and intersperse a lot of decorative plants in our food garden so we are foodscaping our yard for the next few years.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)