Is it Ever Possible to Truly Live According to Your Non-Consumer Values?

I read any interesting article today that really resonated with me -- talking about the impossibility of an ethical life.  The author discusses the myriad inconsistencies in her lifestyle: Abstaining from meat, but owning leather; recycling, but owning two cars; buying local produce, but purchasing clothing from big-box stores.  It's a conundrum that I think all of us face at one time or another. 

Ethics is not an entirely black-and-white field.  If it were, there would be no room for debate and differing opinions -- we would all just do what was right or be "evil" people.  But life isn't a Disney movie, and the lines are not drawn in such clear contrast. 

Everything Affects Everything Else 

The problem with living a sustainable lifestyle is that we're all interconnected.  None of us is really, truly self-sufficient.  We rely on other people in some form or another.  And those people all have their own lives and ethical dilemmas and problems.  Do we buy our clothes from a major chain, which sources them from sweat shop workers?  If we buy those same brands second-hand, aren't we still supporting the original purchase to some degree?  If we make our own clothes, where are we sourcing our fabric from?  Synthetic materials use up petroleum products, but cotton is a GMO crop.  What if we only use organic cotton?  Even then, it uses up so much water to produce.

And on, and on.

The deeper you delve into the question of conscious consumerism, the more complicated it starts to become.  It's tempting to stop caring at all when there seems to be no perfect answer.  

It's true that nobody can do everything.  However, everyone can do something.

And that's really all we can ask for.  Be aware of the impact you're making in the world, and strive to improve the areas that you can.  Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater -- just because you can't be 100% committed to a zero-harm, zero-waste, non-consumer lifestyle doesn't  mean there isn't real value in doing your best.  Every dollar you spend (or don't spend) is a vote for the kind of world you want to live in, and those votes do count. 

A Guilty Admission: I Am a Gardening Sham

So despite my enthusiasm for gardening, my passion for food and my burning desire to build an urban homestead, I have a confession to make: I'm actually kind of a sham.

I've never had my own garden before this year, and have never been very good at keeping plants alive in general.

But this year, I was determined to change things. I bought a bunch of planters and organic soil. I carefully consulted the back of my seed packets to figure out where and when to plant some late-season direct-sowing plants. I eagerly planted, watered, waited. 

A few days ago, I discovered the first seedlings sprouting up from where I had planted them! I was so excited! I sat and watched them, waxing poetical in my mind about the miracle of nature, the amazing power to create something edible from a humble seed, sunlight, dirt and water. It was exhilarating.

But as the days passed, I started to get a little uneasy. None of the other seeds I'd planted seemed to be sprouting. And then I saw those same seedlings cropping up in other areas, where I hadn't planted. And after a little inspection, I realized that those seedlings looked suspiciously similar to the weeds growing all around the backyard.

Looks like I've been lovingly fawning over and tending to a bunch of goat-head bearing weeds.

On the bright side, the plants I bought are doing well.  The bush basil and chocolate mint looked pretty pathetic after transplanting, but they've perked right up after a few weeks of consistent watering.  The rosemary looks beautiful, the strawberry is growing (though I doubt it will make berries this year, at this rate) and the tomato plant has two little tomatoes growing on it.

It's definitely a learning process.

And right now, I'm very grateful that I am not actually relying on this food to survive.  This is another one of those areas where it's important to remember privilege.  It would be very easy for a person with gardening experience to look at people spending money on groceries and say, "Why waste all of that money when you could grow it yourself?"  And while growing your own food is a very worthwhile goal, it's not something that's going to be happening overnight.

So: How is your garden faring this year? 

Why the Supreme Court's Ruling About Hobby Lobby Scares the Shit Out of Me

This is sort of old news by now, but in the days following the Supreme Court's ruling, thinking about it made me too sick to my stomach to form coherent, blog-worthy thoughts.  It's taken a while for all of it to really sink in, for my impulsive anger to reside enough that I could explain in plain English why exactly this ruling is so fucking terrifying. 

So in case you've been under a rock, here's the deal.  Under the Affordable Care Act, employers are required to offer insurance coverage to their employees.  That coverage has to meet certain basic guidelines to ensure that everyone gets the same quality of coverage.  And part of what's covered by that insurance mandate is several forms of birth control, including Plan B, Ella and two types of IUD.  With me so far? 

Okay.  So Hobby Lobby -- a store founded on Christian values -- objected to being forced to pay for this coverage because these forms of birth control violate their pro-life stance.  To clarify, the contraceptives covered by ACA insurance are not abortion pills, by the medical definition of abortion.  An abortion is medically defined as the destruction of a fertilized egg that has already attached to the uterine wall.  None of the birth control methods mentioned above do that.  Instead, in some way or another, all of them prevent eggs from being fertilized in the first place, or prevent a fertilized egg from implanting. 

All the same, the Supreme Court ruled that it was against the law to require businesses to offer contraceptive coverage that went against the owner's religious beliefs. 

As you might expect, a lot of people have a lot of opinions about this, on all sides -- questions about religious freedom, reproductive rights, and whether your employer should have a say in your healthcare.  I'm not going to get into that here, because I think there's a bigger issue that we need to examine.  Because I don't think this case was about religion at all. 

Corporations Are Not People

....but the Supreme Court seems to think they are. 

Thanks to Corporate Personhood, businesses have the same rights as individuals.  And apparently, if the precedent set by this most recent landmark case is anything to go off of, a corporation's rights can supersede the rights of its employees. 

Make no mistake.  Hobby Lobby doesn't give a shit about birth control.  If it did, it would not have invested so much of its money into the pharmaceutical companies that create the very products it refuses to cover through insurance.  The issue isn't about the corporation's values -- it's an issue of money, power and control. 

Granting corporations so many rights is dangerous, in part because corporations have a whole lot more power than individuals.  Part of the reason that individuals have rights in the first place is to protect the weak from the strong.  Without some sort of protection, there is nothing to stop those with power and authority from enslaving or otherwise abusing those who can't fight back. 

Corporations have more money than individuals.  They have more power.  And thanks to the Super-Pacs, they have immense political pull. 

Ushering in a New Age of Feudalism

Wealth inequality is a major problem in our country.  Today, I read a brilliant blog post from "ultra-rich man" Nick Hanauer that said exactly what I've been thinking for years:  If we don't do something to stop it, we will enter another feudal era. 



If you're not familiar with feudalism, here's the way it's basically laid out: At the top, you have a monarch.  Below him are a cluster of noblemen.  These people would be granted ownership of land within the kingdom, in exchange for them providing soldiers to the king's army.  The lands owned by the noblemen would be populated by nobles and knights, certainly, but there'd be a much higher percentage of peasants.  These peasants would live on these lands, but they would have no rights to them.  They would grow crops, but most of what they grew would be the property of the nobleman whose lands they tilled.  There was no upward mobility.  There was only long, arduous hours of back-breaking labor in exchange for a subsistence lifestyle and the persistent threat of abuse from noblemen. 

It seems to me that corporations are the new noblemen.  They're the Lords and Ladies of the modern age.  

The so-called "working poor" (which, in these times of the vanishing middle class, means most of us) are share-croppers, peasants tilling the land of the big corporations.  Except instead of growing sheep and turnips, we're growing cash.  We keep just enough of it to survive, and the rest goes up to those landowners -- who in turn give some of their money to the government in exchange for the freedom to keep doing what they're doing. 

Think on it.  Read Nick Hanauer's article.  Consider it long and hard and tell me honestly if that's a reality you want to see come to pass.  If not, you and I and everyone else needs to start making some noise.  We need to become champions for our own rights while we still have the chance, before things get nasty enough for a full-blown revolution.

Magazines About Urban Homesteading

Here's a question for you readers:  Do you subscribe to any magazines about homesteading, self-sufficiency, social justice, etc.?  Which do you recommend?  Discuss in the comments!

Do Humans Have Rights?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness  -- The Declaration of Independence

I've often found that people do not give much thought to their beliefs -- because if they did, they might realize that they're actually monsters.  The more I hear talk from certain demographics of the country, the more I realize that, if they really believed what they were saying, they must also believe that humans do not have innate rights.

Take, for example, the issue of healthcare.

Many people are less-than-pleased with the Affordable Care Act, for a variety of reasons.  I can sympathize.  It's not the healthcare I would have asked for, either (although I'm still very grateful for the opportunity to buy insurance, which I otherwise could not have done).  But in trying to get people to defend their position against it, you run frequently into a wall.

How are people supposed to get healthcare if they cannot afford it?

If you don't want the government paying for healthcare...and the patient cannot afford it...then who pays?

And if it's not paid for......then the person simply dies?

Because if that's what you believe, by all means, say that aloud.  Say, "I believe that people who cannot afford healthcare should die."  Say out loud, "People who can't find work should starve to death." If that's how you feel, then own it. 

I will find that point of view reprehensible.  If I know you, I will probably "unfriend" you in accordance with whatever space we share.  But at least you're being honest, and I can respect that.

Otherwise -- if you accept, as our founding fathers did -- that everyone is entitled to live and pursue happiness, then we need to all work together to figure out a way to make that happen.  Stop pretending that real people's lives aren't on the line whenever policies change, and start thinking with a little bit of creativity and compassion.  We're smart.  We can come up with a solution. 

The Hidden Language of Yard Sales

I found myself pulled bright and early from bed this morning to go on a yard sale adventure with my mom.  Fortunately for me, she had the forethought to bring coffee, as 8AM is pretty damn early for a vampire like myself.  But once I'd properly caffeinated, thus began the quest of searching for signs, getting lost in subdivisions, slow-rolling past sales and picking through boxes of other people's belongings. 

This was really a targeted quest: I'm on the hunt for a proper desk for my office.

But not just any desk.  Because I have looked at roughly a million desks so far, at yard sales, thrift stores, consignment shops, office supply stores and furniture stores.  None of them have been exactly what I was looking for.  What am I looking for, you might ask?  I have no idea.  But I'll know it when I see it!

So anyway, while questing for the Mystical Unicorn Desk, we came across a whole number of yard sales.  I wanted to use my phone to take some surreptitious pics to turn this post into a photo essay, but I didn't really have the opportunity. 

The thing that's fascinating to me about yard sales is how they really give you a window into the lives of the people having them.  It's interesting to see what you can learn about someone from what they're selling, how much they're charging, and how they react to you and each other when you ask questions.  The whole experience was very much an anthropological study, if nothing else. 

Among other things, today we stopped off at:

• A house clearly belonging to parents of a no-longer-toddler -- the yard was full of baby supplies, including a potty training toilet and lots of baby clothes.  
• The home of a shoe addict.  There's no other way to explain the two HUGE TUBS of nice shoes out on the driveway.  
• The home of a lady who clearly has a lot of great ideas that never come to fruition...exercise equipment, foreign travel plug adaptors, various electronic gadgets still in the box.  I almost considered buying the never-opened "set your own combination" locking thumb drive, but thought better of it.  
• A very cool garage full of strange antique furnishings.  A lot of awesome stuff that I sadly could not justify buying, including a real solid wood high-chair with metal tray.  
• A church parking lot filled with booths -- my favorite of which being the guys who were selling (among other things) an ornamental katana, two slow cookers, an automatic cat feeder, a PS2 and a hamster.  I hung out and chatted with them for a while.  They seemed like cool folks, the kind I'd be likely to hang out with.  (I very nearly came home with that old PS2, but for $50 I couldn't justify the purchase).  
• An extremely, obviously Christian household selling stacks and stacks of books -- my favorite of which had a title like "Seducing Our Children: Saving Your Children From Witchcraft and the Occult!" I was this close to buying it out of sheer curiosity, but I resisted the urge. 

There were more, but those were the ones that stuck out in my mind.  Lots of good times to be had.

I did not, however, leave my quest empty-handed.  Though no Mythical Unicorn Desk appeared, I did walk home with a coffee grinder, large crock pot and well-worn copy of The Joy of Cooking, all for $11.25.  Not half shabby if you ask me.

Anyway, that was my adventure in garage sale land.  Did anybody else have any fun anthropological experiences to report? Find any good deals?  Let me know all about it in the comments! 

Moving: Non-Consumer Wins and Fails

Well, I've gotten mostly settled into the new house and have my internet turned on, so I should be back into the swing of things soon. 

Moving itself was an experience (as it always is).  Though I tried to be mindful during the move, some things invariably were sacrificed to the altar of convenience.  All told, the move was full non-consumer wins and fails: 

Wins: 

• I successfully purged a lot of unwanted items and dropped off a total of about 10 boxes to the thrift store.
• I gave my perishable and hard to pack groceries to a neighbor in exchange for her helping with some clean-up. 
• I packed my breakables in dish towels and other reusable materials; I also used some trash bags as filler and can re-use them now as actual trash bags.  
• I managed to find moving boxes for free at Target (although it got dicey and looked for a while that we'd have to buy them -- it's getting HARD to find free boxes).  

Fails: 

• We've eaten out entirely too much during the move -- it's time to rein that back in now that the kitchen is unpacked.  No more excuses! 
• I caved in and bought some convenience items, including some cleaning supplies and frozen pizzas.  
• We also fell into the lure of half-price shakes at Sonic.  For shame!

One money-spending thing I did that turned out to be a smart idea: Hiring "moving helpers" to unload the truck.  It cost about $80 for an hour of work, but the two guys did all the work for me and saved us the trouble and exhausting work of unpacking the truck the same day we'd packed it and driven it down.  That was money well-spent.

The biggest fail, consumer or otherwise, of the move?

Realizing -- two hours into my drive -- that I had totally left the dirty litter box in the hall closet of the old apartment.  

I'd had every intention of cleaning it and packing it up last and somehow it just...never happened.  Whoops.  That will be a fun surprise for someone later.