It Begins with a Garden
This is How we Revolution
When I was young, college young, I comically believed that my generation could better the world. My dad referred to me as youthfully idealistic.
I cannot claim that I’ve ever sided with a political party. I had a classmate who had a donkey tattoo on her stomach. She was serious about that party but I’ve never had that much love for anything. Perhaps I lack passion. Or inspiration. But considering I was in college amongst a more liberal-type group I suppose I gravitated more naturally to the left. Back then. I can’t say where I lean now - I have a difficult time locating the middle. I would occasionally discuss my more liberal-leaning views with my parents and all the smarty-pants things I thought I had been learning in college. They would chuckle, slyly grin and painfully try to refrain from laughing at me. What are those Neo-Con Jobs teaching you at college, my father would ask. Sam! my mother would screech. I told you not to encourage college – the girls don’t even go to church anymore! And then my dad would giggle to himself, shake his head and say to me, you’ll learn – mommy and daddy won’t be here forever to take care of you.
My dad was a reader, forever curious, and passionate about history, politics and the Constitution. My mother wasn’t as well read but she paid attention and her world view and intense gift of common sense, I think, was heavily influenced by my father. He would always recommend books and articles to my friends and I, who would politely listen, that pertained not to changing the world but understanding and surviving it. Books that bored me to tears back then that I could never quite get through such as The Creature from Jekyll Island (but now see its’ importance and wished I hadn’t been such a stupid kid) but others that captivated my attention because they seemed more pertinent to my life as opposed to the history and faults of the Federal Reserve.
2 pieces of reading material he suggested that now currently act as my survival bibles – his vintage stack of Mother Earth News magazines that he saved in a box in the basement as well as the fascinating book, Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing. If you’re not familiar with these works of knowledge their focus is based on how to simply grow your own food and live a life without having to depend on the government, which I feel is never an invaluable thing to know more about.
My dad was always prepared for the end because of his healthy mistrust of government, his meticulous study of history and his understanding of what people are truly capable of. He learned how to grow a garden, can food and stockpile for the worst. A large portion of my parent’s basement was dedicated to canned goods, dry beans, batteries, ammo and large jugs of water. For years he preached about the New World Order and their plans for domination along with the decimation of our Sovereignty. Most people either didn’t have any interest in hearing about it or simply thought he was crazy. If he had been alive during COVID he would have had some words to say about the world’s reaction. When I stop to ponder some of the conversations I had with my old man that occasionally echo in my mind I do not think he was incorrect about a lot of things he used to talk about.
Presently, we find ourselves in a situation where my father’s harsh lessons of reality are proving to be profoundly useful, if we choose to implement them. We own a restaurant in a time of turmoil. It has been made painfully clear that the world doesn’t like our kind – independent thinkers, small-business owners, middle-finger givers – and wants us ousted. When Walmart and Amazon-type places were given the greenlight to continue operating while the world shut down the little guys it was a kick-in-the-nose-with-a-steel-toed-boot realization of exactly how much the world cared about the people who provide their services. Not very much. Of course, everyone told us how terrible it was but, the lack of real empathy was and still is apparent.
As our security and stability faltered by the passing of every masked day, we watched the business that we had worked and sacrificed for over a span of 7 years nearly crumble, we sat on the edge, as horrified observers, and watched the world go insane. If the sociopaths who orchestrated these maneuvers decide to do it again, unfortunately, I do not think the worlds’ reaction will be much different.
The working class can survive without their weekend out-to-Brunch luxury but we cannot survive without providing what was once a sought-after service. It hurt while it was happening and now that the world wants to forget about it and simply move on it hurts a little bit more. We, and people like us, are still living through the damage. The powers that my dad used to talk about, to mostly deaf ears, are trying as hard as they can to annihilate the food industry as we have always known it. Do you notice it? When you go out to eat now the food and service is a little different. The options aren’t as vast. The grocery stores do not always have what you have become accustomed to in stock. No one can find workers to sell their product. The industry is only staying afloat because most businesses are forced to get even more creative than they already were in regards to razor-thin profit margins. While consumers complain about how expensive everything is the people who are taking the biggest hit are, again, the little moms and pops of the world.
Perhaps this is just the boot-kick in the face that is necessary to look inward and make changes that you were never aware needed to be changed. There are certain times in life I question my ability of being a restaurant owner. I sort of run it a little like Gordon Ramsey would but in the form of a fierce Spartan warrior who has an insanely hot temper and occasionally unleashes that hot temper on unsuspecting individuals. Individuals staring back at me, wide-eyed, shocked and about to cry. It frightens people because the monster that emerges is terrifying. I’m not proud of this character flaw and I have no excuse for it. I come from a long line of crazy and it will sometimes emerge and purge venom. I don’t know if anyone has taken notice of the rising sensitivity level amongst human beings of all ages but it has gotten pretty darn sensitive so this type of behavior is not widely accepted. Maybe this is the restaurnant-gods way of telling me to find a new profession.
When I was 15-years-old working my first dishwasher position at a nearby country club, I remember there being a chef who I always feared would cut me with his knife if I got in his way or if pissed him off just enough. He was probably an ex-criminal all hopped up on coke but I never knew anything was strange about his behavior. When I first began the job, he yelled at me all the time for doing things incorrectly. I didn’t cry or argue I simply fixed the problem and never did it again. Because that is what being an employee is, right? Or I suppose I was too stupid to know that there was a choice to argue with my boss and be disrespectful and still get a paycheck. I got smarter at my job and then he left me alone. I cannot remember taking offense to it or complaining about him to my parents. I was more disturbed about the 200 pounds of potatoes he made me peel for Thanksgiving buffet dinner.
And, this is the place my parents would send me to after school every day. They drove me there, dropped me off and left. I am so grateful for the childhood I had and I write this proudly, with no bitter feelings attached. Life can be full of necessary, enriching experiences that cannot be achieved from watching some douche on YouTube film instances of their life because they think themselves fascinating. My kids would disagree with me, however. Perhaps if children were able to experience any kind of real life, they wouldn’t grow up to be so damn sensitive and the world would not be experiencing the shortage of labor issues that the world currently is.
In today’s world most 15-year-old kids encountering the frightening chef experience I had would produce elephant tears and then never come back to work. And then probably write a bad review on Google profile. Take that, meany, they would proudly boast to themselves, I showed them with my 1-star rating.
Regardless of my shortcomings in my current profession the business has survived and we will continue, for the moment, to fight the death of the food industry. Unfortunately for the destroyers of the life that we once knew our will is stronger than theirs. If the world wants to oust us, we will just fight back harder. Revolutions have never been won by the working class or trust-fund babies. Throughout history they have been won by the people getting shit on because no one will ever fight harder than the ones who have been beaten down the most.
I do not possess the skill or confidence or knowledge of history to educate like my father did or my current favorites do – el gato malo, Utobian, CJ Hopkins, Dr. Meryl Nass, RFK Jr. to name a few, the ones I look to because I feel like my dad would be saying a lot of the same things - so we have to revolution in a different way.
If they are going to alter our food supply, but not better it, and charge us double for garbage, we will simply grow our own.
Our Revolution begins with a garden.
I realize that we have always taken everything for granted. Food, being shipped to us, which our business relies upon, because we’re a restaurant, changed. Once, not so long ago, products came in decent order and consistently. Now, they come in often poor quality for a larger price tag or are unavailable. It makes consistency difficult. But, again, it is loud and clear that our kind is trying to be erased to better serve the psychos my dad always used to talk about who are trying to take over the world we have become accustomed to. I say, bring it as hard as you can. If the world is moving away from providing us the necessary tools to survive, we will simply do it on our own without the system. We will become our own system.
If the food is going to be destroyed and altered, we will simply grow our own. Gardening, if you are unaware, is really hard work. At one point in human history, not so long ago, a task of growing a garden was commonplace. People had a garden, not for enjoyment, but simply to be able to provide food for themselves and their families or a war effort. We are a spoiled lot of weakness, aren’t we?
I fully expect some level of failure our first couple of years. It upsets me that I spent the prime years of my youth working pointless jobs so I could have money to party with my now-absent friends instead of spending quality time in my father’s garden learning all of his tricks. These are the difficult life lessons one must pridefully swallow and hopefully become smarter and stronger from.
Recently, while moving some topsoil from giant mound to small garden plot, my hands got dirtier than they had ever been and I could feel more callouses forming on my already rough kitchen hands. My back hurt, I acquired a painful sunburn. I thought about an article I read from Mother Earth News about a gentleman, Jules Dervaes. He began a homestead on one fifth of an acre in urban Pasadena, California because he was not happy with the introduction of GMOs in the food supply. His goal was to simply provide healthy food for his family. His small homestead turned into a small business and his website, Path to Freedom, began a Movement of folks who wanted to do the same. An article Dervaes wrote in 2009, An Amazing and Prolific Urban Homestead, inspires me, in moments of weakness, to forget my pain and return to the dirt. When I am in my garden and realize how soft and out of shape I am and pissed off at myself because I am sweating profusely while trying to achieve simple tasks, I think of his words, forget my pain and keep moving. He ended the article with saying:
Today, at 61, I am a diehard homesteader turned urban revolutionary. The world today —and, tragically, my children’s inheritance — offers more violence while bearing graver threats. . . The way to survival is through working in our earth, and the tool of salvation is a trowel.
Even though the world appears to continue to plummet towards a path Dervaes was trying to avoid I have not lost all hope. Succumbing to darkness will mean that they have won. Perhaps we are being forced to accept that everything we have been programmed to believe is important, simply isn’t. Returning to hard, physical work playing in organic matter, recognizing the earth’s natural cycles, experiencing pain, discomfort, defeat, like a human being should experience, may help begin to heal this altered existence.
