Pachamama, I Beg You Please Forgive Us

from tonight on the Oil Drum, from “oldfarmeralmanac” at 11:10 pm

Don’t let the first sentence fool you. read to the end.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node…

I live in one of the most backward,poorly educated, and religious communities in the US.

The typical church goer here with a larger than average endowment of basic brain power quietly believes in or accepts most or all of these things: round earth,evolution, geological time, dinosaurs, peak oil,climate change,the population bomb, financial overshoot,possible pandemic killer diseases,and various other things that would suprise the hell out of most people who never have any ACTUAL contact with such people-other than the nutcases of thier kind.Even the dumb ones mostly do not deny these things except if directly confronted in respect to them and the issue is forced.

This may have a lot to do with the fact that most of them are farmers or second generation off the farm, and farmers tend to be quite realistic about such things due to actual eyeball and sweat experience and the fact that they have had televisions for the last fifty years.

A man who runs his own business and makes critical decisions on a regular basis cannot be fooled into believing there is plenty of oil available when he knows that the oil companies are drilling in deep water and mining tar sands.

A man who has seen thousands of acres of crops wiped out by a blight or a new to the nieghborhood bug understands that such things can and do happen at random and could happen to people as well.

A man who talks to family members with his cell phone on the West coast where the sun is high but it has already set here necessarily understands a round earth.

One of them a few days back , in response to a comment that oil is expensive only “because the oil companies are holding it back” simply snorted and asked why they didn’t hold it back when it was thirty cents a gallon.

A man who has had to sell off his cows because they would otherwise starve due to a bad growing season and who has also seen New York or Atlanta as a soldier or a truck driver has no problem understanding overpopulation.

A man who has an orchard of fruit trees such as nectarines which did not exist until created by plant breeders does not deny the reality of evolution.

A coal miner who has seen the local mines shut down because the coal can no longer be gotten out at a profit understands that the same thing must eventually happen at all other mines.

Of course if you ask one of the religious locals directly he will toe the church line from Genesis to Revelation.Nobody should be suprised at this.My well educated friends are just as subject to cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy as the average high school dropout Baptist.Virtually all of them toe the line one way or another in respect to party politics that they really don’t agree with.

I have acquaintances who are stalwart Democrats who would die rather than see thier daughters marry a black man or thier sons bring home a boy friend and Republican acquaintances who are just as hypocritical in other respects.Quite a few of them believe in subsidies for themselves and free enterprise for everybody else.

Now I will not argue that there are not plenty of fools in my community-but like Thoreau, I have traveled widely without going anywhere much, and I can assure the audience that fools are extraordinarily plentiful everywhere, including universities, banks, and high govt offices..

Now the locals do tend to believe they are going to Heaven;but my eighty three year old Daddy was out at the break of day today planting sweet potato slips and ran me out to pick cherries before the sun was up. Today we froze sixty quarts-enough for a pie every week and a few for gifting until next years crop comes in.

He only expects his God to help him as long as he trys really hard to help himself, and he is in no hurry whatsover to get to Heaven-which tells me and anybody else willing to think about it just what Heaven really means to him.

Where he is really in no hurry to get to is his grave out on the hill next to Momma and my sister who died as an infant.Heaven is just a sort of charm or incantation used to deny the grave.

The average liberal does not really believe in socialism and getting a living without working and the average conservative does not really believe in allowing old widow women to starve to death.But if you listen to the partisan sniping you would conclude that each side does so believe.

The average church goer here in the mountian Bible Belt does not really believe in most of the dogma of his church, unless he is intellectually challenged.He simply avoids thinking about it.

Of course the ones who are in fact intellectually challenged are the ones who take it upon themselves to represent the group publicly, and of course these are the ones most readily and easily caricatured by the media in order to sell advertising and to further the political agenda of the media establishment.

Nor should anybody be suprised that many of the dumbest of the religious people are in leadership positions.Most of our leaders are as dumb as fence posts, excepting thier understanding of one problem-getting into power, and staying there.

A- fracking men, brother.  

While I don’t agree with this entirely, it does point out that social groups and religious groups are intertwined to give themselves what they think is an advantage.  Never did figure out what was so attractive about the upcoming versions of heaven filled with people that wanted me either poor, illiterate,  unemployed, uneducated, barefoot, pregnant, semi illiterate, living back in the imaginary Mother Country or continent of their choosing, or just plain out of their existence, filled with dour, vengeful authority figures ordering them around, and no animals nor pets because they were souless and didn’t get to go.

Bleah.