RetroRevolution

Over 200 years ago a group of men came together and formally recognized what was wrong with the country they were living in; put their thoughts to paper; and formalized action against an oppressive government.  This act of rebellion and what amounted to treason had begun over a year earlier.  The Royal Government had passed an act known as the Intolerable Acts.  Four of the five of these acts were in direct response to the Boston Tea Party.  One of the most egregious of these acts was The Massachusetts Government Act. The act took away the right of the people to elect who they wanted to their executive council and forbade town meetings without the express consent of the Governor.  Lord North explained to the British Parliament that the purpose of the act was “to take the executive power from the hands of the democratic part of government”.

There is a deliberate and methodical attack on everyone’s liberty in these united States today.  No one is attempting to quarter troops in your house, but they are attempting to prohibit your right to assemble.  In general people aren’t strung up in the stockades if they speak out against the government, but they are libeled and have their character and reputation assaulted as bigots and racists when they do.  People aren’t arrested for worshiping how they choose, but that very worship in public is admonished and disdained in defense of an illusionary right entitled Freedom from Religion, instead of the actual Freedom of Religion.

This continued erosion of your liberty happens every time you buy a can of food at the grocery store, sit in your car and stare at the air bag light as you wait for it to go out, and every hour that you toil away at work and you have 20-40 percent of your salary confiscated by the government as a means of securing your liberty.  You can revolt against this tyranny with simple acts of peaceful rebellion.

1. Grow some of your own food.  Every radish, carrot, tomato, or apple you grown on your own is one less opportunity for the government to tax you.  This simple step of independence scares world governments so much that bills are introduced regularly, federal regulations proposed, and additional bureaucratic burdens placed upon a simple and self-evident act like producing your own food.
2. Speak your mind.  Don’t succumb to the myth of confidentiality when you disagree with an organization or government.  Of course offer that organization the opportunity to correct the problem, but should they refuse after your reasonable case is pleaded, rally the like minded and represent the case again as a group of 10.  When that fails, come back again with a group of 100 individuals ready and willing to peacefully argue their point.
3. Find ways to become less dependent upon the government.  All governments seek to grow the dependency of the governed.  It is this dependency that they exploit to steal you liberty.  They extort additional funds from you with threats of cutting programs like police and fire protection.  They recognize that everyone wants those.  They never threaten to cut programs like building inspectors or zoning boards.  The governments realize the response would be a unanimous cheer of Please Do!

Your Right of Revolution is a well understood and documented right.  Some claim it is even a duty.  This isn’t a revolution with guns and bombs, but a revolution of skills and ideas.  Plant those seeds of independance today in your family, friends, and neighbors.  Show them that the Right of Revolution begins as an individual right and grows into a collective juggernaut.  Fight the peaceful battle and preserve liberty for your children and their children.  Lest we all forget the words of John F. Kennedy, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Eat local.  If you haven’t heard of this theory, you probably will soon.  Eating Local is about restricting your diet to foods grown close to your home.  This is often some arbitrary number.  150 miles from your home is a number that I often hear thrown around.  That may be on the high side to a lot of purists, and sound ridiculously small to people like me in the upper Midwest when daytime temperatures are in the teens and night time temperatures are in the single digits.

In America, the weighted average distance that food travels from the point of production to the point of consumption is 1500 miles.  That is about the distance from the middle of Michigan to the southern tip of Florida.  Shipping food that far takes a lot of money for fuel.  Most of that money goes to the government for taxes.  Shipping food that far involves several middle men.  That add value to the food along the way.  That might mean that they “Cook it up real nice” and put it in a cardboard box for you to microwave.  It might mean that they store it a warehouse for a few months and then ship it your way.  It might even mean that they do nothing more than put it in a shiny bag and stamp it with a fancy logo.  Regardless they all charge something to do these things.  Ans if they are charging you something to do these things.  You can be certain that our government is charging them something for the privilege of doing those things for you.  Taxing you indirectly if you are new around these parts.

So a benefit of eating local is paying less to an entity like the government.  Another benefit is reducing the energy consumed in making that apple.  If you live in Michigan and eat an apple grown in Michigan, a lot less gas was burnt than if you ate an apple grown in Washington State.  Less gasoline means less carbon emitted.  Less gasoline means less tax revenue for Sam your chubby uncle.  Less gasoline means cheaper apples or more money into the farmers pocket and less into an advertising executive’s pocket that decided to put up billboards that read Got Apples?

Regardless of your reasons for doing it, I imagine that it is easy to eat locally in California, Arizona, or Florida.  Sunny most of the time; the temperature falling below freezing only once a decade and then only for half a night.  What do you do when you want to eat local and you live in a Great Lakes state?  That is when you rely on your own food preservation.  Those apples that were harvested from a local farm in September would be all mush if you left them in a bag on top of your refrigerator until now.  But you have so many options for preserving them:  Canning, Freezing, Cellaring, Fermenting, Pickling, even Dehydrating.

That is what we need to be all about here at the Retro-Revolution. Making due with what we have and not relying on an apple being sent here from 1500 miles away.  If we take the time to learn the skills to reduce how much money we send to Washington D.C. we can foster the growth of change and inspire a revolution.  How’s that for beating sword’s into plowshares?

I want to start to populate the titles on my bookshelf to the website with a review and a link to Amazon.  This summer I picked up a cookbook called, Simply in Season. Tomorrow I am going to try and write a review of it.  I do like the back cover text.  It provides us with 6 reasons to eat foods that are in season: Freshness, Taste, Nutrition, Variety, Environment, and Local Economy.  A good list even though they leave off fewer taxes.

Thanks for reading and look for a review of the book tomorrow.