It's been a nice weekend, and I've been craving more creative outlets. If you don't believe me you should check out my FarmTown farm on facebook, I love making it different every couple days and giving it a cheesy new title. one of the side effects of living in France for such a short time is that we're afraid to really buy anything heavy or that isn't temporary. So I would love to get a guitar or a little garden or some paints or something. My friend told me about a little potted garden of his, and now I think I might get some eggplants to grow this summer. Anyway, I figure I would jot down some thoughts more regularly and let the website be an outlet during weekends or nights.
I was thinking about separatists last night. I was reading about the YKZ ranch on wikipedia, and I grew really suspicious of media-bias in two directions. The YKZ ranch is a compound in Texas connected with the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints. It's pretty much self-sufficient, they have generators, a quarry, waste-treatment facility, etc. So last year the Child Protective Services in Texas got a series of calls from what was supposedly a 16-year old girl inside the compound. The girl told them about underage girls getting married and having kids with much older men in the compound. The calls were enough to get a judge to allow a raid on the compount and they took out several hundred children. After a whole series of legal issues the kids were returned a few months later. So when reading the wikipedia article there were a few sentences that seemed strongly worded, so I checked on their references which often were random articles that didn't at all verify the sentences in the wikipedia article. In fact the direction of the strength of the words seemed to shift from paragraph to paragraph. It made me really feel manipulated by the two camps involved. The primary media outlets made it really sound like some creepy stuff was going on inside the compound. The FCLDS responded very strongly with legal support, verifying that many of the girls who were reported to be underage mothers were actually in their 20's and that the children were being placed into poor conditions under the state's care and so on. At the end of reading what I read I felt certain that polygamy was going on, and probably several cases of the marriages being between partners of grossly different ages.
The thing that made me think so much was that I would love to have a self-sufficient ranch. When I think about the function of having a paycheck it's in order to sustain life for your family. So people seek wealth so that they won't have to work in order to survive. The problem is that in a typical house you'll have mortgage payments and utility bills that come do every month. Without a stream of income you'll have to keep working. In my mind though I rather like the idea of having fruit trees and crops and generators and a paid for structure because having no bills is equivalent to a certain sized stream of income. In fact, having a stream of food and energy from the earth seems more real than the digital imaginary money that I have. Currently my money might not even really exist, it's all just a digital adjustment of numbers. Direct deposit money, automatic bill paying, my debit card, I never really carry cash, and if I do it's not much more than 20-30 euros, which are themselves pieces of paper representing this or that. So the fruit of my labor only has as much meaning as the concept of a government and a society. If I want to eat I need sources of food which also see value in the particular pieces of paper I carry, or who are willing to also believe their digital status is worth something. It's not so far away from exchanging my time or possessions for status upgrades in an on-line video game, only more popular and accepted.
All of that to say I am not the least bit opposed to working towards a self-sufficient ranch of my own. Maybe I won't realize that goal, but I can at the very least understand it, and I don't find it odd. So if I had a self-sufficient ranch would the general populace find it creepy too? How much did people in general find the YFZ story creepy because of the accusations and how much because they find separatists unsettling? Anyway, I found something about the story a litte disturbing and those are my thoughts. I think it's the same reason I loved the show Firefly, I wouldn't mind being a frontiersman.
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