Durango
The Tyme Being

We have for the past 150 years or so drifted from self-sufficiency to near total dependence. As if some Declaration of Dependence was signed behind our backs, we have through four or five generations become all but totally dependent on non-human corporate entities whose primary function is not to make our lives healthier, wealthier or wise, but to reap the maximum profits from their activities regardless of the consequences to humans and the planet Earth.

In the process of giving up the self-reliance of our great-grandfathers we have been poisoned, drugged, brainwashed, ripped off, manipulated, swindled, coerced, deceived, spied-upon, and sent to slaughter.  We have gone from growing our own fresh, healthy organic food to being dependent on Leviathan corporate chemical additions of toxic chemicals pleasantly-packaged and skillfully promoted for our sustenance. GMO added to preserve harm.

For warmth and cooking and our other various convenience tools, entertainment and communication, we have become dependent on corporations to deliver the electricity than runs our world.  Our transportation needs are controlled and delivered by humongous corporations. Otherwise, we walk, our voice is limited to over the next hill, and the only music we hear is that we make ourselves.

Every nook and most crannies of our lives, especially the most basic survival needs, are entangled in dependence on these non-human entities that have come to be known as multinational corporations owned primarily by a relatively small group of elite banking and industrial families who thrive on the power of financial domination and political control, often to the detriment of society and nature.

Over these past four or five generations, our worlds have been taken under control by The Corporation, while we the people have been tricked into believing that our best interests are being served by those who make the big decisions. We no longer rely upon ourselves and our neighbors. We are under control by powers beyond our choices and we are vulnerable to the whims of nature and The Powers That Be.

Westernized Civilization is teetering on the brink of it’s own excesses and we remain constantly less than a week from chaos should The Corporation’s production and distribution channels be disrupted by financial collapse or cataclysmic natural events. Since we’ve lost the basic survival skills of our great-grandfathers, and our water and food supplies are no longer found at our local corporate outlet, food crisis will develop in a matter of hours. Some neighbors may shed their veneers of civilization as their children experience hunger for the first time while the urban and suburban regions descend into precarious and sudden disorder. As the civil engineering infrastructure breaks down, those living in densely-populated areas will quickly find themselves living in desperate circumstances as water distribution and sanitation processes squeal to a halt.  This all a result of the near-complete dependence on the system The Corporation has designed.

This Great Mutation from self-reliance to dependence that has developed during the past few generations has left our freedoms and opportunities vulnerable to systemic collapse and threatens to send us all back to where this age began. And that in itself is not a bad thing.  In fact it is a good thing–and a necessary thing because this top-heavy, lop-sided, wasteful, profit-driven, inequitable system that has evolved over the past few generations, or that has been built, is not working to the benefit of most people, but for the benefit of the few while nature coughs and chokes on the fumes of The Corporation.

Fortunately, change is coming.  Ready or not, things are going to change. At the other end of this transformation a better world awaits.  Between here and there we the people will face many challenges, some sudden, some more gradual, that will put our living skills, our survival skills, to the test. Now would be a good time to take stock of our situation, determine our dependencies, and gain the skills and knowledge to necessary to break those chains The Corporation has lured us into so we will depend only on ourselves and immediate neighbors for our basic needs of food, water and shelter.

In these precarious financial times, the best investment is in those things that would fulfill Buckminster Fuller’s definition of wealth: the number of days of forward survival. A garden and canning skills, greenhouse, solar panels, windmill and good batteries will ensure the least disruption should The Corporation’s best-laid plans go awry. And if your normalcy bias prevents you from believing in any sudden collapse of your local world, at least you’ll be eating healthy food probably for the first time in your life, and your lights will work as long as the sun comes up and the winds blow.

Whether TSHTF happens suddenly, or whether the teetering edifice of The Corporation crumbles slowly, we all will benefit by embracing the self-reliant tool-set of our great-grandfathers and retake control and provision of our own basic needs. This system we were all born into is not working because it does not live in harmony with nature and does not work towards the refinement of the human experience, so it will either collapse on its own greed and fixation with material consumption and accumulation or it will transform itself into something that provides health, comfort and allows everyone to become everything they are meant to be.

This transformation will be fueled by nature, built with a self-reliant tool-set, and inspired by living every day in a simple quality of beneficial interaction with those around us, our basic needs self-sustaining, our dependence on The Corporation long-ago banished to the shelf of failures in history. We will then have arrived at a human-centered civilization that will be our springboard to the stars.

There will never be a better time than now for us to take these steps into self-reliance. Better now to do it voluntarily while we still have a choice, than to wait for The Corporation and it’s minions in government to fix the mess they have made over the past 15 decades or so.

Do it. Do it Now.

–Durango