Mister Potato Head waves bye-bye to those who choose to stay behind in the Old Paradigm, signs "so-long-it's-been-good-to-know-ya'" to those like a couple cited in a comment on The Oil Drum who declared that "they didn't wish to be the "sort of people" who stored potatoes," and when the commenter pointed out to them that "they'd actually be wise to have a bit of food stored in their home for unforeseen circumstances and offered to pay for it myself," "his wife simply said "we'd rather die" and that ended that discussion."It would, wouldn't it?
Discovery channel has come up with a show for those who would rather live: it's called The Colony, "where real people from a wide variety of backgrounds and skills will be challenged to rebuild their own civilization in a devastated world."
The Catacombs is looking to build a New Paradigm from a civilization not yet devastated but already endangered in a world that needs changing if it is to provide a decent life for our progeny yet unborn.
The Catacombs intends to be a community-driven Paradigm Change site, not a hunker-down, rugged individualist survival bolthole, and it is the creation of similar communities this site hopes to promote.
We are looking forward, not Looking Backward
, to the "resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia" that was Edward Bellamy's fever dream looking forward to the year 2000. Bellamy would have felt right at home at a Bilderberg conference, or sharing a glass with Gramsci, perhaps. A conclave here at The Catacombs would favor G.K. Chesterton over Bellamy and be more confortable sharing a locally brewed beer with Wilhelm Ropke.Preparations for August 1st's Valley-wide "Great Seed Swap" continue apace. Down here, we're the sort of people who store spuds, seeds and what-have-you, the sort of people who jerry-rig repair materials when store-bought isn't possible, the sort of people who believe with William Faulkner
what he stated in Stockholm in December of 1950 when awarded the Nobel Prize for literature: "I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."We wouldn't "rather die" than store potatoes. We will endure, we will prevail long past the time when the foolish, infantile and narcissistic suburbanites have died and their way of life become extinct. It is they who look backward: we look ahead; we are going forward.
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I might have a little more difficulty growing spuds as well as storing them but otherwise we are on the same page amigo. I have enjoyed your contributions to the Remnant (where I first came accross you) and this blog is also gripping. I have just read all your posts to date and I find that we are trying to do the same thing although in different places. In 2006 I left the UK after living there for twenty years and returned to live in rural Ireland with my wife and daughter (now twelve). This came about because I had always wanted to live a simple existance and we wished to live a simpler life close to the land. Ireland is a place where you can actually buy land now (even before the meltdown in the world economy) and it is still a rural economy with a lot of land available relative to the population which is about 4.5 million. When I was living in Liverpool and working as a social worker I had many email discussions with friends about how to put distributism into practice. Eventually we decided to come here because we heard that there were a lot of families already here trying to live a fully Catholic life with the accent on co-operation and self sufficiency. We put our toe in the water by renting for a while and found that sure enough there was just such a community in embryo. That was two years ago. In the intervening period we bought a two acre plot of land and built a house on it. Like you I did not wish to have any type of debt and so we decided to rough it for a while and I have done most of the finishing work on the property myself. Two days ago I finished digging the last of our forty permanent 12'X 4' vegetable beds. We already have chickens and have a herd number for the pigs we will be getting next year. I hope we can keep in touch and I will be keeping an eye on your blog. Godbless.
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