Re: [A-List] Belief System

[tully <tully2@xxxxxxxxx>]

Leigh, thanks so much for telling me more about you!  I've tried 
to include below some corresponding info about me.  

On Wednesday 30 April 2008, Leighm wrote:
>54 year old male, married, divorced, two step-daughters in
> their 20s and one blood daughter in her mid-30s, 

56 year old female, divorced, one 25 year old son.  

> been a 
> counter-culturally affiliated activist for most of my life
> since the age of 14 when I left home to 'become a hippie' in
> 1968, and instead found myself a Y... Y!...  Yippie!.

Good for you.  Too many of us became yuppies.  I try to deny my 
yuppie side, which drove me to a technology degree because I 
knew that wages in the humanities sucked.  

>I sleep in the woods or shared alternative housing. 

I also did this after I left my right wing parents.  Went wild 
for 8 years until I got married.  Shared houses with friends in 
Maryland, New York and North Carolina, spent a couple years 
helping an owner-operator friend drive all over the country, 
lived in a pickup truck cap at a free campsite, then got a 
slide-in camper, and later lived in the camper on 3 acres of 
unimproved land I bought at the base of a mountain near 
Hagerstown, MD.  Fun years.  

>Haven't 
> owned a car for ten years, using a bicycle or bus for all my
> transportation needs. I ride that bike about 15 miles a day.
> Rain or Shine.

Only once did I live in a small town where I could have lived 
without a motorized vehicle.  There I could walk to my part time 
job at a florist shop making $2 an hour.  Until I discovered Geo 
Metros, I always had motorcycles for most of my traveling which 
I rode rain, shine, snow, or ice.  But after our first Geo 
Metro, I no longer had an excuse to keep motorcycles because the 
Metro got better fuel mileage than they did.  

I was one of the "back to the land" group.  Tried homesteading 
after I got married in 1980 and moved to a $37K 1920 farmhouse 
on 6.7 acres in central NC (got the owner financed mortgage paid 
off in 7 years), where we tractor farmed and raised sheep, 
goats, and rabbits for wool, food, and pelts.  Discovered it was 
too much work and expense for the two of us and was too 
destructive environmentally.  Found that hunting and gathering 
were far more productive uses of my time and money. That the 
additional establishment of a permaculture food forest, like 
fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and other perennials or self 
seeding annual food plants and/or aquaculture in natural ponds 
provides a worthwhile security hedge over simple H&G, so such 
permaculture will be a major focus of mine from here on.  

>After a careers as an OTR truck driver 

Did trucking remove all your interest in long distance traveling 
like it did me?  I'm grateful I got that traveling bone out of my 
system so early as I might otherwise feel deprived, like so many 
others I know who've worked fulltime for decades and now hear 
the siren song of the gypsy and are so angry about the current 
high fuel prices.  Most are somewhat less than appreciative when 
I bring up the benefits of high fuel prices or express my belief 
that taxes on fossil fuels should be increased further.  

>and precision machinist, 
> chef, laborer, Swiss Army Knife, I find myself working at a
> locally owned coffee shop 

What an intriguing collection of jobs and skills.  Let's see, I 
was a research assistant, florist clerk, wholesale electronic 
parts salesman, truck driver, dept. store customer service, 
telephone installer, project/product/manufacturing engineer, 
programmer/analyst, database administrator, and computer 
instructor (present).  

> in Santa Cruz California, one of the 
> most expensive, bourgeois 'progressive' places in the US and
> live without any government aid at all on $320 dollars a
> month.

Wow, I'm super impressed!  That's fantastic, especially in 
California.  It's much cheaper to live in NC.  Last year I 
averaged about $750/month gross wage and $450/month expenses, so 
I was putting money in the bank.  At the beginning of 2008, I 
lost a major class contract and so far this year my income has 
only averaged $250/month.  Also I just added $213/month in super 
high deductible health insurance cost, figuring that after a 
brother and ex who were diagnosed last year with cancer, that 
I'd pushed my luck long enough with 10 years of no health 
insurance and being a smoker for 35 years.  

So I'm steady losing money now, which I can afford for awhile, 
since I'd saved several years worth of living expenses during 
stints of working fulltime for the corporations.  Over the years 
I've fattened up the savings buffer and then dropped out of the 
workforce for a year or two.  Figure that's let me get away with 
working only 20 of the past 35 years never collecting 
unemployment or any gov't assistance.  

Besides I love this current arrangement of working only 3 hours 
per week with one commute and having 1 to 4 weeks off several 
times a year.  Legally contributing nothing to federal income 
tax, which I've done the entire time Bush has been in office, 
has been a source of great satisfaction.  But I guess I need to 
do something about improving my income before long.  Selling 
this house would help alot in the expenses category.  

I guess cars are the main expense you save over what I'm 
spending.  With two insured tagged running Metros, I figure used 
purchase price, insurance (includes collision because of all the 
deer here), fuel, repairs/tires/maintenance, tags, that my car 
expenses alone are around $200/month, which to me seems so 
incredibly cheap for the benefit it provides.  

I'm also questioning if the passenger miles per gallon of Metros 
can compete with mass transit.  Four people in a Metro accounts 
for 180 passenger miles/gallon while it appears Amtrak can only 
manage about 65.  Maybe light rail is much better, but I'm 
beginning the question the benefit of mass transit, which tends 
to concentrate populations too far from the sources of food 
production and the rest of our sustenance.  I suspect we'd be 
better off and more long term sustainable in post peak times 
with our populations distributed out to many small towns with 
farmland and hunting/fishing spaces within walking distance.  

>When I do my "Global Footprint" (FWIW) I find myself 1.2:1, not
> quite the global median for lifestyle, but as close as one is
> liable to get while living in a US city.

Been a few years since I looked at the online version of that 
test and I wondered about its honesty since it seemed impossible 
to get it much below 1, even with all most favorable inputs 
applied.  Seemed certain "givens" were applied depending on 
nation, so that a full time nomadic hunter-gatherer type (say a 
traditional Plains Indian) in the US would still show up as not 
being much below average.  

>I am my own personal "CopWatch' whenever I walk down the
> street. 

I think many of our generation have what gets called a "problem 
with authority."  Bah humbug.  

> I supply legal advice, am a walking 'Fuck The System' 
><http://www.totse.com/en/politics/anarchism/fuckthesystem172243
>.html> to the homeless 

Excellent.  I find myself leaning hard towards anarchism as I no 
longer trust any gov't to avoid the corruption of power against 
its people, though I don't like the creeping cynicism that 
represents developing in me.  I try very hard to keep my old 
hippie idealism alive because I despise the rampant "hip" 
cynicism in place for the last 30 years.  But it is very 
difficult even for me now to put any faith in any type of 
governance to provide for the betterment of the masses instead 
of the just the elite bureaucrats and their corporate cronies 
that run it.   

However, I'm greatly cheered by the rapidly expanding 
intern/apprentice type arrangements that may indicate a possible 
new type of feudalism developing thru the CSA (Community 
Supported Agriculture) markets for organic farming and 
permaculture and could increase functional and sustainable 
intentional community greatly smoothing the transition to a post 
peak oil era of alternative local markets, craftsmen, trading, 
perhaps even currency.  Seriously thinking of joining one of 
those groups.  Some of the more interesting sites about this 
include:  

http://www.organicvolunteers.com
http://www.attrainternships.ncat.org
http://www.permacultureinternational.org/globaldirectory/internship/internusa.htm

>and provide some socially apt guidance 
> to a few of the more socially conscious police officers (one
> has his Sociology masters) 

Wow, you found socially conscious cops??  Remind me to hire you 
if I need to locate something impossible to find!  Seriously, 
I've never known a police officer I personally liked at all 
(even in the family) and I have an entrenched prejudice at this 
point.  One has to wonder about the sort of person who would 
take such a job, who would want to be in a position to enforce 
rules on others, who doesn't find many of the laws in existence 
to be wrong.  I also wonder about the mentality of people who 
would enter the military voluntarily (including my nephew to my 
recent horror).  When my ex told our son that he'd be proud if 
Eric enlisted, I was appalled.  It couldn't have been the same 
guy I married.  There I was figuring the route Eric and I would 
take to Belize if the draft was re-instituted.  Luckily Eric 
does take after me in some ways and he's opposed to the miltary 
and I've sympathized with the hassling he's received from local 
cops for his taking photos of trains.  Sometimes when a cop 
passes us on the road, I hear him mutter "oink" and rather than 
scold him, I must confess I simply acknowledge it.  

>I am currently engaged in a private/public property legal war
> with elements of the Santa Cruz business community and
> government. You cannot sit in the city hall plaza outside of
> business hours, nor in front of the public library. City Hall,
> maybe... The public library?
>
>Next time one of the city hired security guards calls the
> police for sitting on a public property bench, the end result
> will be a lawsuit forcing the city to paint in LARGE RED
> LETTERS: "NO SITTING BETWEEN SUCH-AND-SUCH HOUR &
> SUCH-AND-SUCH HOUR BY ORDER OF THE CITY OF SANTA CRUZ".

That is an outrage.  I hate how these people won't acknowledge 
who it is they work for and who really owns those spaces.  I 
make it a point to tell students in my web design class that 
they should be free to take any image they want off a .gov site, 
since they are the ones who own it.  

>I engage in psychotherapy with the shattered souls of the local
> homeless and addict population whenever possible, although
> addicts need help from people who have HAD that problem.
>
>Unlike the so-called halcyon days of the 60s, most of the
> street people here had no intention of being such.
>
>I work with Food Not Bombs when the college students are out of
> town and they need logistical assistance. I also have a deal
> with my asshole Republican/Libertarian boss to bring the
> leftover pastries/bagels/etc downtown to feed people. 6 days a
> week, 365 days a year.
>
>I'm currently acting as 'dad#2' (Her adult adolescent parents
> are too busy making the mortgage and buying toys for
> themselves) to a local high school girl who was a 15 year old
> speed addict, quit a couple of years ago, and then got
> pregnant at age 17 by a 20 year old alcoholic (Three months
> along and she plans to keep the child).

My hat is off to you for all this excellent activism.  It's this 
sort of demonstrated love for our fellow beings, not law 
enforcement, that keeps the cities from becoming full fledged 
jungles.  

>Is that enough?

No.  There is no end of what we can learn about and from each 
other.  Thank you so much for taking the time to give me this 
introduction to you.  I look forward to learning much more about 
you here.  

--tully