sky gods

I planted carrots yesterday. About a thousand seeds, maybe two thousand. Most of the carrots I planted in early June didn't come up. Too much rain, I think, the ten days or so after I planted. Many things didn't come up, the savory, romanesco broccoli, kohl rabi, beets, turnips, the Hopi ceremonial tobacco, most of the peas, calendula and Anasazi spinach. It was too late to plant most of it. That, and some of the seed was third rate, a year old, discount commercial. Ultimately though, there was just too much rain too often, for the seed to germinate.

Remember when money seemed to be falling from the sky? Oh those heady days around the turn of the millennium. Eventually the tech stocks crashed, but the Dow Jones climbed ever higher, the price of homes levitated far into the ether, and credit was easier to find than the car keys. And how luxurious those cars became! What did it matter that it took two gallons of gas to drive to the nearest big box retail outlet and back?

Then it was revealed the sky gods had made it all up. They weren't raining down anything, as the oh so duplicitous concept of "trickle down" would suggest. They were just minting money out of that ether, skimming off the illusory credit extended to people and communities, handing that credit back and forth from sky god to sky god, again and again, pretending more money was minted each time. It was and remains nothing but 1's and 0's, even though, when the illusion was revealed, the sky gods at the Federal Reserve started printing dollars as fast as they could, dollars as empty as those techno-graphic 1's and 0's.

But the debt from that credit remains. The sky gods at the Federal Reserve built a multi-trillion dollar safety net for their sky god accomplices in Finance. The rest of us down here on terra firma are left to hope we don't lose our jobs, the jobs we need to pay at least the minimum payments on all that debt; or, we are left to hope we are the one chosen, of the 500 other applicants for that one job that doesn't pay as well as the one I used to have.

And somehow, as the sycophants at Forbes giddily reported a few months back, there were 59 more billionaires in America the Empire in 2009, than there were in 2008, in the midst of the worst recession in recent memory. Even as the estimated value of derivatives, those illusory extensions of actual wealth, are valued at one quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, which is more than ten times the value of the GDP of all the world's nations combined.

Of course, how dare I question the sky gods? If not for them we would all still be apes. Right, Americans?

Sky gods. They are only men. Men who embrace the ethic of every man for himself, who embody the will to rule, who have climbed to the top of a hierarchical social pyramid, sacrificing all that is sacred along the way. Men who excel at plunder, who define the economy that is so detrimental to the health of all things biological, the economy that puts the health of the whole of the Earth at risk.

Which is why I'm planting so many carrots. Because I refuse to participate in that hierarchy. Because I expect the whole bloody system will come crashing down someday soon. Because such insatiability can not be sustained.