June 23rd, 2020
What’s in your share?
Beans
Salad Mix
Romaine Lettuce
Cooking Greens
Bunching Onions
Garlic Scapes
Cilantro
Salad Turnips
"One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep those two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here “I lost my land” is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate — “We lost our land.” The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one….This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning — from “I” to “we.”
John Steinbeck, from Grapes of Wrath
Solidarity is the personal manifestation of - not only - ones acknowledgment and acceptance of our interconnectedness, but a demonstrated material commitment to trust over fear. Psychically and ecologically, the dynamic web that upholds our indivisibility cringes at the concept of the individual, the original, private or contained. Yet, so much of our lives is committed to our very alienation. Self-made and sufficient, distinct in our careers and creation, secure, protected, "in charge." The prioritization and ideology of "mine" is at the core of our failing relationships, to other humans and the world at large.
Thousands of families, fragmented and scared, each hoarding their false securities and sufficiencies against the rest. Rather than share, it is "safer" to go it alone, meanwhile one's excess necessitates another's poverty and therefore each other's volatility. The individualized nature of our consumer and productive capacities cannot be maintained, much less be equitably distributed across the human population. Our political structures and planet are rapidly destabilizing. The need for radical changes to deeply embedded systems is imminent. And the heart of this change is in our commitment to a lived Solidarity.
To those who "hate change and fear revolution", the movement from "I" to "we" is fatal. However, for our existence more generally, to teach trust and remind the masses of their collective creativity and capability to render, redistribute, and redirect the aims and essence of power is our only hope. Reimagining the self as something shared, "Our-self," reimagines all other possibilities; rather than a sacrifice of what is mine, it is the summation of what is ours, with a "whole" outstandingly greater than parts combined.
The commoditization of land, food, farms, and food workers has led us to believe that the culmination of our individual consumer choices will necessarily result in the best societal outcomes. Meanwhile we live in the midst of environmental collapse due to a devastatingly efficient industrial agriculture model, a global refugee crisis (many of whom, dispossessed farmers and peasants, displaced by climate change, trade policies, or both), and hunger aside overproduction and waste. These contradictions are inherent in the simultaneous cheapness and extreme profitability of our food system.
By way of Community Supported Agriculture we begin to lay the groundwork of a practiced sharing of risk, reward, and subsequent trust. This relationship is one step in many towards realizing the potential power of collective action. Together, the extraordinary can be garnered - regionally-based, democratically-organized food systems that recognize food and the land it's grown on as a human necessity and therefore, a Human Right. Only our solidarity can carry us in this endeavor.
We are grateful to share in this with ALL of YOU.