We use our land like a bank. We whore out our own mother. I am angry. These systems – the banking system, the economic engine of housing, the tax breaks for clearing all the land and planting monoculture trees.
Do we not know quality? Do we have no sense of value? If we fancy ourselves aware of a quality life, then why do we allow this use-job? Why do we sell out? We use the land, and once we put a house there, we use it again. We borrow on the house to pay for other immediate needs, or because colleges demand the ‘equity’, and in so doing we tie the place deeper to a hopeless future.
Every time we cash out our land, we make it less and less possible that the bit of soil we know can remain free to breathe. There’s no way to maintain a home place if it’s in hock to the bank. In the end, the land will have to be put up on the block and sold to the highest bidder because, like the giving tree, it is asked to give every last bit of itself for our greed and need.
We buy and sell the land. Chief Seattle was right. (Actually, apparently he never said those words, but the phrase is still right.) That’s where we went wrong, the buying and selling.
Private property? Private is nice. But property? We all know what’s happened to women and others who have been property. The story of the soil is a story of rape, abuse, use, entitled privilege and a mystic veil of cultural heritage. I am not so sure this legacy is anything but shameful, just as our other stories of property.
This land is not yours to use as you wish. Pimps! Take your profits and go, go away from here, away from the land I love, honor, cherish and respect. You have no relationship to this land, you objectify and see cash.
Go make an honest living.