Poverty Is Not an Accident

Poverty Is Not an Accident
Nelson Mandela

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Off the Grid: Life On The Mesa


You are reading http://livinginthehood.blogspot.com

These are not heroes. I guess middle class people wanted to visit these outlaws for some romantic notion. They're not romantic.

I have electricity and well water, but no sewage or heat. I have phone, because I have no vehicle. I have internet, or the isolation would leave me too depressed and despondent.

I leave the water off most of the time because the pipes burst when frozen and they leak. Landlord won't fix anything. I hitch hike or ride my gasoline bicycle. NO drugs. Maybe 3 shots of bourbon each for xmas and my birthday each year.




Kids don't need to be near what's going on out there. There are guns, drugs, toxic chemicals, explosives, rusted scrap metal, poisonous critters, extremes of heat and cold and no access to any help in an emergency. People set fires, shoot guns, get very intoxicated.

It's not a tribe; there's scant cohesion or sense of responsibility to self, let alone others in any consistent way. It's a group tantrum.

I'm sure the "progressive" elite in Albuquerque and Santa Fe will champion these people as "greens," "anarchists," and revolutionaries. They are not. Chaos is not anarchy.

Foraging junk to reuse is not environmentalism, if you are, in the same film, creating huge explosions of noxious smoke.

I put a lot of the blame for the necessity of their and my living arrangements on a society that shuns and vilifies people with behavioral health challenges. A lot of us would rather just live in squalor than "come in" to your "therapies" of toxic drugs, guilt trips and prejudices masquerading as "statistics."

But we're not all a bunch of hair trigger renegades, just waiting for a chance to scare the snot out of the tourists.
Don't know how you make a plastic greenhouse survive sixty mile wind gusts, like we get where I live, though.

What kind of society are we running when our children live like feral dogs?

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/off_the_grid_life_on_the_mesa/

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