Don't Bow To Authoritarians: Building Cedar Raised Beds

This topic is very painful and overwhelming for me.
I saw this video and it sums up a lot of what I'm feeling right now.

Great video, I can only say "Same!"

I love when something puts words to what I'm feeling. It is rather 'freeing' to know that it isn't just yourself experiencing or going through something.

My favorite piece of this was a caption:

I will grow a fat watermelon this year unless I get sent to a prison camp first.

I don't have the megabytes to watch the video...

Short overview?

making some guesses seeing the forum this is in.

Judith Browning wrote:
Short overview?

You can find the transcript on the guy's substack here https://substack.com/home/post/p-162925830 (minimal bandwidth). You will enjoy his delightfully snarky tone. He lives just down the road from my mother, apparently....
the tl;dr is one we know well here- bulding shit in your backyard is a great alternative to getting angry at bad guys or shaking your first at the sky.

I'll add-- I want to send this to my husband, who enjoys watching carpentry videos, but I'm afraid of how much money we will have to spend building a workshop as a result!! We are both tool nuts and this guy has a drool-worthy workshop-- too much temptation. To top it off, he's building with cedar, I can practically smell it when he reams out the screw holes.

A note on building with cedar.
Every big box hardware store sells cedar dog eared fence pickets, roughly 6' long, 5.5" wide and 0.5" thick.
edit: they are rather cheap, like roughly two fifty each.

“Don’t bow to authoritarians, build cedar raised beds!” one could say.

Interesting angle. I especially agree with not letting our power be taken away. I think that that is the root of this thing—that we don’t have the will and assuredness to take care of ourselves and our communities, we rely on increasingly larger and increasingly out of our control institutions rather than learning to take care of ourselves and be independent. In former societies like Ancient Greece, hospitality was such an important virtue because there was no government aid most of the time; people had to rely on each other. This is more and more starting to become relevant again for people who will not benefit from the new conditions.

Edit: Some more on this.

The United States is probably the world’s most spoiled country in this sense. People generally live in and take for granted a comfort that people in other parts of the world envy; but United Statesians don’t work for a lot of it because of the US’s place near the top of the economic pyramid. It is a cause for shock and dismay how much more honest hard work from third world countries goes into making such a life possible.

Thanks for posting this William!

and thanks for the link Tereza.....that's a powerful read.
I've added him to my substack list.

 Showing compassion for immigrants is an act of resistance. Showing empathy for the thousands being killed in Palestine is an act of resistance. Showing love for marginalized people losing their rights is an act of resistance. They may not be some massive groundswell, but they are sorely needed. Do not lose your voice.

Don’t lose who you are because of their hatred.
💜💜💜

(from the substack link)

I’m not sure that my previous post came out very compassionately. Nothing that is happening that is affecting people in an awful way is their fault and we can’t expect anyone to prepare actively for such things (though some do). I mean to say that surviving through this requires that we continue to attend to the essential and nourish life through even the hardest situations. Much of what we are already doing, the good permaculture things like healing the land, foraging, growing food, weaving baskets, sharing food, talking, singing, walking, eating, drinking (what is wholesome) and so on. Like he said in the video it need not be dramatic, just enough to stay human.

People think “a bad ruler has come along, let’s get together and do something about it!” The stance of a warrior. But to stay whole through all of it we need to continue to try to nourish the spirit of the farmer within us, who is the one most ravaged by the winds of ill fortune. The spirit that creates life and doesn’t destroy it, the spirit that brings patience and allows things to bear fruit in their own time and doesn’t demand a quick solution, or even any solution, to a thing. It’s this life nourishing water loving farmer spirit that gets stripped away and torn apart by war, by unrelenting adversity, by panic, trauma, and the modern world, and it’s what we crave and hope to shelter in the first place; it has just been so battered that many forget it, we are far too often lost and disoriented, warriors charging for a dead leader or waving the flag of a sunken country. Maybe there is a place for getting together and saying, “There is a problem”, but it has to be a flower with a root, for quickly do they shrivel, those flowers which are cut from their root. The root is life.