Letter to a Friend

Photo: Ann Kreilkamp

Dear Friend,

Here is a short read for you:

How I Got Bamboozled by Fake News: And the Good That Came of It

Ann Kreilkamp

Exopermaculture

January 6, 2019

 “And thus, a few years later, was Green Acres Village born, first as a neighborhood garden, and then fully fledging as a potent little human community in communion with our Mother Earth. It has been evolving, organically, for over decade now, starting on the mental plane in 2007, when I took the permaculture design course, and was astonished to recognize in its principles real hope for a transformed world...

“It was just then, just when I had worked my mental/emotional system into a frenzied intensity, that I heard a little voice in my right ear: ‘No need for that. Just change perceptions in your neighborhood.’”

Here’s some folks doing something other than violent revolution or trying to reform our dead-end, powerful and wealthy-controlled way of living. They see what’s coming, like what happened in Cuba when the USSR collapsed and cut the Cubans loose.

I’m living from paycheck to paycheck. But I give what I can, a little each month, to help support liberal, progressive causes. I don’t have the energy, patience, social skills or thick skin to argue with the GOPers and Trumpers, or join political activist groups. Again, I admire you for confronting them head-on.

I can only think and write. I don’t need to write a dumbed-down Whole Earth Catalog kinda thing, for children or adults. There’s enough of that out there already. But thank you for thinking I might make a difference. 

I can only influence willing, teachable people with my thinking and writing, locally; and some of those who speak to me within my extended family, here in North America and in Uganda.

I agree, my writing can be improved. But in conversation I speak just the same as you and I do when we discuss stuff. I do not like intellectualizing PhD BSers any more than you do. 

Conversations in my little Owl & Ibis group are in basic language and based on facts and our personal, long life experiences.

Yes, I introduce some ideas from great thinkers past and present. I also introduce my original, anthro-influenced ideas on stuff. But we meet at OI to discuss and learn from each other and from the big thinkers, and challenge them and each other sometimes. We do not sit around and try to impress each other with big words. I think you confuse me with some university professors. I rejected that career, remember? Instead I worked in rural Africa for most of my thirty years of government service.

Kinda ticks me off you think because I write with too many words I’m an intellectual BSer. If you really read the stuff I write you’ll see that in a lot of it I’m telling the intellectual class, the experts, the rich and powerful, to stick it up their asses. 

Thanks, I feel better. :)

Maybe instead of your nephew pissing an inheritance away you could leave that big pile of money you’re sitting on to a local group in the town where you live that’s into permaculture.

Jim