It’s About Making Babies!

Theotherryan at Total Survivalist Libertarian Rantfest wrote about “For the spouses, another perspective.”

When the summary showed up on my BlogLines.com page, there was an ad. A greenwash-type ad. The kind that has a product, and calls it green because it might be – and might generate income, if the market thinks it actually is green. You know, like “saving oil” by mining the metals and producing exotic compounds, and shipping/trucking materials and parts all around the world and the nation, to build a “green” electric car that you plug in – to electricity generated from a coal or oil fired plant (still the majority of electricity in America).

Any, this picture of some young man in a white t-shirt, looks a bit like his parent’s back yard in the background. The tag line on the picture reads “Go green. Date a neighbor.” www.MeetLocals.com. How quaint.

One of the greenest people I read is Sharon Astyk, who writes about the depth of her pantry (Chatelaine’s Keys, and Casaubon’s Book), about saving seed to preserve genetic viability of beans and beets and tomatoes into the future, of preserving peppers and corn and potatoes for her daily life. She writes about scrounging, when need be, for what might be available, growing more vegetables and herbs in window boxes and planters and small gardens. About victory gardens and social issues and reducing her carbon footprint. So I sent her a note about this greenwash ad, and about the TSLR post, which I think touches on a very important aspect of life. Of living long and prospering, as Mr. Spock (Science officer on the USS Enterprise, a starship on Star Trek, a 40-year-old TV show) borrowed from a cherished blessing.

Sharon,

I just got a glimpse at a “personal” greenwash.

… One of the occasionally interesting blogs I read is a gun nut – Total Survivalist Libertarian Rantfest. Today the rotating ad on BlogLines on his article was – MeetLocals.com

The tag line on the picture (smiling average guy in suburban background and unlabeled plain white t-shirt) was “Go green. Date a neighbor.”

Which I think misses the point.

Thursday theotherryan posted about “For the spouses, another perspective.”

http://tslrf.blogspot.com/2010/02/for-spouses-another-perspective.html

Basically, the point was to be sympathetic, when getting “the paranoia” and wanting to start spending only for lots of guns and preserved-forever food, and a rustic bunker in the boonies. I paraphrase.

Lately, the old children’s song (that I really did learn in school), about “can she bake a cherry pie, Billy boy, Billy boy?” has been running through my mind. (A National Institutes of Health site lists two children’s song lyrics – I don’t recall either version – and annoyingly plays an instrumental version of the song – NSFW, for the noise factor when the page loads up.) That is, rather than date a neighbor because you spend less gas money – date someone with the skills and aptitude to enhance your ability to survive what you see coming in the future.

If that is the guy/girl next door – great. The better you know his/her family, and they know you and your family, the better. There is still room for surprises and serious disconnects in values and goals, and if you are dating someone you already know then little issues – like serious skirt chasing as a lifestyle, drug and alcohol abuse, or terror of intimacy – shouldn’t be a surprise.

At least today, mating with a neighbor won’t be a problem. In the next generation, if neighbors aren’t still finding themselves brought together randomly, then finding a mate a ways from home may again become more important, as a means to strengthen the gene pool and to keep ties to neighboring communities fresh and strong.

Just a thought. As I commented (lengthily) at TSLR, I think we face a time where picking a suitable mate may well become (as it has been historically), one of the most important choices we make for surviving and thriving.

I think a part of my comment to theotherryan bears repeating.

Often times, in selecting a partner, we invest a large portion of our self identity into an image of us with them. When change hits, it isn’t just a matter of changing our mind about an everyday thing – rice or potatoes? – but about letting go of our identity and building a new sense of who we are. Any survivalist that chooses, after selecting a partner, to seek a different community for any reason, even for better chances of survival, chooses to abandon the old community. To the spouse this is an isolation; if it isn’t voluntary, this is a significant means of spousal abuse, to deny your partner access to friends, family, and familiar surroundings.

Change is measured in pain. Always. The least pain is for changes that are insignificant to the person involved. It might be contemplated and eagerly sought, but change is always a loss, a spiritual death or clearing away of the old life to make way for the new (quoted from the Tarot, explaining one of the major arcana cards). When making your own choices, you weigh options, you choose the lesser of evils. When you impose that on someone, or try to, then you end their previous life, all to often suddenly or unexpectedly.

Realistically the first thing a survivalist – or anyone – should consider is the stability, trust, and integrity of the things they depend on most – their sense of self and selection of suitable partners and companions. You don’t buy a gun that you know breaks, or that reliable ammunition cannot be found. Why would you want a partner near you that isn’t as invested in surviving whatever may come, at whatever effort, as you are? That should be a primary consideration about choosing a companion.

Sharon preps for an economic decline, a gradual loss of support for today’s consumer-driven economy and society (Sharon, I hope I got that part right!). Theotherryan is part of a community that believes the coming end-of-civilization will be as violent and that communities will devour themselves as so often happened in the past, when things collapse. Sharon works to motivate, demonstrate – and begin living at a level that she believes is achievable today, and likely to reflect the realities of what will come – by gardening, buying clothes at yard sales instead of stores, re-using, and doing differently rather than finding different ways to do the same old, same old. Theotherryan envisions survival as an armed and prepared, remote bunker as a means of surviving the transition.

Neither vision has room for a partner invested in expensive displays of wealth or social status. Both examine their tools and surroundings for ruggedness and usefulness – like Sharon’s broadfork for the garden, or theotherryan’s selection of weapons.

Selection of companions and partners should pass the same test for soundness and appropriate values. People are wired to respond sexually in intimate circumstances. Finding someone you respect and honor, trust and depend upon will seriously narrow the field of candidates. Finding a good person that you will also enjoy holding and getting skin to skin with will be the tiniest bit more difficult.

Good of the community

One of the recent topics I noticed on Transition/Peak Oil, is about organizing communities and building and strengthening communities. Picking a life partner has to be part of that discussion.

Communities grow, or maintain themselves, by the growth of families – partnerings and children – and by adoption, that is, assimilating newcomers. Every formation of family, every bringing together of adults to make a home and raise children, is a vital and integral part of the core of the community. Any time a community member attempts to make a home with a partner unsuitable to the community, or that would make a home that was unsuitable in the community, the community is weakened.

Even today, marriages routinely require the presence and implied consent of the community – witnesses, at least. When times get hard and affluence not as wide-spread as today, the community interest in who forms a family gets much more direct and important to the survival of all.

NML at Baggage Reclaim writes about “I’m Successful! Why Am I Still Single?“.

This isn’t a new complaint, or a new topic. Susan Page wrote “If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single? Ten Strategies That Will Change Your Love Life Forever,” back in 1988. A copy has been sitting on my coffee table since 1990. And, yes, it is the same coffee table I bought in Minneapolis, MN, in 1982. Thanks, Dayton’s.

Being successful isn’t the problem

When someone arrives at success, most often that is a personal accomplishment. One overcomes resistance, odds, and perhaps opposition to succeed. Whether success is wealth, or fame, or position, influence or power – the point of success is to satisfy an ambition. A personal drive to accomplish a personal goal.

Love and Marriage

Frank Sinatra sang, a long time ago, a song about “Love and Marriage” – go together like a horse and carriage. (Amazon.com has both the sheet music and an MP3 download). Hold on – the point isn’t the religious-civil marriage ceremony.

Even as long ago as “Our Town” came out in 1955 (the movie in which the song was introduced), America was losing sight of what makes a community, an extended family. Focus on veterans returning from World War II, and then the Korean conflict, focused on individuals. During WWII, women had left the home of their fathers and husbands, and found a niche in industry, commerce, retail – and in the community.

The modern concept of family – a couple of adults raising children to be “the best they can be” – came from an earlier time. The family, even today, is a unit of culture. Culture – an adoption of rituals, traditions, and values that express the lives and living of those in the family. This culture comes about by combining the backgrounds of experience and cultures they had lived in, to arrive at an agreed upon “home”. It is the expectations, the responsibilities and beliefs, the definitions of right and wrong that a couple use to embody a home, whether in a house, an apartment, a barn or garage, or a couple of rooms in someone else’s house.

The family is a unit constructed out of respect and honor of the families of the primary adults. That is, the extended family. The family is the unit of culture that, gathered together with all those living in a community, define that community.

We are all familiar with chance-formed communities. This is what happens when people buy a house, move into a condo or apartment, without knowing who the neighbors are (and likely never meeting them). The community is formed by chance. So we hire police and elect a mayor, and mostly things go on. In family where there is conflict often some of the affected parties rebel and cut contact, or are shunned.

Make a home, not a bed

What can we do, then, to avoid using chance to build a home – or not? We look for a mate to build a home with, to build with us a unit of culture that we can recognize, respect, and adopt. A mate that will help define our own position within the extended family and within the community.

Crowds of single people form one kind of community. Families, though, have a chance to form stable communities and combine in extended families. Changing from single to family is not a pronouncement gifted when two (or more?) adults choose to form a family.

A family forms, and the community recognizes the family, because the culture of a family is formed. The identity and roles and fundamental definition of one’s role in the world is redefined, by becoming part of a family.

Cults and many religions are similar to families, in that your life is transformed. That transformation is plainly visible to self and the cult or religious community. Or self-help group. Or military unit. Or family.

Success or family

If success is a personal achievement, family is a surrender. What we call a “relationship” is too often a chance-formed association. You find someone that you are attracted to, or is available, or is just there and you feel needy. We choose a partner because of our feelings, our needs, our goals.

When the reality is that we need a partner, to form a family culture, to define something that doesn’t exist yet – the people we will be within a family, within an extended family and within a community.

Single or coupled

It is a shame that marriage is considered to be between a man and a woman.

The reality, is that a marriage is the fundamental formation, the birth if you will, of a new unit in the community and extended family. The community and extended family are integral actors, in the formation nurturing, and ultimately accepting this new family.

The Christian Church, for it’s own reasons, long ago determined that only heterosexual couples fit the rite of marriage. That is fine, I won’t comment on that further. The state and nation have an interest in tracking the merging of assets and parentage – identity – of progeny, both adopted and by birth. But handfasting predates the Christian form of marriage, and serves the community well (except, of course, the Christians). As for man and woman – I cannot find anything in scriptures that details how many adults may be involved in a family – none of the man-and-woman scriptures mentions that either were unmarried, and would not take further spouses. But that is neither here nor their, I just explain why I don’t define a family as the result of a Christian (or “civil”) marriage.

Where the successful person is proud of her/his accomplishments, and strives to apply the strategies that were successful for them to other areas of their life – a relationship is a surrender of self and values, within boundaries, with the goal of forming a family that nurtures everyone else.

Success is something one does, is a personal satisfaction. A mate is defined by role within family and community, not by oneself. A relationship is a partial formation of a family.

Make me happy

When we pick someone because we admire or fantasize about their sexual features or provocations, we risk beginning a relationship – whether a quick few minutes or attempt at months or years, or a lifetime together – because we follow the key to success. We strive to satisfy our personal goal.

And we stumble into a chance-formed family.

It used to be that girls worried about dating and their “reputation” about being sexually active. Not just the girls and boys – their families, and entire communities. Sex obscures thinking; the community and extended family have a need to sustain themselves. That is, they need to keep families involved in the community, and to nurture those families. Extended families have the same need. Letting homes form, that fail to thrive, weakens the community.

We have forgotten that.

Few alive in modern America today recall just what an involved, community-type community could be. Some rural villages and towns, some urban neighborhoods still express the old involvement, but most have lost their young people.

Whom to choose

Suppose, for a moment, we respect and honor what our parents taught us. That we think of ourselves in terms of being part of a family, of raising children to believe as we do, as our parents did.

Who would we need to fill the other adult role(s), to make a family? To contribute to raising the children – to embrace and build the community?

We need someone trustworthy, stable, and disciplined.

Should we take on a partner to have fun, or should we look for responsible people to have fun with?

Does it have to be this way?

Up until the Renaissance, mostly matings were formed by arrangement by the parents – worldwide, that was still the most common form of marriage in the world, in 1970. The musical “Fiddler On The Roof” (and Janeane Garafolo in “The Matchmaker”) taught many of us that hadn’t known, about matchmakers. Matchmakers served the community, enriching the community with responsible pairings that also took into account similar backgrounds and likelihood of being good for each other. Many older women today seem willing to give such advice. I would stick with the happily partnered women, for advice.

Alternatively, the successful and powerful bought slaves, or bought wives, or allowed a woman or man to serve as the co-parent of their children. Sometimes as eye candy, sometimes as display spouse or host/hostess for social occasions. Sometimes these mercenary partnerings resulted in real respect and affection. Sometimes.

Dating sites and dating services

Dating sites and dating services don’t take into account the needs of the community, or the extended family. The assumption is made that each individual is unencumbered by family or friends or employer or neighbors, or current or future roles in the community.

Dating services and dating sites enable one to pick someone – to make themselves happy. That is, successful. And we are back to the ego satisfaction of the individual, rather than the “together from now on” goal that has to be shared.

If you don’t think you want to pick your partner based on whether, together, you form a unit of your community – consider where you want to live, with what relationship with your community. And whether you want a partner that makes that better for you and the community.

And consider why, in the marriage ceremony, the phrase often arises, “before G-d, family, and friends”. Picking a partner is just a blind gamble, if you are trying to be successful.