greenstorm | Entries tagged with fb

Two issues: social media and violence.

The ongoing issue is that of folks I used to know well and be friends with down south, a bunch of them have been on the (and I don't say this lightly) cancel culture (eg summoning mobs to spam/insult/threaten/doxx folks who show HP logos incidentally in a picture or video or who have someone as a fb follow or fb friend)/violence is ok if you're hitting the right person/etc sort of train. Most of those folks I manage by either removing them or keeping them hidden, but because we were all part of a social group this stuff comes up on my social media pretty often through people who I do keep in touch with. I find it super stressful. I'm not sure how to manage the situation; I don't really want to remove everyone I knew in person from that group so that I don't get bycatch but I also just don't want the bycatch.

I did a big push over the last year to get stuff I do like on social media: seed swap groups, jewelery and ceramic artists, garden groups. These have been great! But they also mean I don't want to leave social media because I get this good stuff there. It's certainly made it a better environment for me, but every once in awhile something pops through this space I've made for myself from the previous world.

In the last 24 hours something has come up about an ?Oscars? event. Someone joked about someone's wife, so they hit him. Basically the spillover is saying this was the right thing for the hitter to do because of where it lands on the race/gender/disability stuff.

I'm really fucked up about this. Writing is actually really helping, but I was in a tailspin for awhile. There's lots of *stuff*:

Folks are like "verbal violence that was done to the wife is real violence"

My dad was verbally abusive to mom and to us kids, or at least to me. I was verbally abusive to partners. I believe that verbal violence is real, because I lived it and it was real. I also have been told, and I believe, that what someone does isn't justification for hurting them. Provocation doesn't mean the thing is ok.

Folks are like "what the first guy did was so bad it couldn't be let stand"

This is the first time I've been paying attention from a place of masculinity when something like this has happened. When I'm read as a woman people are always saying "violence is never ok" and "no matter what the victim did, they didn't deserve this". Now I see that's what folks say to women. What folks say to men is, "if you're a bad man you deserve violence done to you, and good men step up to do that violence (even if haha maybe they shouldn't but of course a real, good man couldn't resist doing violence to another man in defense of a woman)

It's a scary shift. What does it take for me to be bad enough, if I'm a man, that it's ok to do violence to me? Am I supposed to look for bad men and hurt them? It's been important for me not to do violence to people. It's also been important to me not to normalize or legitimize violence to anyone.

The left I know has tended to tolerate harm to men in service of more pressing goals. This feels like turning over a rock and finding it unexpectedly crawling with bugs, though: it's not toleration, it's endorsement. It's a desire to visit fear and trauma on folks to keep them in line rather than addressing underlying issues. And folks are doing it with such vigour.

To make it super surreal, the joke involved... like, I've done the reading. I know there's a lot of nuance involved. The way I receive the joke is not how it was received in that context. But, the joke involved is one I had directed at me at minimum ten times a day when I shaved my head in high school, thousands of times a year, it lands on me as profoundly unoriginal background noise. Clearly that's not how it landed here, stuff about hair culture, power, and disability all contribute, but it's like suddenly being in a world of funhouse mirrors.

My therapist is booking a month out. I'm sure I'll settle it out for myself before then. But this isn't the world I want to build, it's not way I think it should be built, and I really want to be well away from it.

Tl;dr if you want to keep genetic diversity in domestic animals, and/or you want there to be domestic animals in our future, actively buy animal products from small diverse farmers. Also I'm burnt out and struggling some.

You can save seed from rare plants and skip growing it for a couple years. You can keep those seeds in a freezer for quite awhile and you don't lose the variety. Animals are different. To preserve domestic animals you need a big enough gene pool of live, young or breeding-age animals. Sure you could freeze semen and ova and hope someone revives them someday but that requires a lot more tech and it isn't being done to the breadth of genetics we need to preserve. Plus, animals have not only genes but culture. Three years ago my geese did not know how to dig for potatoes or shake their own apples off trees: they learned. My sows make better nests when they're around older sows who have made nests.

If you believe animals are a useful and necessary part of ecosystems and human food systems-- obviously I do, for many reasons I won't detail here, but you can definitely ask me about it-- this is a hard time. We're losing an awful lot of our diversity.

Feed has gone up from roughly $14/bag last year to $20/bag this year for me. That's a lot more money out of my pocket, my discretionary income, every day. Animals eat every day. I'm trying to figure out ways to keep this working but I'm not sure I've recovered from the 2018 evacuation or the covid abattoir disappearance where I couldn't legally sell meat to reimburse costs.

I don't really *like* selling meat to people I don't know, either: meat is the outcome of a pretty intense and special relationship between me and my animals. That relationship should also include the person who eats that meat: it should be done with reverence and something like love. So I waffle on what to do, I spend money to feed animals in order to keep the breed alive, I spread the genes and support other folks raising animals when I can. I spend money on feed instead of on housesitters for vacations and so I don't really take vacations, and I burn out, and I feel dark about the future of all of this.

When I put my hand to these plants and animals I can feel the chain of people who made domestication and husbandry choices generation by generation. Every person who breeds a plant or an animal makes choices that change it, just a little bit, honing it for the next person, fitting it better into the environment. One break in the chain and animals are lost, plants may be lost. I'm a link in that chain. In cold winters oils and fats are so important to survival, and they're hard to get from plants and take good soil (which will be mostly underwater soon, tbh) and a lot of physical labour. If someone needs a small, very hardy animal that can forage and sort itself pretty well over winter and provides huge number of calories at some time in the future they will have that animal, in part, because of my work with Ossabaws and various geese. Maybe they will be able to have a kinder community because of it. If someone needs to grow vegetables in a short season (short because it's north, or because part of the season is too hot or too dry to grow in) they will in part have those because of my stewardship and spread of those seeds. I have trouble thinking of charging for that too: the more people have these seeds the more likely they are to survive.

Whenever someone gets breeding stock from me and grows their own animals out, or gets seeds from me and shares their own saved seeds with friends, or learns a skill from me and shares those skills with friends: that makes it worth it. When people honour the connection of their food and their ecosystem and their body, that brings me so much joy.

When I'm burnt out I think, if folks today don't support diversity then they don't deserve to have it given to their future generations. It's not a good way to feel.

So I'm looking at what to do going forward, I don't know what that will be at this point. This is just a rambling post in keeping with my Dinosaur Farm videos, trying to be real about what this experience is for me without shining it up any and maybe looking for some words of encouragement. I'm putting myself into a bit of a farm business class to see if that helps me thread all these needles and come up with some sort of useful tapestry of action.

Meanwhile I'll likely be down to the coast with ducks and geese (and maybe pork?) and soap this fall; once I have abattoir dates I'll be taking deposits.

I know a lot of you are actively working to make the world a better place in your area of knowledge or expertise. This is mine. I wish us all so much success.