Learning about Chickens and Revolution
Bear with me as I expound on what I believe I am (with teammates) experiencing. So I steward a small 80 acre ranch north of DFW (Texas, USA) close to the Red River (a major US migratory range) that is mostly wildlife refuge but I also raise cow-calf, fish, ducks, chickens and vegetable garden. I need to add fruit trees.
I have learned some about chickens. They are smarter than I ever imagined with personalities (I’ll use that word, I guess a biologist when say something like genetic and learned behavioral differences). Chickens are (truly) relatively easy and cheap, especially in geography close to the equator (like southern USA) where seasons let them graze on seeds / bugs about 9 months of the year and subsistence gardening provides them with scraps they love. — ie … most humans had a few chickens through the end of the 19th century. In winter they will live on cracked corn. A “brood” hen will sit on eggs to hatch (not all do, and some who will not do the 3 week sitting — but will, after birth chicks, help raise the chicks)… so a brood hen probably would not be the pick for Sunday dinner because she replenishes the count. A brood hen goes into a suspended world when sitting, eating and drinking little and just sets on eggs, usually some of her own and some from other hens. Too many roosters and there is fighting and territorial and relationship disputes. Pecking order. Roosters are protective and keep an eye out for predators more than the hens. Chickens are virtually defenseless and in exchange for giving us protein rich eggs and meat we (humans) built pens and roosts, fed, and warded off predators. BTW, France is not a farm rich country which is I believe one reason they use eggs and chicken in so many of their dishes.
Why do I wax on about chickens? After the full bloom of the next consciousness revolution I don’t think “free range” therefore more expensive eggs or chicken meat will be an option at the market — it will be the only thing available. Today some chickens live from birth till death on concrete in a caged space where they can’t even turn around and they get way too much hormones and antibodies administered. That’s inhumane to chickens and not good for us. We don’t need eggs or chicken meat to be less expensive so we can have more at less price — we’re not that desperate. Chicken meat and eggs are probably not the optimal choice for feeding the literally minimum, food at risk, poor. As you know, there are already places like Whole Foods, farmers markets, and brands in Tom Thumb or Walmart that sell based on “free range”, “treated well”, no hormones or unnecessary antibodies.
BTW, I don’t think we are going to make the next leap of the actual (technological) as well as psychological sense of hyper-connectedness and “in the same boat” because of “push” activism as we are used to in the current age. It will bloom forth the same way the Industrial Age concluded and the technological age raced to fruition — it will be what CG Jung called the collective consciousness, what Rupert Sheldrake hypothesis calls “morphic resonance”. It will be as Bob Dylan sang, “the answer my friend, is blowing in the wind”. In the mid 19th century Standard Oil burned off gasoline for decades or threw it into rivers as a dangerous worse than worthless byproduct — Rockefeller was after kerosene to replace whale oil. Isn’t it interesting Nicholas Otto (with help from his factory manager former gunsmith Gottlieb Daimler) worked two decades and figured out how to use gasoline?
Once the industrial revolution was full bloom (railroads, tractors, manufactured goods, engines, automobile, airplanes) notice how quick technological took over. Light bulb, vacuum tube, telephone, radio, motion pictures, semiconductor, TV, computing, Internet, iPhone. Countless pundits have pontificated about the non-linear increase in speed of cycles.
It’s true, revolutions are at a faster pace, cycles faster in the revolution. It took us 500 years to obsolete the printing press. The early 2000s was the last generation where most students carried actual books, we can literally tell most brains in the western world born after 2000 just from an MRI — the digital 1st brain is different.
So what happens now? Revolutions were happening more often with faster cycles but now we have “arrived”? As I see it the idea of “arrived” is ludicrous. We are going to have a 2nd consciousness revolution. It’s inescapable. To get out of this solar system will require some kind of warping to deal with the sluggish speed of light. This is a decades if not centuries task. Do you think the fear of loss of white supremacy into a multi-culture / multi-race society that is exhibited by some Americans is overblown? Wait till you see the growing reaction to realization of hyper connected, “all just stuck together” in this fragile tiny hot crowded boat called our solar system. The challenge/fear becomes …. “this is it” — figure out hyper connected sustainability not just at environmental level but at social, emotional, economic, political, academic, psychology and physical level — and it’s embrace this unknown new world or we all go extinct by ravages of violence, disease, exploitation and willful self destruction born of nihilism.
BTW, embracing global multi-ethnic/culture and finding an optimization of it is THE KEY to relevancy / survival in the next revolution. The USA is in the same position as JCPenny was in 1995. They already had catalogue, mail/toll free distribution centers, direct to home shipping. They were Amazon — before Amazon — and just needed to convert to digital. Doing primitive forms of the next revolution does not guarantee leadership. I am convinced of this change. I have built a ground based solar system, learned subsistence systems, created an environmental wildlife refuge to learn from our siblings and teammates — the sun our star, sister moon, plants, microbes, soil, animals (domestic and non-domestic), insects, water, air. Why do raccoons, squirrels, dove, deer, coyote, turkeys, mice, rats, rabbits thrive with my encroachment but bobcats, fox, quail seemingly less so? I do meditation and breathing and work on mind training. I still eat eggs, still use meat (sparingly, almost as a condiment, I think I’d be wise to be more vegan-ish). I experiment with AR, AI and do things like use Tick Tok then watch the processor on my device and data going in/out my wifi router to see if it is truly siphoning off my life, passwords or searches. It’s not easy to tell — nearly all companies gather location and web history information. Forget putting just RFID tags on my cow calf operation — I want a chip placed under their neck skin and when I put on a redneck baseball cap with sensors in the band it tells me where they are, how they are feeling, how pregnant they are, any distress and any mineral or vitamin deficiency. I hang the cap in the barn and when I feed in the evenings I pull it on for herd interaction. I do know my cows. If we are going to slaughter and eat beef their expectation is a relationship similar to the American Indian and the buffalo. They say, “Let me live as a Angus cow, grazing, free, well cared for. Treat my life with respect and be humane with the human doing the human part of stewardship. If I, Angus cow, am slaughtered then do so humanely only to extent needed and waste nothing”. Cows are hard on the environment we don’t need many.
It’s ramblings, much weaker than Michel de Montaigne. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne — but what wanderer can hope to influence a Francis Bacon? Montaigne (1533–1592) did. But, it doesn’t matter how poor my articulation, the next revolution is coming.
September 5, year 2020, Sunday
https://youtu.be/mE0YUsQr5Xk
Order — design -tension — balance — harmony. … Stephen Sondheim
Who else? Chickens love the beetles.
