Love in the Era of Short Supply

October 21, 2021 12:29 pm Published by Jim Riley Leave your thoughts

Principles and Pie Shells

Life could be worse. At Sleepy Hollow last night, two pretty women told me they loved me.
“You were interviewed, weren’t you?” they asked.
“Quite a few times,” I responded.
“We saw it and we said, ‘we love Jim.'”
“What did I say?” I asked. “So I know what to say again.”
“We can’t remember. We just love you.”

Mary’s okay with that kind of thing; she didn’t marry George Clooney. (I’m loved for my principles and not my charm.) She’s not okay, nor am I, with the supply chain issues we are now enduring — courtesy of entire industries now living in abject fear of the Commie virus. I know one fellow, employed by a major manufacturer, who is required to attend a weekly Covid strategies seminar. How do we make better widgets (or any widgets) if we keep paying people to jabber about a virus? Some of us have been sounding the alarm for more than a year now. It shouldn’t be too difficult to understand: if you keep people from working, eventually the shelves go empty, and if you give an overpaid longshoreman an excuse to get paid and not unload the ships, guess what happens??? (You ever get the feeling all the grownups left the room?)

Farm Living and the Self-Sufficiency Thing

I suppose if it all broke down, I would want to weather the storm on a farm; we have our own wells, some livestock, acres of firewood, and maybe enough apples to brew brandy as currency, but we should all remember that even in the “primitive” agrarian past, there really never has been totally insular self-sufficiency, (of the sort where one family, on one piece of land, provides all of their own necessities). Our 18th century New England ancestors actually did trade with the world, and depended on world trade to sustain life. British woolen broadcloth, for example, was cheaper, and of better quality, than anything made in the colonies. In small farming communities, you usually bartered for the use of an oxen team, since it wasn’t efficient for everyone to maintain that much livestock. Everyone raised hay, but everyone pursued a marketable skill on the side as well — surveying, shoe-making, joinery.

At Riley’s Farm, we take pride in baking a fresh apple pie, and we sell a LOT of my nephew’s, Oak Glen hard cider, but even up here, we need things like pie tins (discontinued by our supplier), oven parts (two month waiting list), generator radiators (nine month waiting list), and paper supplies (no sixteen ounce cups). Every day, we get a new, unpleasant, surprise, a new jigsaw puzzle with 10% of the pieces missing.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear..

..is fear itself, sayeth one of my least favorite American presidents. But it’s true. This nightmare could all be over if we started treating Covid instead of preventing it, if we took a spear to the lion instead of cowering inside our homes and worrying what the lion might be up to out there..

A sluggard says, “There’s a lion in the road,
a fierce lion roaming the streets!”

I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that people who don’t fear God end up fearing life itself, and they want you every bit as fearful as they are.