Culture is EVERYTHING

The Farm – and Why Culture Matters

These days, the bad news doesn’t just breeze by me like some, infrequent, gritty wind.  It feels more like the cannon fire of some demonic army gathering strength in the distance.  Each blast seems to promise a thundering collapse.

Consider just the last few days..

• Hundreds of women rallied, in sympathy, for a woman who strangled her three small children to death.
• A highly paid Sacramento legislative staffer, Terry Schanz, taking a fevered and hysterical dislike to citizen journalist Nick Shirley, confronted the young man with a sign questioning the size of Nick’s penis.
• Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, surrounded by female legislators and doctors, celebrated the signing of a bill that would literally allow children to be aborted moments before their birth.
• A series of memes put us in memory of Oregon’s decision not to require proficiency from high school graduates in reading and mathematics, so as to assist “Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color.”
• Instead of encouraging citizen journalists to help the state uncover fraud, the California legislature passed a bill that effectively shields anyone who calls such investigation “intimidating.”

There is, of course, good news.  The Democrats appear to be eating themselves alive by allowing unabashed Communists like Hasan Piker and Zohran Mamdani to take center stage.   When Wisconsin voters found out what a DEI lunatic they had in Francesca Hong, her primary lead evaporated.  Thanks to Elon Musk, for now at least, Americans can freely discuss difficult issues on public platforms.

But I beg everyone to remember:  political battles are only as sustainable as the cultural ground upon which they are waged.  If Oregon citizens, thanks to their low education standards, can’t even READ political stories, much less think critically about them, what sort of bloated mama-state can we expect?  If outright fraud is encouraged by government officials, through some warped sense of “spreading the wealth,” who, in their right mind, will build a better mouse trap?  What innovation can we expect from talented entrepreneurs who are afraid to make money, only to have it stolen? If we are raising an entire generation of women who see preborn babies (and even children!) as parasites who can be exterminated if mood dictates,  well, do I even need to ask the question?  How dark a world do you want?  A world where “mom” kills off any little brothers or sisters she doesn’t feel like feeding?

Culture, folks, is everything.  “Culture” is why Somalia is an impoverished hellhole.  “Culture” is why America invented everything from the cotton gin to the rooftop satellite dish.  You can have a thieving, murderous, inbred population with low national IQ, or you can enjoy the cultural capital our New England ancestors built for us, a culture that once unavoidably promoted literacy, education, and a high ethical standard.  If you live in a culture that values trickery, swindling, and no prohibitions against marrying your first cousin, you are going to live among low-achieving thieves.

Culture is why, in some neighborhoods,  you can leave your home unlocked and your windows open, and, why, in other neighborhoods, everything you own has to be locked down tight and under the 24/7 watch of security cameras.  Culture is why black teenage boys have fewer father role models; culture is why western women can wear a sun dress on a hot day and other women have to bag themselves in black, head to toe.

Culture touches everything – the cost of car insurance, the shoplifting charge built into your grocery bill,  the interest you pay on your credit card, the taxes taken out of you payroll check.  We ALL pay for people who have no conscience, no sense of the sacred, no reverence for the golden rule. We all pay for people, in other words, who have a poisoned, low-achieving, low-responsibility “culture.”

Over the thirty years I’ve lived and worked in Oak Glen, I’ve seen the old American cultural bank account deplete very quickly.  I’ve seen families, in brand new expensive vehicles, steal apples – mom, dad, and the children all together, learning theft and making it a family tradition.  My wife watched a family actually break an apple branch off a tree, on the pretext of claiming, “their grandmother had never seen an apple tree.”  I’ve witnessed the online vulgarity of guests with different political opinions get more and more dark.  I’ve witnessed soccer moms, who show off their babies online, use vulgarity that would make a streetwalker blush.  I’ve seen basic infrastructure (roads, electricity,  traffic management) decline in a way that makes me wonder, “where did all the grown-ups go?”  There’s a reason the underground, one hundred year old water mains broke in Hollywood recently: no one is tending the store.  No one values their civilization enough to maintain it.  This, again, is a sign of shallow, selfish, unthinking culture.

Likely the most chilling thing I’ve witnessed?  Years ago, as a family, when we engaged in pro-life activism, the post-abortive women would argue, “well, it wasn’t really a child.”    Now they actually brag about killing their children.  They use those terms.  Our “culture” is getting more callous, and cruel, and, frankly, PAGAN.   You can’t study history without seeing this.  Ancient, stone age cultures would sacrifice children – break their necks, bury them alive, burn them on altars.  It’s all over the Bible.  Fifty years before Columbus, in an act so barbaric it seemed to beg for European saviors, Incan priests sacrificed more than 200 children to appease the gods of the flood.

A lot of contemporary agnostics won’t get this, or they will write it off by virtue of the Christian hypocrites they have known in their lives, but there’s a counterintuitive rule pastors sometimes give young married couples: “You both need to love God more than you love each other, and if you do, you will end up loving each other more.”  The idea is that if a totally just, totally loving God is your best friend, you will be a better, and more honorable friend to everyone you know.  You won’t kill your unborn child.  You won’t steal from the local apple farmer.  You won’t cheat on your insurance company.  You won’t become a dead weight on the population because that wouldn’t be “loving your neighbor as yourself.”

So how do we restore good culture?  How do we restore the soul of the nation?

As a Christian, I will tell you the only certain way is for the nation to individually, and collectively, come to belief in Jesus Christ, the Savior of mankind.  A truly biblical revival, of the sort that inspired the Bay Colony, is THE ONLY sure fire way of creating peace, order, wealth, and civilization.  I’m not talking about a quiet, personal, pietistic reverie. I’m not talking about obsessing over “the rapture.”  I’m not talking about “Christians” so grateful for their forgiveness they go right on being flakes, full time. No. I am talking about nation-building Christianity, the sort of Christianity that “establishes justice in the gate.” (Amos 5:15). 

Beyond that, even for the rigorously secular types, good culture is built with good stories.  If you go to a Hollywood film and the most glamorous, witty, good looking character is a sexually deviant, dishonest scoundrel, you are getting a big heaping dose of bad culture.  If, on the other hand, you witness Wonderful Life’s George Bailey, a very HUMAN George Bailey, do the right thing, suffer setbacks, suffer outright despair, and then you see him experience “epiphany,” a glorious insight into the beauty of the life God has given us, then you are consuming good culture. If you tell a child nothing but stories of ancient, historical evils, oppression, and mass villainy (usually attributed to, er, one race), then you are giving him bad culture.  If you tell ALL children that history really does produce wise men, innovators, conquering heroes, then you are building the culture.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my grandchildren to live around a lot of illiterate, math-challenged, pagan Oregonians.  I don’t want the streets full of callous, hard-hearted women who glory in killing their own children.  I don’t want my granddaughters having to choose among effeminate, porn-drenched beta males who don’t want children and have no greater ambition than to beg the state for resources.  I don’t want dreary, artless ghetto music.  I want Bach and Bluegrass and Glen Miller and Dean Martin and Johnny Cash and Left Banke. I want sun dresses, not Burkas. I want one nation under God, and not one nation under “follow your own wicked heart.”

So..

How does the farm, and other institutions like it, speak to good culture?

I maintain that the SIMPLE TELLING OF HISTORY builds good culture.  Learning how difficult it was to plow a field builds culture.  Learning how much work and how much danger went into winning the west builds good culture.  Picking herbs and drying them in the summer kitchen builds good culture.  Learning how to ask a young lady to dance builds good culture.  Learning how to tell a story around the campfire, learning how to sing in four part harmony, learning how to have a laugh without sharing a YouTube video on your smart phone builds good culture.  Spending a night as a family in a primitive, square cut log cabin, knowing there are bears outside builds good culture – and memories.

There should be THOUSANDS of places like Riley’s Farm.  Most of you live in a cultural war zone and you and your children are being fed cultural garbage day in and day out, because the devil wants you broken. He wants your marriages broken, your families broken, your hearts broken. In response to that, I maintain, you need a place to re-charge, to gather strength from other soldiers who want to fight.  You need something like the Emerald City I keep trying to envision.

You need good culture. I need it. We all need it.

As I write this, I am literally rattled, (shaking) with tension.  We lost TWO $10,000 dollar water pumps in the last month.  An expensive generator, running another well, went out, and our farm ag manager told us we have two or three days to save the pumpkin crop.. I had to scramble to find replacements, with money I didn’t have. I got a regulation call from the county.  An expensive workers comp premium is due tomorrow.  It never ends,  and some of my children encourage me to consider selling the farm, just because it has eaten away at my health.

But I keep wondering: does the world need a place like this?   Am I on a fool’s errand?  Could enough of us band together to get this done?

If we can’t do it, I sure hope someone else does.

Categorised in: Culture, Farm Journal

This post was written by Jim Riley