The best and most powerful movements almost always seem to come from the young whose idealism, energy and restlessness are thankfully still intact. When I need spiritual inspiration, I tend to look there for renewal and ideas. With some notable exceptions older people have been trained to worry about their IRA’s, sexual stimulants (if they are lucky) and weekly visits to the doctor. Spirituality used to mean seeking ways of connection, but in our time, it often means looking for just the opposite – ways of disconnection.
Many of the people I most admire and connect with talk more and more about living “off the grid,” a powerful metaphor in so many ways, it is an idea bristling with energy and passion, especially in the grip of the Corporate Nation, where money-grubbing, anger and soul-sucking are embraced as political and cultural ideals. See what they have done to us.
Technically, living off the means not being connected to a grid, literally not being connected to the main or national transmission of electricity. Socially it is coming to mean much more than that, it means living anonymously, apart from our growing system of technological, corporate, bureaucratic, governmental dependency, complexity, cost, paperwork, regulation and invasion of privacy and life. When most people talk about living off the grid, they are not just talking about electricity, but a very different way to live.
Some see this as choosing a better, simpler and more meaningful way to live. Others say living off the grid as an urgent response to the coming Armageddon, when our resources run out and we begin eating each other. As for me, when the Apocalypse comes, you will not find me holed up in my cold storage room with a rifle defending my rutabagas. I will head for the nearest river and plunge right in.
For me, it is strange to embrace a movement that celebrates flight from conventional life. I have been working to go the other way. Living off the grid is to me, both a beacon and a retreat. There are movements that pull us towards one another and movements that pull us apart, and living off of the the grid suggests a kind of surrender to me, an understandable withdrawal from our growing disenchantment with the deprivations of corporatism, our true and growing national religion. Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims combined are small fry next to these people. No wonder idealistic people are seeking to unplug themselves.
Corporations have taken over media, culture, government and industry and sometimes I wonder where the old Bolsheviks are when we really need them. All week the country has been seriously debating whether an 82-year-old iconic actor talking to a chair and mumbling for seven minutes is offering us something meaningful about our national leadership or whether he dithered adequately enough to harm his foe. That this is beyond insane – it makes Orwellian seem a pale notion – has not really been discussed. See what they have done to us, cont. Life off the grid makes more and more sense to me.
From my perspective, living off the grid is exciting but like so many bubbling social movements, a long shot, even if it were a good shot. I have been watching the Corporate Nation grow for awhile, and it is not about to sit by idly while people lose their jobs, are raped by greedy marketers, make their own food, electricity, avoid regulation and shed the need to buy more and more things each year so the “economy” can grow. If government once existed to promote freedom, I wonder if it’s purpose now is to stifle creativity and independence and keep the world safe for investors. The Tea Party activists and Bolsheviks may have more in common than either thinks.
I guess in some ways I have gone off the grid in my own odd way, and the idea speaks to me, stirs my imagination. I am careful never to dismiss the ideas of the young. They have a habit of finding the best ideas. Last week, while Clint Eastwood was mumbling to his now famous empty chair – the best metaphor I could have imagined for the shallow ideals and cultural bankruptcy of our political system – I was scraping wallpaper off the living room wall of our new house, oohing-and-aahing over the hidden treasures I was finding in the old layers.
It’s only a matter of time before we plant a vegetable garden at the New Bedlam Farm, fire up our beautiful wood stove, and start eating our chickens.
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(P.S. My friend George Forss the photographer has agreed to join the Bedlam Farm Men’s Club, now consisting of me, him, Simon, Red, Strut the rooster and Rocky the blind pony. We are a mighty army.