Are You Starving...Yet?

When I grew up in the south-central United States during the 1950s, rural communities had agrarian infrastructure that served the economic interests of its farmer residents. Or, at least, one demographic segment of it. For this was a period of American Apartheid, to be followed by the current period of \textit{ethnocide}. Like most things in the United States, social engineering around gender, sex, ethnicity, and nationality is toxic. White nationalism in the United States is the consequence of a toxic ecosystem emanating from toxic psyches, a system designed to insure its citizens remain stupid, that they vote against their own interests, that they never demand a rightful share of the nation's assets, that they believe human complexion is somebody else's problem. All humans have basic needs. Three of those needs are nutrition, access to food, housing, and social security, each of which should be guaranteed by a responsible social contract forged from the enormous natural assets stolen from the slaughter of Indigenous peoples. But under a system based on the invention of skin complexion as a determinant of who is assigned to hard labor, whether they get proper nutrition and are free from bodily harm, or whether they have gainful employment those goals are not a societal consideration. Make no mistake, growing food is intensive, high-risk hard work, requiring intelligent people organized and committed to collaborative multi-cropping production systems. The growth of Farm Aid in the 1970's and early 1980's was evidence that for generations, officials within the Department of Agriculture and associated government offices were more supportive of cash cropping–monoculture–that can be grown with mechanized equipment, that feed animals and machines more than people and can be sold to volume buyers or to the government. This policy is just one of the legacies of a white nationalist economy based on the subordination of labor and wages. If a farmer is big enough, the government subsidizes labor by paying a farmer not to farm. White farmers not in power or big enough not to care were and are more interested in not having to work for their daily bread.(Charles Walters, Unforgiven: The American Economic System SOLD for Debt and War... Revised 2nd Ed. Austin, TX: Acres USA,1971. p. 198.) Growing food crops, therefore, was automatically assigned as work for poor workers or people of color, either as sharecroppers or itinerant migrant labor. The 1950s infrastructure in these communities existed to serve these two interests. By contrast, the production of marketable table foods demands smart, intensive management, and an infrastructure that supports family farms, such as exists within the European Community or Scandinavia. For several weeks during the summer months, I would ride the rural roads of Arkansas with a great-aunt who was an agriculture extension agent. Her family was a gifted group of farmers, so her work was a natural progression from her family's agrarian roots. Over the course of periodic summer vacations with her, we would visit African American sharecroppers and their families, often to find them in fields planting, cultivating, harvesting or managing their land. Sadly, many were no more than slave labor for poor white farmers who did not want to work and found stealing from poor black people eased their own transition into poverty. The main highway on which these small towns were established was always recognizable. Within a mile or two of the ``Main Street'' would see a cotton gin or its equivalent for sugar cane, a grain mill, an ice house for cold storage, perhaps a lumber yard or poultry operation, with one or more of these facilities on each side of the town center. Alongside the highway would often be railroad tracks, usually having direct access to the gin, mills, grain silos, and other facilities. Upon approaching the town center, a Trailways or Greyhound bus depot, maybe a railway depot, and a post office were situated on or in close proximity to the main road---the highway into and out of town where small white-owned businesses would be located, but the same road nonetheless. Black businesses were in another section of town situated away from the town's center and invisible to the main highway. You know, like segregated, apart from, out of sight, but always in mind, just like the country we live in today. All this began to change when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that Apartheid was unconstitutional, causing many small southern towns to close down their agrarian infrastructure so as not to be forced to service the needs of African Americans, an excellent historical case study in how to cut off your nose to spite your face. Only unique and progressive communities did otherwise. I did not know any truly integrated and progressive southern townships, but where this infrastructure existed in African American townships all customers received assistance, such as in Tuskegee, Alabama, home of Tuskegee College, now University, and a prime source of agriculture extension services for farmers. Tuskegee was also the home of one of the top scientists in U.S. agricultural history and a friend of several secretaries of agriculture, George Washington Carver. Tuskegee's Department of Agriculture and its Cooperative Extension Program are still going strong. I'm telling this story by way of introduction to make this point---when a society values its food producers, it plans and implements infrastructure to service the needs of that constituency, as occurs in most countries in the European Union and Scandinavian countries, for example. In the United States, that type of infrastructure rarely exists today, and for that reason among others, farming is a hazardous occupation by capitalist design.(Walters, Ibid.) Officials in the federal government have fully abrogated their responsibilities to small family farmers and Americans depending on a stable food supply by becoming a partner-in-crime with BigAg. Some readers may think this is old news, ancient history, but the substance of this narrative continues to play out daily in global media. Just recently, Ms. Barbra Streisand, 26 September 2022. posted a tweet on Twitter about immigrants and the attitudes Americans have about intensive labor:

The truth hurts and infuriates. Need I add that feedback to Ms. Streisand was fast and furious. One reply contained another truth for the infuriated to ponder: Slave-built infrastructure still creates wealth in U.S. In short, the U.S. federal government has rarely been a neutral arbiter when it comes to food production or anything else that most Americans need and want. Since Republicans have been in power, even children and their teachers are not considered valued citizens who deserve protection from psychotics and their guns, both within and outside the schools. So, where does that leave the rest of us? All residents in the USA are now treated like prey. Approximately seventy-five percent of the population don't know it...yet.