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Fringe People:
Recently I wrote about the meaning of the word natural and how
Madison Avenue has hijacked the concept. That caused me to start
thinking about the people who first used that word. These are
the folks who are somewhat outside the mainstream of our culture.
I'm not talking about the extremists who disrupt commerce and
act illegally to make some kind of political point. Those people,
I consider to be terrorists and I will address that issue in another
essay.
The folks I'm talking about here are the nonviolent back-to-nature folks. You know some of them, I'm sure. They constitute an interesting subculture in America. I was, for a few years, closely associated with some of the members of that subculture. Although I cannot agree with their life philosophy, I found them to be relatively harmless, except to themselves.
I found that a great deal of what they did was unhealthy in the extreme. Their behavior was quite often based on ridiculous misinformation and bizarre theories of reality. Much of it had to do with this elusive concept of natural and unnatural. Other concepts which some of them favored had to do with health, diet, and conservation. The one thing which struck me about all of these people was the extreme degree of dishonesty in their philosophical rationalizations. Examples are in order here.
I knew one very gentle person who though that he would like to grow his own garden. One day, I was visiting him for another reason. However, he knew that I was a gardener. He showed me some very pitiful looking tomato seedlings and asked me what was wrong with them.
The answer to his question was quite obvious from the color of his plants. Instead of a dark, purplish healthy green, they were a pale yellowish green. I told him that his plants were most likely suffering from a nitrogen deficiency. He looked at me askance and said, "I think I'll just put them out in the sun."
I was thinking to myself, ‘Well, you fool, you don't deserve my help.' I knew that he had a ready source of nitrogen in a farm field directly behind his residence. I knew he was one of the fringe folk, and I had been about to explain to him that he could use cow-pow to feed his plants. I did not bother. I did not explain to him that a nice cow-pie in a bucket, covered with water will produce very fertile water, quite high in nitrogen.
This was an educated guy who had abandon his reasoning ability and migrated to the fringe of our culture. He had even abandon a very good position as an actuary for a major insurance company. He did this to satisfy his rather bizarre back-to-nature notions. His reaction to the word nitrogen was a typical response. He heard the word nitrogen and to him is said, nitrogen, aka chemical, aka man made, aka unnatural, aka bad.
This guy felt very strongly that our culture was going in an unhealthy direction. He believed that industry, was behind this misdirection. To him, manufactured and man made were profanities. I have learned early on that behavior which comes out of feelings will be unassailable through logic. It would do no good to explain to this guy that nitrogen is a basic element of nature; that it appears on the periodic table as N; that it cannot possibly be unnatural; that nitrogen is not and cannot be a man made substance. To be sure, it can be extracted from nature. That is only because it is there.
Another fellow I met in this subculture was even weirder. He was most dangerous to himself. He fancied himself, among other things, a conservationist. He wanted to save the trees. This caused him to do one very unhealthy thing. In place of facial tissue, he carried in his pocket a rag. It was, in fact, a snot rag.
This rag may have been white at one time, but, when I saw it, it was yellow. It was also loaded with snot and outright boogers. It had to be a perfect breeding ground for almost any disease. That rag was the main reason I stopped counseling with him. He would go into a crying discharge and invariably pull out that rag to blow his nose. I simply could not handle it. I was all I could do to hold down my breakfast.
This guy also used vitamin E for all things medical. At one time he had a festering wound on his shin. I know not how he acquired it. Mrs. Gaffer was present one day and he knew she was a nurse. He showed her this ghastly red pus-loaded gash and asked her what she thought. She told him to go see his doctor immediately.
She got the same reaction I got from the tomato guy. He looked at her askance and said, "I thing I'll just spread some vitamin E on it." Except for me, Mrs. Gaffer does not suffer fools gladly. Her face went rigid, she abruptly turned her back, and she never listened to, answered, or spoke to that fellow again.
Many of the people of this subculture fancy themselves conservationists. The all have this dumb notion about saving the trees. They talk a great deal about it, but they rarely do anything. Most of them support the green-freak terrorists in their bizarre behavior. Fortunately, most of them lack the courage of their convictions. Most of them rarely go to the extreme of destroying capital equipment and threatening the health and lives of innocent logging workers.
The reaction of these fools is always interesting when I ask them how many trees they have planted. The hemming and hawing is answer enough. Most of them have not even planted or cared for a single tree. They want someone else to do that part. The rationalizations are usually about cost. Of course it's bull-crap, but it's bull-crap based in emotional illogic. As such, it is unassailable.
When Mrs' Gaffer and I acquired our property, one of the first things we did was to plant 5000 coniferous trees. We did that before we put in inside plumbing. That's how important it was to us. Financially we were struggling, but we found the money for that. We got the trees from the State of Michigan's conservation department at cost. We paid about $300.00 for 5000 seedling trees.
It would do no good to tell these fringe people that or to tell them that Weyerhaeuser is a better conservationist than they are. Weyerhaeuser plants millions of trees every year. They plant more trees in a week than all of the green freaks together have planted since the beginning of time. Yet, the green freaks camp out in the top of one tree and pretend they are doing something good and noble.
For the lumber companies, it has nothing to do with nobleness. They have to restore the forests because it's their business. We think of them as lumber and paper companies, but they are really tree farmers. Trees are their renewable resource. This knowledge was not always apparent to them. However, they have learned over time that trees are no different that oats and wheat.
When it comes to diet and nutrition, the fringe people excel in creating weird and unhealthy notions. These are the original granola folk. Granola is another concept which got highjacked. This one by the cereal industry. Most of the diet fringe folk pretend to abhor meat, especially red meat. Yet, they go to great extremes to make their dishes taste like they contain meat. Cumin is one of the favorite flavoring ingredients for this purpose. Try it sometime. It really does work.
Now, I know that a meat free diet can be perfectly adequate. If it were not so, most of the peasants of third world countries would have long since died. And for sure, most of us probably do eat much more protein than is necessary. My problem with these fringe folk is their rationalizations for what they do.
With no supporting evidence at all, they will insist that meat is unhealthy in any amount, that it causes cancer and many other diseases. They will also claim that eating meat causes people to be aggressive and is the main cause of war. I have even heard the theory put forth that eating meat causes impotence. The whole thing is wrapped in unreal unsupportable notions of health and nutrition.
I confess that I genuinely liked many of these fringe folk when I knew them. I could not, however, admire or respect any of them. Here are my reasons. Most of them are financially desperate. Most of them are ne'er-do-wells who have never held a steady job. Most of them have not trained themselves to do anything useful. Most of them freeload off of the culture shamelessly.
The worst part is that most of them came from solid middle
classed backgrounds. This shows that their situation is nothing
more that a matter of personal choice. They could have as easily
elected to become useful contributing members of the culture.
They simply chose to be freeloaders. I have known people from
really poor backgrounds who would cry hot salty tears for the
kind of opportunities that these fringe folk have discarded. That
is why I cannot respect them.
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