Matthew Wood

Last post I gave my ‘rational’ analysis of our last election.  Basically, a large segment of the Amerian public doesn’t accept the reality of the ‘limits to growth” vision of resource exhaustion and they are blaming Democrats or whoever for the economic decline that has occurred over the last forty years, since these limits were first discovered.  The Democrats didn’t help themselves by literally forcing their voters into a corrupt, bloated, and expensive health care system, so called.

But, this is the Exoteric explanation.  I withheld the Esoteric.

On January 1, 1989 I awoke in the morning after a sober and mildly enjoyable New Year’s Eve night.  I lay there peacefully.  Suddenly I felt happy.  Then I felt happier and even happier than that.  Being a melancholic and cynical by nature I thought, “where is this coming from?  I’m not this happy.”  At that second a consciousness entered my mind.  It was about two stories high.  It said, “This is a happy year, because during this year, the people who are spiritual will be taken out from under the power of the people who are not.  The change will occur three quarters of the way through the year.”

That day I went out and asked every person I met whether they felt happy on New Year’s morning and every single one said yes.  This went on for a week.  Even a year later I mentioned it to my employer and she said, “Yeah, I remember that!”

I was raised on an isolated Indian reservation in the middle of nowhere, fifty miles by dirt road from the nearest town, so it was always natural for me to be able to feel the feelings of people around me and of society in general because that’s the way it is in Indian country.  The white man’s model of reality is a delusion, let me tell you.

After we left I felt like an exile—or maybe I was autistic or something.  I felt the soul in the world, in nature, in other people, but there was no acknowledgement of this in society.  I just watched.  Like an exile or a heretic.  And every day, every hour, every minute, every second, a voice would say, “if they only knew how you thought, they’d burn you at the stake.”  I called that the voice of the ‘thought police.”  In 1989 I felt the thought police died and diasappeared.  The dominant society, based on a nonspiritual view of reality, had been expelled from control over the mind of spiritual people.  Another sensitive I know noticed this change as well.

So, the thought police died and the people who were not spiritual lost their power on the inner plane.  And they knew it.  They got mad.  All of a sudden Newt Gingrich was barking about this and that, the contract with America, and what not.  Oh, I thought to myself, the nonspiritual people feel that they have lost control over society.  Too late.

I felt like Bill Clinton was the little Dutch boy holding his finger in the dyke.  He was a cunning politician and he knew enough to know that a liberal agenda wouldn’t fly.  All he could do was keep the middle class and the country relatively healthy.  Then Bush Jr. came, and now, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.  Anger is abroad in the land.  There will be more and more, in my opinion.  It is unstoppable, because it comes from the bitterness of the losers.  Those who lost control and want it back, even though they are unconsious of everything I am talking about.

Well, that’s the Return of the View from Sunnyfield.  For now.  Thank-you,

Matthew Wood

A lot of people have analyzed the 2020 election, in which the Tea Party and the Republican Party took over the House of Representatives.  I wasn’t satisfied with any of the current analyses, so I offer my own.

Let’s see.  Mine would stretch back to the first President I can remember.  John F. Kennedy.  He was a real liberal; he was killed.  The next liberal was Jimmy Carter.  He was a weakling when it came to Iran.  He didn’t stand up to terrorism and it rightly cost him the Presidency.  For the next twenty five years people would be saying ‘the Democrats can’t defend us.’  His weakness hurt his party for years to come.

But Carter was right about one thing, and it was an observation that is only now coming to fruition.  Carter faced the fact that environmental resources were running out and he spoke up about ‘limits to growth.’  He was shouted down.  The people that shouted him down sounded a lot like the people shouting down realistic solutions for the declining economy and environment of today.  These people couldn’t accept reality then and they can’t accept it now.  They want to blame these declines on the Democrats, when in reality we are now well into the ‘limits to growth’ period.  Stop being and voting like fools: the problem is not manufactured by Democrats, it is build into the fabric of the modern world.  Resources are getting more and more expensive, the population is larger, and the buying power of the average American has gone down greatly.

There was a reaction against Carter.  I think we would still have prisoners in Iran if Reagan had not been elected, but that doesn’t mean I found him a realistic or illuminating font of political wisdom.  He was part of the ‘limits to growth’ denial train.

Under Reagan the erosion of the middle class and the destruction of the American farmer really began, even if he did not believe in ‘limits to growth.’  Back in those days the average blue collar worker had a house, a cabin on the lake, a big boat, a snowmobile, and money in his pocket.  Decade by decade the cabin would go, the boat would go, the RV would go, the snowmobile would go, and finally, the money in the pocket and the house went.  The farmers voted for Reagan overwhelmingly.  He ‘rewarded’ them with big loans.  Within seven years almost all those farmers that took those loans went bankrupt.  They were designed to put small farmers out of business because, increasingly, small farms were dinosaurs.

I had an apprentice the last year or so before I sold Sunnyfield.  She and her husband were dairy farmers from Maine.  ”There were oveh thirty dairy fahrms in our town,” she said in her Down East accent.  ”All of ‘em took loans except for us.  Five years later we were the only one left.”

I never read one editorial on the destruction of the small farm by the Reagan administration.  They didn’t have the guts to destroy the middle class yet, however, so it survived.

It was the Reagan people who first introduced the doctrine of the ‘trickle down economy.’  The idea was that if we took taxation and regulation burdens off the rich the money would trickle down to the middle class and the poor.

What kind of fools would believe in something like that?  Well, obviously the same ones that watched the farm economy collapse as a ‘reward’ for voting for Reagan.  Since when do rich people give away their money?  Get a life!  This is a prescription for a feudal economy.  The rich have it all.

The truth is that a healthy economy is based on a ‘trickle up and down’ model.  If there is a healthy middle class they support the rich and the poor.  If there is no middle class, the poor starve and the even the rich have much less.  This is borne out by subsequent presidencies.  Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. all lowered taxes and regulations and the economy stagnated or shrank.  Clinton raised taxes and the economy flourished—helped by the expansion of a new industry, cybertechnology.

The money made then was stolen from the middle class.  Deregulated banking (partly Clinton’s fault too) destroyed America’s nest eggs, producing a massive cracking sound across the world.  It took longer for decreased taxation of the wealthy to have its effect; a trillion dollar plus national debt.

And now, we hear ignoramuses blame Obama and the Democrats for the economy and advocate less taxes and more deregulation.  Careful, you might get what you want, like the farmers did under Reagan.  Voters, if you vote in benefits for the rich they will despise you.  And the rest of us will suffer with you.

Nothing is totally black and white.  I hate the health care plan forced upon us by Obama and the Democrats.  They didn’t take care of the structural problems in the health system, an extreme form of monopoly, and now they want to force us to pay for it and they want to make the monopoly bigger.

As an herbalist who knows that alternative medicine works, I know there is no need for a costly system which indulges massive, needless scientific research and spending to come up with solutions that are expensive and flawed.

I wrote my Democratic senators, Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, about this issue.  I said, “why don’t you take a lesson from us not-so-well-off self-employed people.  We either have insurance for accidents only or catastrophe or hospitalization only.  Start by offering universal insurance on a scale like this, rather than forcing people to buy into a bloated, expensive, undisciplined system.”  Franken responded with a form letter; Klobuchar didn’t respond.

I certainly hope Republicans gut this so-called health care debacle.  I am not going to be hiring anybody if I have to pay towards their health insurance if I employ them for more than $600.  And I do know that Ron Paul actively supported alternative medicine; maybe Rand Paul will too.

Drug companies get billions and billions of dollars for research, decade after decade.  Herbs only get enough to prove they don’t work; tests administrated, of course, by critics.  Government should stay out of health care.  Government has corrupted the whole system to the core.

Meanwhile, growth is more and more limited.  No matter who is in power and who is out, the economy and the environment are degrading more and more rapidly.  I may abuse science, but I don’t abuse global warming science.  I live in Minnesota.  In the far North the change in the climate is obvious.  When I was a child there were no opossums in Minnesota.  I just saw one last night.  The growing season was about a month longer than normal.  The oak leaves were as big as mouse’s ears in early May; they used to reach that threshold in late May.  And all herbalists watch plants and know. . . not only are they blooming out of order, they are acting ‘confused.’

In order to be an herbalist it is sometimes necessary to value the old and the ancient.  That’s one excuse for why I am so behind the times with modern cybertechnology.  Including this blog.  Slowly but surely, I am catching up.

After the fire in the guesthouse at Sunnyfield Herb Farm I ruminated for a long time.  That little farm was my residential true love.  I don’t believe I will ever be as happy living any other place.  However, the destruction of the guest house gave me options and I decided to sell it.  Maybe that was a mistake.  Maybe not.  I loved that place so much, but I also didn’t feel like it was the best place for me in the great scheme of things.  As a nationally known teacher of herbal medicine, was it best to be in Minnesota?  Did I want to stay in a climate I pretty much hated for the rest of my life?  Minnesota winters are not for me.  Then there are the mosquitoes.  I felt like I was in exile on my own land for ten months out of the year, due to cold or mosquitoes.  Finally, I knew the real estate market in 2004 was inflated.  I sold out on the last little blip of optimism, in the fall of 2004.

More personal bio later.  I am not the self-revealing type.

In 1992 I settled at Sunnyfield Herb Farm, on Sunnyfield Road, in Minnetrista, thirty miles west of downtown Minneapolis.  The seventeen acres were dedicated to herbs, wildflowers, fields, woods, and swamps.  A short time later political issues pushed me to begin a monthly editorial in The Edge, a Twin Cities magazine dedicated to complementary and alternative medicine.  The issue at hand was the Dietary Supplement and Education Act, successfully passed in 1994, I believe it was, protecting the rights of the public to access to vitamin, mineral, and herbal supplements and products.  I keep writing.  Life on my new and beloved farm was an adventure.  Some of these articles are archived under Green Writ, elsewhere on this website.  More will appear in the future.

In 1999 ‘Aunt Esther,’ the aunt of the heirs from whom I purchased the farm died.  She had a life estate in the guest house on the farm.  With her death, the little threefold community of Esther, myself, and her son Sam dissolved.  Sam moved to the city.  Some of my apprentices occupied the guest house for a while.  I began to travel as much as twice a month on a regular basis, teaching classes across the country.  The old leisure time I spent in my library, meditating, looking out the window, writing on the computer, was gone.

In 2004 a mentally ill ‘guest’ in the guest house burned it down.  That was a watershed.  It was time to move.  My articles were at an end.  I planned one more (never written) to explain the changes at Sunnyfield.  I’m not sure anyone cares anymore, but I will be picking up the narrative back there with the fire, the sale of Sunnyfield, and the beginning of my new life.  As usual, the herbs will accompany us on the literary trail.