Going back to jail for the second time

There is something very wrong with this picture. It’s just not right. Not at all. I know what some people may say: life is not fair! Get use to it!

But I don’t imagine people who regularly say this even if they seem to say it with such conviction have ever farmed before. No! They have never had to clear land pit their sinews and muscles against a stubborn root – to hold on to that line of litany till the sun goes down and wake up the following morning to do it all over again. Coming to think of it….these people who regularly say life is not fair….have probably never even grown a cactus before in their whole life.

That’s the only reason why they can say with such conviction – life is not fair!

But men who are accustomed to live off the land. All know deep in the marrow of their bones – it’s precisely because life is intrinsically unfair that it needs to be worked on. Just like maybe how a farmer works on his land day in and day out to rid it of marauding pest and weeds to create just the right conditions to grow heavy and sweet fruit.

Life left to its own…and it doesn’t really matter what it is. Could just as well be your lawn, better half or even something really juggernaut big like the world economy will always threaten to drive out the good….if left to its own. That’s a truism.

That’s one reason why it’s so important for us all to always strive to make the world a fairer place…precisely because if left to it own – life can never fair.

No…there is something very wrong with this picture….very wrong indeed.

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‘I am not particularly impressed by people who like to say life is not fair! That’s like saying if I don’t even bother to open the hood of my car from time to time to make sure all is well – then one day that car is just going to die somewhere in the ECP or PIE.

Its a no brainer.

But one reason why I take exception to people saying, life is not fair as if they’re so wise and sharing some secret arcanum is because, they just stop right there and don’t bother to go on further.

That has always bothered me terribly.

If I had to really ask myself why, it’s probably because I am a farmer…a person whose estranged from the world…an exile of sorts – and folk who live off the land know only too well that life is never bloody fair from the word go!

We are the only industry in the world that buys everything a retail prices and sell at wholesale! So you tell me where’s does fairness even feature in farming. That I imagine could be why whenever there is a war between evil and good. The first to enlist have always been farm boys – it’s no coincidence the battlefields of Ardennes and Normandy are littered with the bones of farmers….precisely because they all know life is intrinsically unfair….that’s why it’s so important to roll out the sleeves and make the wrong…right – like maybe how a farmer clears the land of tree trunks, ploughs it straight, sows without missing a single row to yield a bountiful harvest…to me it’s a very agricultural way of seeing the world an attitude that’s even climatic to the whole vocation of farming.

City folk I don’t think fully appreciate this dimension of thought as they have probably never ever grown anything in their lives before or had to put food on the table with the sweat of their brow by tilling the land. They’ve never had to stand there helpless before pestilence, disease and drought and see their crops die, suck it all in and muster the courage to try again….but farmers are accustomed to making the best they can with these vagaries of what life regularly throws out. You could even say, that’s the only thing they ever do, day in and day out….to constantly make things which were wrong, right…so that it yields a bountiful harvest – that why I think the vantage of the world is all wrong – all they see is a bunch of rednecks from Nebraska who probably have slightly more brain cells than Forest Gump rushing off to war without ever once thinking deeply – but it’s not like that, not at all. It’s much more philosophical…measured…studied…and even intellectual….it’s the idea, if we want tomorrow to better, then we all have to work at it…it’s never easy…never supposed to be…it may even bloody kill you! But that’s an allegory of what it means to be a farmer and to see the world in those terms. I guess.

You see there are never any shortcuts in farming, it’s not like city folk where they can explain it all away with clever words like rightsizing…better calibrate or some other bs word that their spin doctors hatched as the flavor of the month….no it’s never that handsome in a farm…..like they say, life is not fair!

Now coming back to the picture….there is something very wrong with it.’