“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine,” H.D. Thoreau wrote in “Civil Disobedience.” Or at least gum it up a bit with your sabots, right?
Of course, we’re all deeply imbedded, imbricated, enveloped in a befouling system. But we do have some choices, don’t we?
Nobody makes you order from Amazon. Nobody forces you to watch television. What keeps you on Facebook now that you know you’re nothing but cattle to them to be sold to the highest bidding Nazi or Russian autocrat?
Did you ever wonder about the transformation of the word “brand”: from a mark of ownership seared into the flesh of slaves to a willingly sported symbol of attachment to corporate identity. Not such a long jump, really, except for the smell of burnt flesh in the air, and the fact that the slaves were bound.
How about “consumption”? The word means to burn up from within; it’s an old name for the scourge of TB, a horrible wasting away. Now it’s what keeps our deranged economy going by necessitating the burning of the very planet.
Sure, unless we would prefer not to, we have to eat. Yet a huge proportion of conventional supermarkets are filled with processed junk, entire aisles of pseudo-foods.
“No” is the beginning of liberation.
Backyard and Beyond 
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