Fruitless (A Rant/glut of frustration) by Lance Cheuvront.
In my opinion, this is something you need to read. Ponder it. And then go off and change your lives for the better."I just finished reading over a really cool article about a group called Guerilla Grafters, and I will provide a link so you can check it out too! What these people do is graft branches from fruit bearing trees onto the non-bearing varieties that cities around San Francisco plant; so that the trees will (you guessed it) bear fruit.
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Now I have enough journalistic integrity that I also read several articles demonizing said group because of a number of reasons. Oh, and by the way, did I mention that what they are doing is illegal?
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The opponents of the grafters, largely but not always city officials are up in arms because of a series of doomsday scenarios that they believe will play out when these trees begin to fruit, and their complaints, lead me to question their sanity and our society as a whole and I will try to be succinct about this, but damn it, you know me and I get angry…
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Here are some, but by no means all of the reasons that everyone fears the fruit.
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1. When the fruit ripens and falls, it will destroy cars, make a mess, be slippery and be a fall risk and attract fruit flies.
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2. People will try and climb the trees to get the fruit higher up and fall and die horrible, broken, mangled deaths, or even worse, live on and suffer.
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3. Dirty, homeless, hungry people will be attracted to the neighborhood and may find something to eat.
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4. Children may discover the fruit and (god forbid) eat it and maybe ingest a bruise or a worm.
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5. Wal-mart may suffer a loss of 0.0003% of their produce sales.
6. We as human beings may discover that we can actually GROW food and shake off the shackles of retail tyranny, and that cannot fucking happen!
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Now that last one is mine and it reeks a bit of sarcasm, but that happens around here and you should be used to it by now.
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I am not going to tackle this point by point, I am just going to monkeystomp all over it, like grapes into wine and let you sort it out for yourselves.
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I want a time machine for a few reasons and one of the main ones is to go back and find the person that pressed and won the first frivolous lawsuit over something stupid that they did, I am going to find that guy and put a huge smoking bullet in his head, and make it known why. I will stand there by my monkey tardis and exclaim for all to see, “If you do something idiotic and survive it, you will not blame anyone else but yourself and you will go to your room and be silent in your shame. If you pour hot coffee in your crotch, you will not sue anyone for not telling you it was hot. If you trip walking down the street, you will pick yourself up, pray no one saw you and try harder to walk correctly next time. If you eat so much that you begin to resemble a rogue moon from a giant planet, you have no right to sue the stupid clown (whom I have another bullet for). You will not blame Cookie Monster, Nike or Johnny Knoxville for you being rotund or in a body cast. YOU decided what you were going to do, YOU live with the results. You are the reason we have been regulated into bondage you bastards.”
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Personal responsibility is not dead, but it is very ill and lacking hospice.
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Do you know how long we survived on this planet, whilst and at the same time harvesting our own food? Do you know how quickly our ancestors would beat the ever loving crap out of us for being ridiculous whiners and total pansies? We are so far gone from our own instincts, abilities, feelings and natural joys that when you reintroduce many people to them, they are reduced to tears because they cannot reconcile themselves to the depths of the emotion.
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Newsflash kids; we climbed trees to get fruit. We bent over and picked carrots. We crawled through the forest harvesting mushrooms. We killed, butchered, stored, prepared and ate animals ourselves for WAY longer than we have had them waiting in frozen bins at the Wimp-o-Mart! We walked across this county, from sea to shining sea (back when the seas still shone from their own glory, not from the oil laying on the surface). We walked, and we fell and sometimes we got hurt and sometimes we died, and it was part of our natural selection which is now failing miserably. We are the only non-domesticated species on the planet that does not profit as a species from survival of the fittest and natural culling. I know some of you hate when I say this, but not all of us are on the same level, not all of us were meant to survive. (and yes, I do include myself in that quotient)
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So the fruit is going to plummet from on high and squish your Lexus? Maybe park somewhere else for a couple weeks and walk an extra twenty three feet. Terrified of fruit flies? We have birds and insects for that, unless you have killed and driven them all off too. Worried that your precious widdle toddler is going to find a wild plum and put it in his sugar conditioned gob? Oh how terrible that he should learn that fruit comes from nature and how equally awful that he might taste something yucky and use that knowledge to better know the world. And what the fuck, you have a helmet on him so much of the time anyway that what is another couple of weeks during the harvest? Or we could just teach them about the world around them? No? You’re right… Who has time for that?
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Oh, and the homeless may find food, how terrible that would be. In a country where the average harvest it yourself farm is claiming that about 50% of all of their produce ends up as waste because we spoiled bastards will not take a perfectly good 20 ounce tomato if it has a one tenth of an ounce bruise on it and throw it down on the ground to reach for another. How awful that the richest country in the world will not only not feed its people, but its citizens object to the hungry feeding themselves. And I know, I know, you are not really against the homeless picking fruit, but they should maybe be doing it somewhere other than your neighborhood, and maybe doing it as a job, right?
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And while we are messing about with the time machine, let’s go back and whack the first guy that forced someone else to grow crops for him and also the first guy that thought of the idea of growing more than he needed so he could turn a profit and allowed others enough spare time to figure out a million other ways to take everything from someone else.
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Fruit grows on trees and it used to be something wild that if we found it, we could harvest and eat it. But like the land itself, man declared dominion and ownership of it, modifying it to fit his needs and maximize his profits and marginalizing anyone who thought enough to ask, “Hey, didn’t we once have places we could get that for free?”
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It is truly sad how petty, greedy, selfish and afraid we have become. We are now laughing around water coolers about child raping priests, the objectification of women, the loss of millions of lives to preventable diseases, and we do it all, safe in the knowledge that we can stop on the way home and pick up a bag of apples.
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I know what an apple fresh off of a tree tastes like, before it has been coated in a corn based wax, packed in crates and trucked further than most Americans will travel in their lifetimes. I know what wild grapes, strawberries, trout, elk, and blackberries taste like, all sun warmed and perfect, but don’t you go an try it, because if you fall out of a tree, or prick your finger on a thorn, you may have trouble figuring out who to sue first."
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http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/guerrilla-grafters
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http://grist.org/food/graft-punk-breaking-the-law-to-help-urban-trees-bear-fruit
As I mentioned last time, I have talented friends. Friends plural. Here's an introduction to another.
