December 7, 1941, 80 years ago today, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and ignited the entrance of the U.S. into World War II. Most of us think it was a surprise attack, but was it really? Search duck duck go <was the Pearl Harbor attack really a surprise?> and see what you find.

But what I want to reflect upon here, is what we might think of as the unintended consequences of what happened once the war was over. But then again, were those consequences — still unfolding — really unintended? Another rabbit hole.

I speak here of the G.I. Bill, a magnanimous gift by a grateful nation for those who had served in that war.

From wikipedia: G.I. Bill

“Benefits included low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans to start a business or farm, one year of unemployment compensation, and dedicated payments of tuition and living expenses to attend high school, college, or vocational school. These benefits were available to all veterans who had been on active duty during the war years for at least 90 days and had not been dishonorably discharged.^[4]”

My Mom and Dad, for example, ended up moving with their children to the wilds of Idaho from Minnesota, where he had gone to medical school, and where Mom had lived all her life within reach of her two sisters and parents, all of whom were immensely helpful for her and her two small children while Dad was away during the war.

Mom spoke all her life, of the way her own mom cried when they left home, never to return, except for short visits.

My parents’ story was repeated endlessly by returning G.I.s as they moved away from their roots in extended family life for parts unknown, going to college far away and then settling often, in Levittowns, mile upon mile of new, soulless tract homes, where the women felt stuck inside and the men off to work. Thus was the “nuclear family” born, with each of those wives, many of them former Rosie the Riveters — forcefully re-indoctrinated, thanks to television advertising, to return to domesticity, cleaning spotless floors and proud of new appliances. 

The first hint of what would come next came with Betty Friedan’s book 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, her identification of “the problem that has no name.”

I remember reading that book as a 21 year old, stuck inside our tiny apartment with an infant, and screaming internally. What has happened to my life? Why am I so unhappy? I did not want to be like my long-suffering mother, stuck inside the house all day.

By the mid-60s, (and the Uranus/Pluto conjunction in Virgo) the nuclear families, into which the children of G.I. Joe’s were born, began to explode, as the artificial boundaries around the nuclear family, lacking extended family context as well as meaningful social interaction — thanks to soulless suburban planning — began to fracture and transmogrify into a chaotic morass of broken families, broken homes, freshly “liberated” mothers going off to work, and traumatized children left home alone and unsupervised.

Just like with the mythology of Pearl Harbor, so too the “feminism” of the ’60s may also have been engineered, or, more likely steered, in a massive plot by the CIA to dissolve what remained of formerly resilient bonding of the extended family, by exploding the alreaady atomized nuclear family into even smaller units, each person on his or her own, rootless, alone, and ridden by the unconscious, free-floating anxiety that attends not being able to generate meaning or purpose from experience in life.

And as Dr. Desbet has analysed, it’s no wonder the cabal can use “the virus” to generate FEAR and thus isolate and lock us down. “The virus” gives us something “real” to fear, an object upon which to pin our free-floating anxiety, and thus comes as almost a relief! Moreover, by identifying with others who are vaxxed, we regain (fake) social cohesion!

It is well to remember: as long as we see ourselves as fundamentally “on our own, with no direction known,” (thank you, Bob Dylan) we will be susceptible to whatever they want to do to us.

Which is why the movement to return to village life has such appeal. Either building intentional community from scratch, or retrofitting within an existing suburb like we are doing here in Green Acres Permaculture Village. And, for those who are very very lucky, and soulless modern life has not mentally and/or emotionally divided their original families irreparably — to return to creating with our actual blood relatives that village life, buying property together, building upon it or repurposing it to recreate the bonds and mutual aid originally offered by extended family connectivity.

Either way, we begin to heal the damage done to the resilient mycellial networked web that village life and extended families had offered prior to World War II.

It’s time. Let’s go.  Once we recognize how the resilient, regenerative underlying mycellium of society was torn apart, atomized, and then exploded, leaving entire generations of children from broken homes to try to cope, we can begin to remember — to re-member ourselves, put ourselves back together again, as one planet, one people, organically organized into countless decentralized, networked symbiotic webs, nourishing the living tissue of the human species and our endosymbiotic relationship with planet Earth, one small body, in one small solar system, in one small galaxy, on out to the infinite reaches of the space both within and without. There is simply no end to the human imagination and creativity, once we grab hold of ourselves. Let’s go.

 

And remember, none of us is alone. Indeed, we are all-one!