Meat Sorting, Thoreau

A much more productive and enjoyable week after last week’s stomach bug. I got caught up on mowing the cabin yards and around the barn while Amy was at the Abingdon Farmers Market on Saturday. She cleaned one of the cabins after the market. Then we brought 75 cows into the barn for sorting.

On Monday Carter rode with me to haul 12 cows to the processor in NC. While we were gone, Amy and the other kids went to pick up ORVF pork from the processor in Abingdon. No one is more excited than Wren to have sausage patties back in stock. Amy and the baby turned around and went back to Abingdon for a farmers market meeting that evening while the other four stayed with me and made the rounds checking cows. Two with me in the Jeep and two behind us on the 4-wheeler. As dusk approached and the temperature dipped, the two on the 4-wheeler opted to park it and pile in the Jeep with the rest of us. With the back seat taken out of the Jeep to haul around tools and such, the four kids piled on top of each other in the single passenger seat up front, giggling and singing as we checked the mommas and baby calves. Carter reminded me it was time to take the “roof” back off the Jeep. “If you remember the constructions.” Ha

On Tuesday we set up more chicken shelters and moved about 360 chicks from the brooder out to the field. Up to 12 shelters to move daily. Getting my body used to pulling shelters and carrying buckets again. 

Still keeping the outdoor wood stove burning. Another load of wood split and hauled. About halfway to filling up our new woodshed. 

Another batch of newly hatched chicks in the brooder yesterday. After morning chores, Bella Jane came over to the farm and helped us with freezer work for the remainder of the day. Last week getting ORVF beef and pork back from the processor while we weren’t feeling well resulted in us just putting everything in the freezer wherever we could get it. Which meant before spending hours filling herd shares and orders yesterday, we had to spend hours getting everything sorted and organized. Lots of moving boxes around in and out of the freezers. I can’t say it felt good working in the freezers all afternoon, but it sure felt good to have May herd shares filled and that work behind us. 

With Carter making the trip to the processor with me and tagging along much of the farm week, my audiobooks listening was limited. I did however, manage to get through CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE by Henry David Thoreau. 

Most Americans like the thought of some form of democracy. I suppose people having some say is better than a state in which the people have no say. However, Thoreau points out that a democracy can make unjust laws the same as it can make just ones. If justice is true, it isn’t moved or swayed by what’s popular. Just ask Jesus. Of course the state wasn’t governed by a democracy when he was alive, but had a democracy been in place, the people would’ve certainly voted “Crucify!”

Again, democracy may be far superior to other forms of government, but a greater remains that Thoreau encourages us move towards. Not a state where we all have a small say in what everyone else does and are thus forced to conform to the popular consensus. But that which the individual is governed by his own higher conscience and not the collective conscience of society blowing this way and that with the wind. 

We live in a society quick to advocate for laws telling everyone else how to live. I suppose in an ideal society, I’d rather have no say in the laws of everyone else if that meant everyone else had no say in the laws over me. Democracy doesn’t necessarily equate to freedom of the individual. There is a big difference in having a little say over everyone else and having full say over yourself. 

“Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14) Democracy moves the needle towards the majority. But the majority is not always right. Just because the majority go down the broad road, it doesn’t mean that’s the right way to go. What’s better than everyone having a say in the way everyone else should go? The individual choosing his/her own way. 

Here’s a few quotes from Henry David Thoreau:

“But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong but conscious?”

“It not only divides states and churches, it divides families, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine. Unjust laws exist. Shall we be content to obey them? Or shall we endeavor to amend them and obey them until we have succeeded? Or shall we transgress them at once?”

“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go. Let it go, for chance it will wear smooth. Certainly the machine will wear out if the injustice has a spring or a pulley or a rope or a crank exclusively for itself… But if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say — break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see at any rate that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”

“The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarch to a democracy is a progress toward a true respect for the individual… Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority derive.” 

Have a good week.

Will