Independence Day, the Founding Fathers, Paleo diet, and Conservatism

Independence Day!  So what does that have to do with Paleo living?  Well, quite a bit, as it turns out...

The founding fathers of America had a strong vision of what they wanted this new country to be!  They wanted to escape the class structure that had so stratified the countries of Europe; the prevailing vision was of a country of small farms, where each family was largely independent and self-reliant.  Most of the settlers in America were of English stock at this time, and they were acutely aware of the top down, autocratic, controlling nature of that society: they meant to avoid that!  

And, for a long time, our country was pretty much what our Founding Fathers had envisioned- small, largely independent, self-supporting small towns, peopled by small, local businesses and small, well-run family farms that grew a wide variety of crops and a variety of animals.  Government was largely local,  and so those who lived within a community were pretty much the ones that ran it!  Charity was provided by the local churches, not government.

Things began to change in the 1960's, and by the '70's we had really started to go a different, dangerous path- ironically, we started to turn more into a European, top-down, big Government and big Food corporations and big Medical all started to morph into GIANTS.  Probably the main way this power was concentrated was by the advances into media: Television, especially was perfect for gradually brainwashing people into believing things that, before they were constantly being bombarded with such ideas, they would have found ridiculous, just by using their common sense!  Things like:

1. Fat is bad!  Don't eat butter- eat margarine, which is a kind of fake, industrial seed oil we'd like to sell to you, rather than to pay for its disposal.
2. Eggs are bad!  Instead of eating the eggs your own chickens lay, eat a big bowl (or two!) of processed grains, wheat and corn, from these great cereal boxes we will gladly sell you!
3. Meat is bad!  Red meat is a "heart attack on a plate!"   Eat this soy stuff; it tastes like pretty much nothing, but we will gladly sell it to you in all sorts of shapes and forms.
4. Grains are wholesome!  Make them the foundation of your diet, even though your ancestors hardly ate any at all (unless they had to), and they thrived on a diet of meat, eggs, veggies, fruits and nuts... we will gladly put grains into almost any product you buy, and we will engineer them to be positively addictive.  You will eat them all day long, day after day!
5. You are all sick.  You need the government to tell you how to eat, and you all need lots of medicines; statins, insulin for your diabetes, gastric bypass operations since you are all fat since you don't walk on your treadmill enough, and you are still eating too much fat.
6. This is how it's been going since then, with the top-down, autocratic Government itself taking more and more authority away from us as individuals, and increasingly telling us what we should eat, how we should exercise, what medicines we should be taking, taxing us at ever-increasing rates because they know much better how to spend our money on the common good than we do ourselves.

Today, July 4 2012, let's remember the spirit of those original Founding Fathers of the United States, who would be 100% behind the Paleo diet's notions of buying food locally- growing it locally, eating wholesome, real foods prepared in your own kitchen instead of in a factory, and eating all foods from local, trusted sources that raise their animals humanely, feeding them grass if that is what they are meant to eat by Nature and God.  We need to get away from the control of the New Self Appointed Royalty of America today:  Big Government, Big Medicine, Big Food!

Luckily, we can take back control- Television is on the wane, who watches commercials any more, for that matter who watches the evening news?  We don't need "filtered" news anymore; now we have the internet!  We can read the unvarnished truth instead!

The original American Revolution was a profoundly conservative revolution.  Nothing really like it had come before.  The French revolution, in fact virtually all other revolutions have been liberal, left wing, "Power to the people" socialist revolutions; ours was totally unique in that it was conservative, 

saying not to "take away from everyone else to share", which results in the powerful ones in the revolution itself just taking it all for themselves, and their cronies. 

In the American revolution, afterwards we were all free to provide for ourselves.  This is a profound difference, and resulted in the single most successful governmental experiment in history.  I think the only other political system on that level is the ancient Greek city-state; but then our American revolution incorporated most of their ideas from that earlier "experiment".

So, let's get back to our roots!  Think for yourself.  Don't listen to self-appointed "experts" that are shills of big corporations.  Read the real science behind things; don't get the "filtered" versions.  Here is a brief video featuring Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, who really has this thing of sustainable agriculture, as the founding fathers of America intended, all figured out:

As Angelo Coppola of the "Latest in Paleo" podcast says: "Humans are not broken by default"!

In other words:  "We are made in God's image"; hardly "broken"!

J