No, Neo, you are a slave.

Yes, I know, a pop lite reference to the Matrix,  but I have not selected it out of ignorance or indolence (well, I might have).   Fact is, the situation that we find ourselves in would have been depressingly familiar with our forebrears 200, 900, or even 1,000 years ago.  Well, at least to mine, who were agricultural labourers and woodsmen, seamstresses and domestic servants.  Yours may well have been land owners and factory owners, you oppressor, but the reality of our lives is that we live in a structured heirarchy, where there are those who hold power, influence and money, and there's the rest of us, with our aspirations (both for ourselves and for our children) our credit cards and our wage slavery.

How has mankind come to this?  How is it that we voluntarily  submit to a system that keeps us trapped and working for fuck all for people that know fuck all and how, most importantly, has this got anything to do with vegetables?

Well, vegetables - growing your own food on your own land, is one small step to setting yourself free.  Life is about being harrassed, being worried and frightened by all the shit happening in the world and being bombarded with images of crap you are being pressurised to buy by multi national conglomerates that have the ability to make or break countries by the manipulation of currency and frankly are not much bothered about your wellbeing, just so long as you keep spending.   It is beyond my ken, but I have an idea - maybe we don't need them, or their crap, or their fear, or their slavery.

But I sense that I have not made my case very well.  I shall take you back to a discussion with my wife, where I said "You are a slave (as am I)" and she said "No, I am not".  Now, from my perspective, where you work for an employer, in order to earn money, in order to buy food, water, heat, light, you are a slave.  Who, in this world, decided that person A should have to work 50 years and that person B should tell them what to do and to grow wealthy off of person A's labour?  More importantly - why do we all so meekly accept this atrocious state of affairs?  Are we not free?  From my wife's perspective, she enjoyed her work, liked the money and did not feel as if she had no other choice.  Sadly, I would argue, that for far too many of us, there is no other choice.  Be a wage slave, or live a marginal life on benefits, that is the choice we have and that is no real choice at all.  We all deserve better.

Better to die on your feet than live on your knee's?  Maybe, how about, better to live on your feet and find a way to be free?  That is the journey that my family and other vegetables is on.

By the way, I am no marxist-leninist revolutionary.  I am not political - I just don't want to be a battery.