Critics - and "The phone is a joke, right?!?"

Poor NoImpactMan! Really, my heart goes out; he talks today about the hate mail he's received as a result of the NYT article.

Uzis to you

I'm moderating the comments on this blog, and I'll save everybody some time- I'm totally not interested in the comments of whack-job tree and people haters, and I'll just delete them as they come in, so nobody else has to read that junk. Polite discussion, polite total disagreement- fine. Statements that add up to "eat compost and die" - right back atcha. Not here.

A couple of the comments from eco-nazis were outraged that NoImpactMan was using a (GASP) ... computer!!

Oh, horrors.

Look, you nazi morons, THIS WORLD - this one, right here- is the one we have to live in. There are computers all over the place, and they are never going away. They are, in fact, with a little care, a terrifically powerful tool. I own a chainsaw, too.

So- read my "green practices" on the sidebar here. I'm off the grid. Limited power. And I do (how can you tell?) use computers. Plural. They are all notebooks- because- guess what? they use less power than desktops. And their batteries are filled up each day by... sunlight.

One of the topics I said I'd write about is "The phone's a joke, right?" This looks like the right place for it.

After we'd been living in the Little House for about 5 years, without a phone, we decided that a) we liked this life quite a bit, and b) we wanted a child, right about now. So we got ourselves pregnant, and had the child.

We're isolated- it's a good 1/2 mile to the nearest neighbor, and no guarantee they'll be home if you go. For help. Pretty quick, with a baby, we discovered there were times when we really wanted to talk to a doctor, NOW.

Unlike the power companies, that charge an arm and a leg to hook up, the phone company here is a real co-op. It was inexpensive, and painless to get a line buried in here, and in fact our membership now pays dividends. And the doctor became a phone call away.

One of my grad school buddies came to visit, and saw the phone, hanging on the wall.

He totally cracked up. Thought it was the funniest bit of humor he'd ever seen. So sly, so droll of us to put in a fake phone. So to play up to the joke, he walked over, and picked up the phone.... and it was live, with a dial tone.

As amused as he had been before discovering the dial tone, he was that outraged after. Furious. "How can you be such hypocrites-!!" Really angry, because he'd admired us for "dropping out", and now we were "selling out."

We were never dropping out, is the thing. We still intend to be part of THIS world. Just on our terms, not stuffed in Little Boxes On The Hillside.

Lots of folks somehow get the idea that since we live in a log cabin, without grid electricity, etc, therefore we must DISAPPROVE of the rest of the world. And them. No, we don't.

The world is what it is. We are what we are. You should be what you want to be.

It's really that simple, but there are a bunch of folks who will never believe you mean it- because they, themselves do not approve of that kind of personal freedom. They believe you should be free to do what they tell you is the right thing.

Let them eat compost.

Yup, we live this way because it makes us unhappy to live in a fashion so wasteful that ten families in India could live for a month on one week of our trash.

That's wrong. And bad. Personally, I'd add "shameful" to the list of adjectives. But I personally have no expectation that everyone else will suddenly see things just as we do. We don't feel scorn for regular folks.

And no, you're not going to hear religious arguments here.

Some truths are just self evident.