It was back in July, at an Amish sawmill a few miles from me. I was there to order some rough cut (aka not planed smooth) green lumber for a project on my homestead. Local cut poplar boards to redo an old building I have. There were sheaves of wheat stacked in a field visible from where I parked. The Amishman was running his small sawmill with help from a teenage son, with a couple little boys in attendance also. He had a diesel engine to run his saw, the mill being set up near the road with his house in the background, but that was the extent of modernity on his place. And there was peace and a sense of normalcy.
Most of us live attached to electronic media and the communication system. It is as if there is a cord connecting us to it, like an electric cord to an appliance, or the umbilical cord on an infant. Our ancestors could not imagine our daily use of electronic communications and media. The Twelve Southerners who wrote I’ll Take My Stand in 1930 could not fathom this; I can only imagine the scathing essay they would have written if they had a glimpse of the tech media future we live in. Our connection to electronic media is perhaps the most destructive element of modern society.
Even Texas agrarian and Bible teacher Michael Bunker, whom I used to admire, has rejoined the system he once preached against. Over the last four years or so I watched his community fall apart, he start writing Amish themed sci-fi novels and try selling them to Hollywood, he grow his hair long, and send his wife to work in a lab during Covid. His older children moved off, his married oldest daughter Tracy (per her Facebook) ditching her plain dress, then cutting her hair and adding a nose ring. Though once pro-Southern and mildly Kinist, Bunker is now flirting with anti-racist sentiment. Well, Bunker moved back to town this summer, lives in an apartment with air conditioning, writes a column for the Brownwood News.com, and tends bar for a living. Seriously.
I knew that Bunker had basically gone apostate when I mentioned his book Surviving Off Off-Grid in my May 2022 blog post Family, Place, and the Way Home, but did not then know he had moved back to town. I mentioned his book because of the effect it had on me at the time, not because of what Bunker is or has become. I first commented on Bunker’s downward spiral in a post here at GKS way back in June of 2018. Watching Bunker’s slow descent was very disappointing to me, as I thought he was different. Is Bunker backslidden, or was he just an imposter all along, a huckster selling an agrarian life and worldview that he simply threw off when it no longer suited him? We will probably never know.
Bunker left air conditioning and running water for over a decade and used an outhouse, but he never ceased using a computer, wi-fi, and a cell phone. Maybe the internet, and the distractions and entertainments it provides, was the cause of his eventual downfall?
Admit it. You, most of us actually, cannot stop staring at a lifeless screen, a screen that consumes our time and damages our vision with the blue light it emits. Can you leave the house for the day without your smartphone? Why do you even have a smartphone? Can you go 72 hours without turning own a TV, going online, or using a cellphone? I can. If you cannot, you have a major tech addiction, one that you will probably never get under control unless you just (metaphorically) cut the cord and go cold turkey off of modern technologies.
The internet had some value mixed in with a great amount of dross. Now it is mainly just dross, a waste of time. In the last essay of Into The Twilight I advocated we begin to rebuild our culture from the ground up, by making connections with kith and kin, real face to face connections. Do not let electronic devices rule your life.
God, Kin, and Soil 