Quote:
Originally Posted by fuller2
I am actually all for MDC being fairly 'extreme' in its granola point of view. I really like that I find people here who are even more granola than I am--I learn new stuff all the time. I do not like the idea that we should become an all-inclusive place and water the whole thing down. MDC *IS* a granola extreme--and that's the way I like it. If you use 100% disposable diapers or eat at Taco Bell, that's fine, it's your life--but I don't think you should expect that people here are going to think that's normal or desirable. (I suppose you could get a charge out of being 'rebellious', though
...)
I think that if we let MDC become watered down, the super-granola people will leave and the site will become fairly mainstream. It will become mostly Whole Foods shoppers who are uncomfortable spanking, instead of the homesteaders with the acre-sized garden and the milk goats who do 'elimination communication' and are practicing Buddhists or geez, even polyamorous pagans. The site does serve a purpose in 'educating' those WF shoppers to a lifestyle even more extreme than the one they imagined they were living...but. There's a reason many hardcore granola types sort of drop out of society...and it's often because they are tired of 'educating' and want to just live.
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Interesting. The only problem with your logic is that in real life, the drop-out extremists are more likely to have consumed Taco Bell in the past week, year, or ten years than the less-extreme GD Whole Foodies. Because they have less money, and fewer pretensions. I have spent far more time living without electricity than most MDCers - and I also have eaten far more Taco Bell.
And drop-out extremists are least likely of all to do a checklist. What comes up again and again and again is the reality that doing a full checklist is a luxury. A few months ago there was a LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG thread over whether it was rude to refuse a piece of fruit at someone's house because it wasn't organic. Some people appear to have completely taken leave of the humane values that were supposed to drive this philosophy in the first place.
I believe it was BelgianSheepDog who recently said that she finds the whole idea of having a parenting "style" with a name to be silly and bourgeois. I'm tempted to look up the exact quote and make it my signature.
Just look at some of the input whenever class/welfare issues are discussed. There are
A LOT of people on this site who have no idea how the other half lives, and we make a major mistake if we think that doesn't color our collective concepts of AP/NFL purity and what it takes to achieve it.
I also think that rigorously adhering to the whole checklist is a sign of lack of independent thought. Which is not to say that everyone who happens to do everything on the list lacks independent thought - but the pursuit of the list as such is frankly kind of sad.
I guess what I am inarticulately and somewhat ungraciously trying to say is that MDC's collective self-image as "crunchy" rings false for me because it doesn't seem to have that much in common with the concept of the countercultural lifestyle and aesthetic I would previously have designated as "crunchy granola" before discovering MDC. A large part of that lifestyle is individualism and nonconformity, not only from the "mainstream" rules but from the whole idea of living by a rulebook, in general. I see many, many references to lifestyle choices that lie beyond the purview of MDC's specific AP/NFL obsession that would instantly disqualify someone from being "crunchy" in my perception if I met them in real life. That's not a judgment, it's just reality. It partly refers to me; I am not the epitome of countercultural lifestyle, myself. But I have not allowed MDC groupthink to colonize my lifestyle concepts. Anyone who thinks you can tell how "granola" someone is by enumerating from a finite list of specific practices doesn't know what "granola" means.
By strict MDC logic, the trim blonde McMansion-dweller who spends thousands on hyena fluff is crunchier than the tattooed inner-city punk mama who uses sposies because she has neither a washing machine nor a car to get to the laundromat. (Or make up whatever example you want.) It's patently absurd.
IOW, it's
already mostly WF shoppers who feel uncomfortable spanking, and the crunchier-than-thou dynamic doesn't help matters. The rest of our lives are just too messy.
Another thought: in any given MDC discussion, a huge red flag goes up for me when someone starts saying "Noone can
make you feel guilty" in defense of something they or others have said to...well....make people feel guilty. I think "noone can
make you feel guilty" is the MDC equivalent of Godwin's Law! Much of what I see on this thread is the same idea generalized to the site as a whole.
Beware of the mentality that only people with everything checked off the list fully belong here and the rest of us should just be sitting at their feet. Life is full of ambiguity. This is a discussion site. If the only thing that matters is either/or determinations with regard to a few specific practices, what is there to discuss?