Page 6 RAIN Summer 1986 because the means employed, the threatened results, and the economic and moral costs have all become so extreme as to be unimaginable.. It is, to begin with, impossible for me to imagine that our "nuclear preparedness" is well understood or sincerely meant by its advocates in the government, much less by the nation at large. What we are proposing to ourselves and to the A defensible country has a large measure ofpractical and material independence .. \, and is g~nerally loved and competently caredfor by its people. world is that we are prepared to die, to the last child, to the last green leaf, in defense of our dearest principles of liberty, charity, and justice. It would normally be expected, I think, that people led to the brink of total annihilation by so high and sober a purpose would be living lives of great austerity, sacrifice, and selfless discipline. That we are not doing so is a fact notorious even among ourselves. Our leaders are not doing so, nor are they calling upon us or preparing us to do so. As a people, we are selfish, greedy, dependent, negligent of our duties to our land and to each other. We are evidently willing to sacrifice our own lives, and the lives of millions of others, born and unborn-but not one minute of pleasure. We must ask if the present version of national defense is, in fact, national defense. To make sense of that question, and to hope to answer it, we must ask first what kind of country is defensible, militarily or in any other way. And we may answer that a defensible country has a large measure of practical and material independence: that it can live, if it has to, independent of foreign supplies and of long distance transport within its own boundaries; that it rests upon the broadest possible base of economic prosperity, not just in the sense of a money economy, but in the sense of properties, materials, and practical skills; and, most important of all, that it is generally loved and competently cared for by its people, who, individually, identify their own interest with the interest of their neighbors and of the country (the land) itself. And even today, against overpowering odds and prohibitive costs, one does not have to go far in any part of the country to hear voiced the old hopes that moved millions of immigrants, freed slaves, westward movers, young couples starting out:· a little farm, a little shop, a little store-some kind of place and enterprise of one's own, within and by which one's family could achieve a proper measure of independence, not only of its own economy, but of satisfaction, thought, and character. That our public institutions have not looked with favor upon these hopes is sufficiently evident from the results. In the twenty-five years after World War II, our farm people were driven off their farms by economic pressure at the rate of about one million a year. They are still going out of business at the rate of 1,400 farm families per week, or 72,800 families per year. That the rate of decline is now less than it was does not mean that the situation is improving; it means that the removal of farmers from farming is nearly complete. But this is not happening just on the farm. A similar decline is taking place in the cities. According to Jack
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