[Sosfbay-discuss] Common currency... or courtesy.

[Tian Harter]

Wes Rolley wrote:

>Having the luxury of 0.5 acres, my wife and I raise a lot of vegetablesw 
>and fruit.  The day hardly goes by that we don't eat something that we 
>raised ourselves.  Right now, we are working on the last of our 
>pineapple guava.  Our mandarin oranges are almost ready to be picked.
>
>With such largess, we frequently share with our neighbors, at least 10 
>families in our neighborhood.  Responses vary signifantly from returning 
>favors (eg. lemon cake flavored with our lemons)  to "is that all?" 
>  
>
I found a few homes with lots of fruit trees or other garden
activity while I was walking precincts. I came home with my
pockets full of quinces one time. The guy I met at that house
practically forced me to take them. I didn't complain. It was
only after bringing them home that I figured out my mom
made pies out of them when we had our own quince tree.
She had to. They are inedible without cooking. Cooking them
REALLY brought back memories. I would have gone back for
more if my CC campaign hadn't been keeping me so busy.

>I recently re-read the story of  Erwin Hansen. Hansen grew up in the 
>mountains of eastern Arizona. This was the same area devastated by the 
>fires of 2002. His family moved to the mountains in 1906. He had spent 
>70 years there by the time his remembrances were published in the June 
>1975 edition of Arizona Highways. According to Hansen, “My daddy always 
>was a neighbor-lovin' man. But shucks, back in those days, everybody 
>helped everybody else. We had to. For instance, if all your neighbors 
>were down with the flu and you weren't feelin' so hot yourself, you'd 
>still go out and try to hunt up some grub. Maybe it would be nothin' but 
>a crippled rabbit, but you'd find something. You always fed your 
>neighbors first. That was how we got along.”
>
>Maybe we need to re-learn that relaince on our neighbors to create a 
>significant change in society. I am not sure that a new bank handling a 
>new form of currency really changes how people deal with life.  It seems 
>to me like a solution to a problem that most people don't think they 
>have.  At some point, we will understand that we all have to rely on 
>each other just to live. Maybe Global Warming will make that happen.  
>Maybe losing the water from the California Delta will be the catalyst. 
>
>Otherwise this is just a parlor game.
>
I subscribe to Coin World, a great rag to read about the history
of money in. I read an article about how back in the 1800s starting
a bank consisted of paying for the printing of a trunk full of money.
For the bank to work though, you had to find a way to circulate
the money where everybody got value out of the transactions they
made. I had an uncle who was a Texas banker, and some of his
stories about being the banker in a small town were VERY INTERSTING.
I'd like to see some of that type of work fall into the political system.
Seems like the value that you get from listening to a good idea is
the kind of starting point we could participate in win/win from.

Every now and then Coin World has another article about another
local currency, along with pictures of sample notes and an address
you can mail money off to to buy your own bills to collect. I ended
up with local money from a town in Kansas that way. I'd be glad to
sell one of those notes to anybody that wants to try and spend it.
It would be fraud to get someone to take it who didn't realize that
they were going to have to build the market for that money.

-- 
Tian
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