Anyone who’s ever read Wendell Berry’s work on the farm crisis of the 70’s and 80’s will be ahead of the curve.

The key takeaway from COVID-19 will be this: There is no such thing as a service economy.

Sure, you can call all of the busyness of people running around and sporting and shuffling insurance and loan paperwork “the economy”, but Reality shows up at the point of resource extraction and waste disposal.

When humans aren’t doing anything useful for their places, they are extremely vulnerable to all of the natural risks they have systematically ignored. Borrowing money to buy a $60,000 truck to drive to a job to buy a truck to drive to sports is not sustainable in reality: only in the fantasy of ‘civilized’ people (city-based society) detached from the sources of their very existence.

Keep this in mind: most American farmers don’t grow the food they actually eat, nor do they grow food that is edible. They drive: Trucks, tractors, harvesters, sprayers and kids to schools that send them off to cities for jobs. Economists tell them what to grow and academic agronomists tell them what to spray on it. Beer commercials, angry white males on talk radio and marketers tell them who to vote for.

It’s all in the marketing, and it’s ALL marketing.