Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

About twenty years ago, I began to recognise that the water provided to me in Houston through the tap was not any good. In addition to a large number of known pathogens, there were also various poisons, such as fluoride. A federal government subsidy encourages municipalities to add fluoride to their drinking water so that uranium purification contractors can off-load much of their toxic waste at a profit instead of at a cost.

More recently, the scandal involving the terribly evil people involved in the city of Flint, Michigan’s government deliberately poisoning the people who live there with toxic levels of lead has resulted in other city water being tested. An investigation by Reuters suggests there are thousands of communities with far more toxic water than the water found in Flint. So, not drinking the water makes sense.

In order to alleviate thirst, water remains the best resource. At-the-tap filters only remove some pathogens and rarely filter anything in solution. The best filters use reverse osmosis. Happily, much bottled water is available that is purified using reverse osmosis. I can get bulk water for about 35 cents a gallon at Fresh Thyme and other grocers. I have three 7-gallon buckets (from Reliance) that I refill, and numerous one-gallon bottles I off-load from the larger water containers. Distilled water is also safe to drink, of course, since the distillation process leaves the metals and other contaminants behind.

Lately, though, on my walks (today I walked 6.6 miles to fetch a turkey for the local Friends’ meeting pot luck on Sunday) I have been carrying 17 ounce bottles of drinking water. Twenty years ago, these were sturdy containers that would allow me to grip in one hand, twist off the plastic top in the other. But in the last five years, manufacturers have been determined to destroy their products and irritate their customers. In the case of water bottles, they are now so flimsy that it is extremely difficult to simply open the bottle without getting much water out in the process.

It had been my view that every manufacturer has gone to this shoddy approach, but I was impressed with the store label at Dorothy Lane Market here in Dayton. Bottled in Ontario, Canada, their water is in a very sturdy bottle that I was able to easily grip and open without getting my gloves wet. On colder days, as we have been having lately, it is nice to keep dry gloves.

Everywhere you look, there are signs of the breakdown of what has been passing for civilisation. I regard the deliberate poisoning of municipal water supplies, which has been increasing since the 1930s, as a strong indicator that what people in the West have thought of as their civilisation is nothing of the sort. Looting by plundering scum is not civilised, and every Western government has been promoting looting to the maximum extent they can. There are many better ways of doing things. Some of those ways are resilient.

Jim Davidson is an author of 4 books, entrepreneur, and founder of the Resilient Ways Foundation at ResilientWays.net which is financing a rural community in Ohio and a theme park in Kansas with customer advance payments using their Resilient Way token.