My Church is a Farmer’s Market – And Vice Versa

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Jim Hightower, Humor Times

The Boggy Creek Farmstand is one farmers market out of more than a dozen flourishing in my hometown of Austin, Texas.

Well, habemus papam. Welcome, Pope Leo! Bless him … and us.

I hope no one thinks I am blasphemous, but I go to a church nearly every Saturday that is not denominational. It isn’t held in any sort of ornate cathedral, temple or mosque. It’s a plain wooden, open-air shed with a metal roof and a loose brick floor — but it’s filled with goodness, joy and a diversity of devotees who share in the bounty of nature. It’s the Boggy Creek Farmstand, is one farmers market out of more than a dozen flourishing in my hometown of Austin, Texas.

Indeed, thousands of these secular-but-soulful gathering places that nurture body and spirit have cropped up across America. From big city neighborhoods to rural towns, they provide a genuine grassroots alternative to factory food and monopoly megamarts.

The spread of this good food movement has been neither “miraculous” nor the product of some corporate conclave. Rather, it’s the organic result of hundreds of local coalitions — small farmers, consumer advocates, environmentalists, community officials and others dedicated to real, lasting progress of, by and for workaday people.

When organizing a Texas network of these cooperative ventures in my years as state agriculture commissioner, we followed a path blazed by (shhhh, don’t tell anyone) New York City. There, a pragmatic visionary named Barry Benepe and his can-do cohort were showing that small farmers could bypass the corporate system and profit by selling directly to consumers in the city.

This is Jim Hightower saying … Our friend Barry passed away last month at 96, but what a legacy — 45 Greenmarkets in New York City alone and a national farm-to-table movement! To help extend its reach into your town, go to Farmers Market Coalition.

Maga Extremists: Even too Nutty for Texas?

In this dark age of Trumpian rule, is there any glimmer of hope?

Yes — lo and behold: Texas!

I’ll bet you were not expecting that answer. Well, for sure, the Republican clique of arrogant billionaires and Christian supremacists who thought they owned Texas politics didn’t expect the comeuppance voters delivered to them in this month’s local elections.

In city and school board contests across the state, Texans bluntly said to right-wing operatives and officials: We’re sick of you — your constant attempts to divide and dictate, ban and bully, privatize and profiteer at the expense of the common good.

For example, in the flashing-red suburbs of Fort Worth, where GOP front groups have spent millions in dark money to take over school boards, Democratic challengers won 11 of 11 races! In Mansfield, the county’s third-largest city, all five right-wing extremists running for mayor and school board lost. “Mansfield has gone to Hell,” screeched one of the Christian Nationalist activists!

No, it’s being yanked back to its senses, rejecting hyper-partisan nutballism and church dictatorship in favor of, you know, educating children!

Also, voters in Katy, Fort Bend, Plano, Richardson and other big suburbs — long written off as solid red bastions — produced sweeping progressive victories.

This grassroots turnaround is no accident. It’s largely the product of a young generation of progressive activists revitalizing the tried-and-true practice of “little-d” democratic organizing — which means showing up in person, day in and day out, to connect with workaday people, focusing on their real problems.

This is Jim Hightower saying … Of course, this doesn’t mean Texas is suddenly blue — but it’s on the right path and that offers hope in other red and purple areas. Remember: The first rule of politics is to show up.

Jim Hightower
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