We Are As Gods Quotes

“Young back-to-the-landers who had felt reassured by the "real" skills of growing their own food and building their own shelter were now also experiencing what their farm neighbors and forebears had long known: relying strictly on yourself and on the land for your livelihood puts you frighteningly at the mercy of chance. An early frost, a slipped saw blade, a hot-selling market vegetable suddenly passing out of vogue- one stroke of bad luck could be devastating. Many were shocked to discover that poverty- even romantic, "turned-on" poverty- was defined not by a lack of material possessions but by a lack of control. Mortgages and health insurance and the other systems their parents had counted on to provide stability suddenly made a lot more sense.”
― Kate Daloz, We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America

“In explaining his own move away from communal living, Ken Kesey cited "the great statement" made by his friend Babbs: " We don't want a commune, we want a community," Myrtle Hill would have agreed. While they had found that they were happier not living together, no one was ready to give up on their connection to one another or on their interdependence.”
― Kate Daloz, We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America

“American urge to reinvent ourselves in the wilderness spiked into its largest, most influential and most radical manifestation ever. That decade, as many as a million young Americans uprooted themselves, almost en masse, abandoning their urban and suburban backgrounds in favor of a life in the countryside. They were almost all white, well-educated, and from middle-class or wealthy backgrounds. This was not a coincidence. For many, the choice to live a life of radical austerity and anachronism was certainly a rebellion against the comfort and prosperity of their Eisenhower-era childhoods, but that same background of comfort also offered a security and safety net that made such radical choices possible. For some, trust funds and allowances actually financed their rural experiments; for most others, family support was more implied than actual—if things really went wrong on the farm, they knew, their parents could bail them out or take them in. But even those who had cut ties with their families altogether were still the recipients of a particular, inherited confidence.”
― Kate Daloz, We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America

“She was not alone. “There’s a definite panic on the hip scene in Cambridge,” wrote student radical Raymond Mungo that year, “people going to uncommonly arduous lengths (debt, sacrifice, the prospect of cold toes and brown rice forever) to get away while there’s still time.” And it wasn’t just Cambridge. All over the nation at the dawn of the 1970s, young people were suddenly feeling an urge to get away, to leave the city behind for a new way of life in the country. Some, like Mungo, filled an elderly New England farmhouse with a tangle of comrades. Others sought out mountain-side hermitages in New Mexico or remote single-family Edens in Tennessee. Hilltop Maoists traversed their fields with horse-drawn plows. Graduate students who had never before held a hammer overhauled tobacco barns and flipped through the Whole Earth Catalog by the light of kerosene lamps. Vietnam vets hand-mixed adobe bricks. Born-and-bred Brooklynites felled cedar in Oregon. Former debutants milked goats in Humboldt County and weeded strawberry beds with their babies strapped to their backs. Famous musicians forked organic compost into upstate gardens. College professors committed themselves to winter commutes that required swapping high heels for cross-country skis. Computer programmers turned the last page of Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life and packed their families into the car the next day. Most had no farming or carpentry experience, but no matter. To go back to the land, it seemed, all that was necessary was an ardent belief that life in Middle America was corrupt and hollow, that consumer goods were burdensome and unnecessary, that protest was better lived than shouted, and that the best response to a broken culture was to simply reinvent it from scratch.”
― Kate Daloz, We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America

“she needed rest, but it was more than that—she needed to get someplace where she could breathe a little better, where her daughter could run barefoot without stepping in dog shit and broken glass and where she wasn’t waiting all the time for a catastrophe she couldn’t even name. Later when she heard Joni Mitchell sing about Woodstock, the lyrics, written that same summer, could have been channeled straight from Loraine’s own mind: “I’m going to camp out on the land/I’m going to try an’ get my soul free . . . We’ve got to get ourselves/Back to the garden.” For Loraine, her next move felt obvious. One day, she left.”
― Kate Daloz, We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America