Let me tell you a story

Let me tell you a story. (Not my personal story)

When I was a boy, I grew up walking the soft earth of a farm that had been in my family for more than a hundred years. A thousand acres of rich, breathing land. My father had inherited it from his father, and his father before him. Five generations of my family lived and died on that farm, and they were buried there. Just like the trees, we had roots deep in the land.

I remember the forests my grandfather planted, cool shade in the summer, the whisper of leaves moving like waves in the wind. I remember the barns that smelled of hay and animals, the creak of wood that had absorbed a century of labor and laughter. The soil was dark, moist, alive.

The water from the irrigation channels ran cold and clear, feeding the fields that gave us bread. It was not just a farm, it was a body, a memory, a legacy. It pulsed with life. And my father told me: this is yours to keep, to protect, to pass on.

When my turn came, though, I was no farmer. I was an economist. College educated and proud of it. A believer in the free market. And when I looked out over that land, I didn’t see legacy. I saw capital.

Underutilized capital! Oh the profits I could make.

So I brought in the men with saws. I chopped down the forests, felt the trees crash, smelled the resin bleeding from the stumps. I stripped the topsoil, watched the dark richness hauled away in trucks. I slaughtered the animals, their cries echoing in the barns before the silence settled. I tore down those barns too, the wood splintering, the smell of dust and rot rising as beams fell. I sold the tractors, the plows, the very tools that had fed my family. And when it was all gone, I sold the land itself. By the end of the year, I had more money in my hands than my father had made in a decade. I told myself: I must be a brilliant farmer. The most profitable year this land has ever seen.

And boy did I live well that winter! And the next.

But eventually the money ran out. And the wind blew over barren fields. My children had no dark forest to play in. The great oak outside our house, where I once swung on a rope as a boy, was gone, and so my children could not swing on it. They could not ride ponies in the back lot, as I had as a child, because there were no ponies left. The barns stood no more to echo with their laughter as they jumped in the hay piles. There were no trees to shelter me, no soil to plant in, no animals to tend, no barns to walk into, no land to stand on. There was nothing. I had eaten the body of my inheritance. The wealth was gone. I had not created, I had consumed.

And this, my friend, is what we in the West have done. We sold out our inheritance, our fertility, our cohesion, our sovereignty, for the glitter of numbers: higher GDP, inflated house prices, the soft luxury of retirement. We told ourselves we were richer than ever. But all along, we were selling the forest, the soil, the barns, the animals, the very farm itself. We mistook liquidation for profit. Consumption for wealth.

And the bill will not come to us. It will come to our children, who inherit the empty fields, the silence where there was once life, and the ruins of what was once a civilization.