I am currently rereading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which I highly recommend to everyone. Most of us know his most famous quote from that work, regarding “going to the woods to live deliberately.” There is, however, another statement he makes much further in the work, in the chapter “Baker Farm,” which struck me as being even more important and appropriate for consideration, particularly today. I wanted to provided that here, without further comment (for the time being!):
[A]nd yet he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day.
But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.