Joel Salatin on Modern Society’s Uneasy Relationship with Death

That kind of stress plays a big factor with people's immune systems all the time. People are stressed out, they always get sick. It's real, real common. It just makes sense. And I think this kind of fear, particularly, I mean, the way I was experiencing it, when the lockdown was first ordered and everyone was at the supermarket, no one was wearing masks yet, but everyone was stockpiling food. And you know, we were nervous. We were real nervous because we didn't know what this was going to be like. I was nervous particularly because I feel like the information we were getting out of China was not correct. And I was worried that when you see those videos of them spraying disinfectant on houses and buildings, it's like maybe this is way worse than we think it is. And it's going to hit America really hard because we've been lied to by the Chinese. There was a lot of fear. So I remember lying in bed at night and like testing my breath like, maybe I have it now. Maybe it's going to get worse. You know, there's a lot of that. Yeah. There was a lot of that. I didn't sleep real good at all for maybe the first few days of lockdown till I sort of calmed down and realized, well, I'm not going anywhere. I can't get it. You know, and then I got tested. I'm like, okay, well, this is nice to know that I don't have it currently. Like maybe if I just keep doing what I'm doing, I won't get it. But then, you know, I'd have days where half the day I think this is all bullshit. What we need to do is tell people how to strengthen their immune system. And then you read some crazy story about some new inflammatory syndrome. They're fine on, you know, some patients where, you know, their feet are swelling up. Yeah. Blue toes and all this. Yeah. They get scared again. Yeah. Yeah. I'm totally with you. And I think that that brings up the issue of how our society now views death. I read an interesting article just in the last couple of days about how, how, as we have left, it used to be when we were kids, we used the term somebody dropped dead. Remember that? You know, they just dropped dead. Old days. Well, today we don't say they dropped dead. We say apparently medicine failed them or the hospital. It's like, it's like instead of just people, yeah, we do drop dead. Instead, every death is some sort of a failure of our technosophisticated cryogenic, you know, system that's supposed to keep everybody, you know, beautiful and perfect forever. And the fact is, you know, and I think that's an advantage of on the farm where we are. I mean, we see death every day. I mean, we know that things and in fact, in fact, death makes room. I mean, a compost pile is death in life. I mean, it's you've got microbes eating stuff that was living and then that makes new life. And of course, my family knows that when I go, they're supposed to put me in a compost pile. You know, do you? Really? Yeah. Yeah. Put me in a compost pile. I mean, that's. Is that legal, though? Don't they have to cremate you or something stupid? I think I think they have to at least put me in the ground or something. But that's my joke. Yeah. I don't even think they're allowed to just put you in the ground. I think they have to pump you up with chemicals. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, my dad, my dad, nothing. Really? No, in the ground. That was it. And did you have to sign paperwork saying that you didn't kill your dad or anything? Because, you know, what? No, what we did have to get was a special use permit for a family graveyard. Oh. So we've got permission for 10 spots. So in a family graveyard, you don't have to use formaldehyde. No, nothing. Nothing. Everywhere else you do, though, correct? You either cremate or use formaldehyde. And I think these formaldehyde before they cremate. Well, there are now burgeoning around the country. There are natural cemeteries. Really? Yeah. And there are especially primitive cemeteries where nothing is used. But you probably can't even zoom anybody, right? You zoom your bones, I guess. The bones would stay for a good while. We know the bones last a long time. But, you know, my thing is that, look, I don't want a bunch of people to die. But the fact is that death is transformative. And I don't want to get all too mystical and spiritual. But whatever your spiritual tradition is, mine happens to be Judeo-Christian. I think so. I think there is an afterlife. But even if there's nothing, even if you say, well, I'm dead and there's no spirit and I'm gone, even so, that makes room for tomorrow's babies. It makes room for new ideas, new things. I mean, you can't have life without the regenerative capacity of death. And the foundation of ecology is life, death, decomposition, regeneration. Life, death, no, regeneration might look like something else. Okay. But that's our digestion. It's compost. It's, you know, it's everything. And when we get sterilized and move away from that, I think we lose the beauty of the transformative capacity of that part of life. Yeah, I think it speaks to what you were talking about earlier, that they look at death as some sort of a failure instead of just a part of the natural cycle.