b'meetings large and small, public and private, around the country since 2009, and thousands have put $75 million into more than 750 small organic farms and local food enterprises in dozens of communities, in the name of local economic vitality, community resilience, health and soil fertility. (Social distancing be damned, all those gatherings seem awfully sweet right about now. . .)The second audience is the next circle of folks who might wish to join this particular fray. That wish is tied to a smile which is tied to an intention which is tied to an inkling about the possibility of fixing thingseconomy, democracy, culturefrom the ground up, and while that inkling was inkling before the novel coronavirus went zoonotic, it is inkling even more ardently today. It takes one ardent inkling, indeed, to impel folks to put a few thousand dollars here and a few million dollars there to work, gathering in volun-teer-led local groups, angel investors and philanthropists alongside small investors and donors, farmers and neighbors and food entrepre-neurs, using no one investment instrument, no one interest rate and, sometimes, even making 0% loans, suspending (or is it bending? or mending?) the rules of the Great Fiduciary in the Sky. Are these acts of economic madness? Some might say so. Some might say the economic madness lies elsewhere. When Oscar Wilde observed that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, he missed the deeper diagnosis. Ours is not an economic cynicism. Ours is an economics-induced pathology far more life-threatening than that. Its as if economic madness 13'