From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: Globalization and Community
Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2003 08:36:34 -0500


Hugh,

In some respects it seems the small farmers were like a miner's canary -
an early warning sign of the impact of development and economic
complexification upon all of us.  

I think in many respects we share similar values and would both prefer
to witness other outcomes in a world more tolerant of another mode of
living.

I guess my own hopelessly unrealizable vision is something like this. 

I would prefer to live in a world where people would have less and be
more; a world less competitive and less ostentatious where everyone
would have their basic needs met and have more free time and the
resources available to actualize themselves - whether this takes the
form of pursuing intellectual and spiritual endeavors or engaging in the
local community to create new babylons of endless adventure in the form
of festivals, architecture, art, theatre, dance, play, poetry - to
create the convivial city.

Not a simple return to nineteenth century world, but a more
decentralized Jeffersonian world in which people are linked globally
with information and communication technologies, but live out more
ecological lives at the local level, growing their own food, making
their own clothing, buildings and transportation, but doing in a manner
that utilizes both current knowledge and appropriate technology, slowing
things down to live out more contemplative meaningful lives, and taking
the arts out of the museums and galleries to bring them into everyday
life in order to transform it. An artistic Jeffersonian direct democracy
with a highly educated and cultivated populace that emphasizes simple
Epicurean pleasures. A world that is more like a rave than a shopping
mall.

I recognize this is just a dream, a fantasy, and it currently has
absolutely no chance of being enacted in our contemporary world.  The
twentieth century was a political battle waged against Fascism and,
retrospectively, it appears the Fascists have won. 

As an American I am worried about our country.  The people who cry the
loudest about patriotism today only remind me of the brown shirts and
the black shirts who preceded them. Only now the Fascists have the
technology to make their world happen. 

They piss on the poor, elevate a new aristocracy of the wealthy and
famous, consolidate the media in the hands of a few for propaganda
purposes (we distort, you decide) fight neo-colonial wars for obvious
transparent lies, reduce religion to fundamentalist forms of thought
control, lower the standards of health, education and the environment
until fear, panic and terror drive out everything else. We have met the
future and it looks like George W. Bush.

Welcome to the desert of the real....

eric