So I was starting to write about a debate I heard last night on KQED on "California is the first failed state." It was on Intelligence Squared, so I went to their website to look something up and lo and behold, found this one lurking in their recent broadcasts:

THE US SHOULD STEP BACK FROM ITS SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAEL

And here's the great news: Before the debate, the live NYC audience voted 33% for the motion, 42% against and 25% undecided. Following the debate, 49% voted for the motion, 47% against and 4% undecided. Roger Cohen & Rashid Khalidi carried the day.

So sounds like we all want to catch it! You can download the full or edited audio and watch the video by clicking here.

The Enemy Is Ourselves

I don't like using this blog to criticize other activist groups, but today I feel like I have to.

This morning, the radio show Letters to Washington had a round table on the anti-war movement, inspired by the report (not quite accurate, according to Democracy Now!) that the U.S. death toll in Afghanistan topped 1,000 in the last couple days. My friend David Solnit was on the panel, as was Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, and some other people I can't actually remember right now. So they started out talking about how in order to reenergize the anti-war movement, we need to make alliances with people who are affected and outraged by the economic and budgetary crises in the country. They talked about making connections with the students organizing the March 4 protest of the dismantling of California's educational system.

Now that's obviously an idea I agree with; just today, I was making stickers for March 4. But it's not a new and untried idea. Back in the 1980s we were chanting, "Money for Jobs, Not for War," "Money for Health Care, Not for Warfare," "Money for Schools, Not for War," "Feed the People, Not the Pentagon." That was when the wars were in Central America, something the students organizing March 4 probably never even heard of. Back then I remember going to meetings where people explained and adjured and harangued each other that if we wanted poor people and people of color to join the movement to end the wars abroad we needed to start talking about the "war at home." In 1983, people from the various anti-war and social justice groups formed a Coalition for Jobs, Peace and Justice, which had an annual demonstration by the same name. It was a nice coming together for a day, but it did not succeed in creating a unified movement, and it certainly didn't succeed in putting an end to imperialist wars or the war-based economy.

So if it's not clear by now, I was kind of peed off right off the bat.
But then Medea Benjamin started talking about how we need to reach out to the Tea Party people, because they're also against the wars because we can't afford them. The host of the panel asked her if we were going to see joint Code Pink-Tea Party actions, and she said that that was being discussed. And then I lost it. As it happens, just last night I was at a meeting where someone said something similar about the movement for single-payer health care, that we should be able to make an alliance with the Tea Partiers because they hate the corporations too. My friend Deeg laid out very succinctly and eloquently why that's not possible. I sure wished she had been in that round table, and I also wished they were taking call-ins, since no one else on the panel decided to point out that the Tea Parties may hate corporations (though they are funded by them), and some of them may think the wars are too expensive, but they also hate "welfare cheats," which in their mind means (all) Black people, and they also hate paying taxes so that the children of immigrants can go to school, and they also hate that the President is an African American whom they believe is a socialist and a Muslim.

That an anti-war movement could even be considering for one moment reaching out to a group whose folk hero and keynote speaker is Sarah Palin shows that it is not serious about making alliances with the groups they started out saying they needed to ally with, groups which are largely people of color, immigrants, and people who need public financing for their education.

Moreover, a legitimate anti-war movement is not going to align with people whose opposition to the war is based on the cost, because a true anti-war movement knows that once we withdraw our troops, we cannot simply keep all the money at home. We are going to owe – we already owe – massive reparations to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. And you are never going to sell that to the Tea Party people.

Are we so afraid of poor people, people of color and youth that we would rather join up with gun-toting bigots? If so, we have met the enemy and it is us.

Chapter 3 is up - Rania and Chloe Meet Top Killer

Chapter 3 is up! In Chapter 3, Chloe and Rania encounter a soldier called Top Killer, and Rania gets a clue about the abandoned car.


Chapter 3 - Meet Top Killer

Rania sought out one of the coffee kids and bought two small hot cups, nos hilwe, half sweet. She handed one to Chloe, and they settled under the shade of an olive tree. She sipped at the bitter cardamom-tinged liquid, savoring the feel of the tiny grounds in her teeth.

“Are you a journalist?” she asked.

“Not exactly.” Chloe had been evasive about the little object around her neck, and now she didn’t want to say what her work was. Rania started to wonder if it was so wise to be hanging around this woman. Perhaps she was an Israeli spy. But a spy would probably take care to have her story down.

“A student?” Rania persisted, though certainly, the woman was too old for a student in the conventional sense.

“Sort of … I’m trying to learn about the situation.”

“But why here?”

Chloe hesitated again. “Well, I’m Jewish,” she said, confirming Rania’s presumption. “I always heard great things about Israel growing up, but then I heard about the Intifada. So I wanted to see for myself what is really going on.”

“And what have you concluded?”

Chloe was quiet for a few beats, but this time Rania didn’t feel she was hiding anything. It seemed more like she was asking herself the question for the first time.

Keep reading

Chapter 2 is up

Chapter 2 of Murder Under the Bridge is online. In Chapter 2, Abu Anwar makes a startling discovery (you might be able to guess...) while going to his olive groves.

It's short, but there are some new photos to enhance the reading experience.

I'm really enjoying having everyone read my book. I wish I had done this months ago! I thought that self-publishing online wouldn't be as satisfying as having a "real" publisher publish a "real" book, but I have to say that so far, it's an absolute blast. It just makes me so happy to hear people saying, "I can't wait for the next chapter," "give me more," and telling me what they're thinking about the characters and the place. And I think that the serial format is really going to work for building the suspense and also creating a community around the novel, which is one of my goals.

I think some people are the type of writers who can't be happy putting out writing that is not the absolute best that it can be. Like my friend Steve, whose discipline I admire so much. For those writers, writing is as much about self-discovery and learning the craft as it is about creating something. Pure writers, I guess you would call them. I'm not like that. For me, writing is communicating. I can't be interested in one-way communication. That's why blogging is easy for me, and hard for Steve. Of course I like the thought that people will think my work is "good," but what's most important to me is that it's read. Which is why publishing may or may not be the right venue for me. What's great is that I'm exploring how the blog format can be adaptable as an online fiction journal, and it's surprisingly effective.

I'm also trying to figure out what all these different blogs and websites that I have now are going to be for, what I will put here, what on the Murder Under the Bridge blog, what on the facebook page, and what if anything will be on the website other than the blog. For now, the only thing I know for sure is that this will continue to be my home for random thoughts about everything under the sun, and the MUB blog will only have the book.

Comments always welcome here as well as there.

Read Chapter 2.

Kate

How do we "make him"?

Since the day Obama walked into the White House, people have been quoting the story, which he himself told on the campaign trail, about FDR’s alleged challenge to A. Philip Randolph to “go out and make me” end discrimination against African Americans in government hiring. (The story may be apocryphal; it was apparently told to Tavis Smiley by Harry Belafonte who heard it from Eleanor Roosevelt.) Every left-wing commentator points out ad infinitem that if we want Obama to do anything, or if we want Congress to do anything, we need to create a movement to make them do it.

That goes without saying. It did before Obama and it will long after Obama.

What I don’t hear people talking about nearly enough is what it takes to build such a movement. It’s not as simple as 1-2-3. Okay, we need a movement, let’s go buy one at Wal-Mart or log on and sign up at createamovement.org. Wanting it doesn’t get it done, and neither does believing it’s necessary.

One thing I had forgotten, is that Obama told the story in response to a question about finding a just solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. That’s pretty significant, because that is one issue on which we know Obama has flip-flopped since coming into public life. So we can assume that the policy he’s pursuing, of total appeasement toward Israel, is based on opportunism and not deeply held belief. Does it matter? Well it might, especially since policy toward Israel, as people like Walt and Mearsheimer have pointed out, is one area on which elite interest and the interests of justice could be made to, or made out to, coincide. And on the other hand, it’s one issue on which the interests opposed to justice are highly mobilized to stop any change from occurring. But so were the Dixiecrats. Kennedy and Johnson and their allies were deeply beholden to the southern Democrats, and for years they tried to ignore, marginalize, criminalize and defuse the civil rights movement until they couldn’t any more. The civil rights movement made them do it.

It’s also a popular myth – professor Chomsky, among others, spreads it – that U.S. policy toward South Africa changed in the 1980s because the government simply changed its mind, that the U.S. government was an early opponent of apartheid. Not true. U.S. policy towards South Africa changed because of several years of intense organizing following the Soweto uprising in 1976, and that organizing built on decades of less intense but no less critical organizing by groups such as the Committee of Americans for South African Resistance (AFSAR), of which Philip Randolph incidentally was an active member, and the Congressional Black Caucus. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act was only passed in 1986 (by overriding a veto by president Ronald Reagan), 14 years after the first anti-apartheid legislation was introduced by Ron Dellums, 25 years after the first boycott legislation was passed in Europe, and 24 years after the International Olympic Committee voted to exclude South Africa.

So by that standard, the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions to end Israeli apartheid is doing pretty well right now. But what hasn’t happened, at least certainly not in the Bay Area, is any upswelling of activism aimed at, or with a prayer of, making Obama (or anyone else in officialdom) change his policy toward Israel.

Why not?

In thinking about this question, I Googled “How to make a successful social movement” and the first thing that came up was something I’ve read a bunch of times before, “8 Stages of Successful Social Movements” by Bill Moyer. Well worth re-reading. One of the things that’s helpful about Moyer’s movement trajectory is that he incorporates down-turns as well as up-turns. So Stage 4 is “Take-Off” at which time “A catalytic (“trigger”) event occurs that starkly and clearly conveys the problem to the public” – think the invasion of Lebanon in 2006 or the assault on Gaza a year ago, or the threatened collapse of the U.S. economy – as a result of which, building on previous organizing by the movement, “The problem is finally put on ‘society’s agenda.’”

Most of us assume that once that happens, it’s full steam ahead. We think of the Montgomery Bus Boycott as the trigger and wiping out six years of ups and downs before the lunch counter sit-ins began, we see an inexorable urge toward the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But Stage 5, in Moyer’s outline, is "Movement Identity Crisis — A Sense of Failure and Powerlessness,” during which time “Those who joined the movement when it was growing in Stage 4 expect rapid success. When this doesn’t happen there is often hopelessness and burn-out.” And, says Moyer, “It seems that this is the end of the movement; in fact, it is now that the real work begins.”

So if I look at any of the movements I’ve been focusing on in the last few years: Palestine solidarity/BDS, anti-war, anti-torture, health care, I would say they’re nearly all in Stage 5 right now. Okay, so what does Moyer say to do in Stage 5? “Recognize that movement is nearing Stage Six and pursue goals appropriate to that stage.”

What’s Stage 6?
“Winning Majority Public Opinion. The movement deepens and broadens, finds ways to involve citizens and institutions from a broad perspective to address this problem. Growing public opposition puts the problem on the political agenda; the political price that some powerholders have to pay to maintain their policies grows to become an untenable liability. The consensus of the powerholders on this issue fractures, leading to proposals from the powerholders for change (often these proposals are for cosmetic change). The majority of the public is now more concerned about the problem and less concerned about the movement’s proposed change. Often there is a new catalytic event (re-enacting Stage 4).”

Wait, so if we’re at the stage of hopelessness and burnout, dwindling numbers at actions, that means we’re on the verge of winning majority public opinion? Maybe, maybe not. But part of the equation is that “new catalytic event,” and I think we can pretty much count on those. Israel will for sure take some new aggressive action before too long, because when has it not? The U.S. economy is too unstable not to have another, bigger crisis (not that this one is anywhere near over). Certainly Haiti could have been a trigger if the movement were in a position to remind people about Katrina.

So the real question is, what do we need to do to be ready to respond to the next catalytic event in a way that pushes us forward, instead of backward?

One of the things that occurs to me in looking at the movements that have been successful in this country is that nearly all of them have been strongly rooted in a specific community and culture. So, for instance, I looked at the website of the Building Movement Project, which looks at case studies of five nonprofits which moved to incorporate a social change agenda into their social service work. The stories are fascinating and inspiring, and one of the things I noticed about them are that they are all working with or in a very specific community. Several are primarily immigrant-oriented, all are limited to a pretty narrow geographic area (a city or neighborhood).

When I think about social movements in this country that have succeeded in bringing about significant social change, I think of the anti-apartheid movement, the civil rights movement, the United Farm Workers, the women’s movement, the AIDS treatment access movement, the retirees movement. And all of these movements were fairly culturally homogeneous, not necessarily in terms of who participated, but in terms of where their leadership was coming from and having a strong cultural base in one community or another. I mentioned this to a friend who said, “What about the labor movement?” But I think that the labor movement actually illustrates this point perfectly. We call it “the labor movement,” but in fact, it was many different movements. It’s not like “labor” suddenly rose up and demanded respect and contracts and got it. Every industry, often every workplace, had to be organized uniquely (and still does) and the organizing had to take into account who the people were who were working in that industry. The UFW involved thousands of organizers from many different backgrounds, but its heart and soul were in the Chicano community. The New York garment industry was organized by Jewish and Italian immigrant women, drawing on Eastern European and Italian traditions of labor militancy. The civil rights movement, of course, was rooted in the Black church, the anti-apartheid movement in the African American intelligentsia. The feminist movement had its base in primarily educated middle-class women, the AIDS movement among middle-class white gay men.

I am not trying to say that movements should be homogeneous, but I think one problem nowadays is that too many of the movements I’ve been part of have had as one of their goals being something they are not. We’re embarrassed about being who we are, we are not coming out of a place of pride in our community and wanting to flex our power, the way that the immigrant rights May Day marches have been. Instead we are well-meaning people who want to help others, or we are people who are ashamed of what our country is doing, or we are professional organizers “working with” a population we are not part of, or we are trying to become part of another culture because we don’t have one we identify with, or we are leftists who basically feel alienated from our whole society. And I just don’t see any of that as a recipe for success.

One of the things I always try to do with groups I’m in is look at who we are, and then try to figure out who we can influence. I think the trend in social movements right now is to do the opposite – to do power mapping, to look at who has the power to change the policy we’re focused on, who has influence over those people, and then try to craft a strategy to reach those influential people. So, for instance, I’ve sat in too many meetings where everyone insisted that the key to a successful movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel is campus activism, and we talked about that for two hours before recognizing that we had no students in the room. Or people were determined to target Lockheed Martin, which is really hard if you don’t know anyone who runs an airline. On the other hand, QUIT! (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism) set a goal as getting our local queer film festival to stop taking Israeli money, and we’ve been successful in getting them to take the issue seriously and recognize that it is not going away.

If FDR in fact told Philip Randolph to make him act to eliminate federal job discrimination against African Americans, he knew that Randolph had the constituency and the clout to do that. Randolph was the leader of the first African American trade union, and together with Bayard Rustin and A.J. Muste was threatening to organize a March on Washington in 1941 to demand integration of the armed forces. Obama, on the other hand, knows that we don’t have the base to make him change his policy on Palestine or on health care or end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We can’t bring a million people to Washington, not for single payer, not for justice for Palestine, not against the war. So why should he listen to us?

Either we are going to go home and wait for someone who does have a base to build a movement we can cheer from the wings, or we’re each going to give some thought to who we are and whom we can bring with us. I don’t mean the kind of “What 5 people are you going to bring to the next meeting?” exercise that the Organizing Institute people always make us do, but that we all do come from somewhere, we all live somewhere, almost all of us work somewhere, we all have people who care about us, and it’s time we start thinking seriously and strategically about how we can get those people into our movements. Because that’s what it will take to “make them do it.”

Open Letter to Democracy Now! - Stop Promoting Queer Militarism

Dear Amy and producers of Democracy Now!,

As a loyal listener, I have been shocked and appalled at your coverage of the controversy over whether LGBT people should be kicked out of the military.

Now, as a lesbian, and as a progressive and a supporter of human rights, of course I support people's right not to be fired from their chosen profession. That goes without saying. It's a civil right to be in the military. But the position of the group I work with, LAGAI - Queer Insurrection, and of most other progressive queer people, is that it's a human right to stay out of the military.

You would never have a heterosexual soldier on your show uncritically talking about their work, and not even ask them one question about why they want to be part of an institution whose purpose is to oppress and repress people all over the world and maintain U.S. control over the world's resources. By having those gay people on air, and not even challenging them, you are treating them - us - as less human than straight people. You are reinforcing the very policy that Don't Ask, Don't Tell is based on - that gay people are less moral, or cannot be held to the same ethical and human rights standards, as straight people.


There are many queer organizations that work against discrimination AND for human rights. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, we launched "We Like Our Queers Out of Uniform," a counter-recruitment packet for LGBT youth, and did tabling in the Polk District of San Francisco, where a lot of gay youth hang out. In 1993, we led a "Queers Out of Uniform" contingent of over 100 people in the LGBT March on Washington, carrying signs that said, "The U.S. Military: It's Not Liberation." We were even on the Sally Jesse Raphael show, but were ignored by the left.

As far as I can recall, you have never had an openly queer person on your show as a spokesperson for the antiwar movement. You have never had anyone from our group on your show, and it's not because we haven't tried. But you don't have to have us. There's Stephen Funk, a gay man who became a military resister, was in prison and has made connections with Israeli military resisters. There's Ryn Gluckman, author of the article "Ten Reasons Why Militarism Is Bad for Queer People," from Hampshire College. There's Sarah Lazare, who used to work for you, who is now an organizer with both Courage to Resist and the Queer Youth Organizing Project. There are so many people to choose from, you could probably have one on every day for a month.

Please stop promoting the image of gay people wanting to assimilate into militarist, heteronormative, nuclear family based society. You owe it to your listeners, you owe it to yourselves, and you sure owe it to us, the queer liberation movement.

In struggle,

Kate Raphael

Could We Create a Liberated Zone in the U.S.?

The other day on "Democracy Now," Amy Goodman had her annual sit-down with her former partner (not sure what exactly their relationship was or is, but the guy she went to East Timor with all those years ago), Allen Nairn. They were talking about Obama's first year, and Nairn was certainly devastating to anyone who still cherished some illusions or hope about Obama as a force for progressive change. For me, he said nothing that I hadn't known for a long time, and I ultimately had to turn it off.

The next day I was talking to a friend who had found the interview fascinating and inspiring, and she asked why I turned it off. I said it was demoralizing. But that isn't really true. What I found it was simplistic. He made a list of things "Obama" has done in foreign policy which are against U.S. and international law, and he kept saying that "Obama could turn off the killing machine but he has chosen not to." While that's technically true, I guess -- the president is the commander in chief, as we all know, and has the power under the constitution to unilaterally set foreign policy to an extent -- it doesn't accurately describe how U.S. foreign policy has ever been made in my lifetime. Let's just imagine that Obama, having been elected on his promise to bomb Afghanistan and Pakistan, etc., etc., walked into the White House last January and said, "Okay, we're leaving Afghanistan starting tomorrow?" Would the Powers-That-Be -- more on that later -- have simply shrugged and said, "Okay, well he's the president, nothing we can do about it?"

This is not to say that Obama couldn't and shouldn't have done better. Certainly he didn't need to expand the military spending, and he didn't need to try to fulfill his pledge to close Guantanamo by sending more people to indefinite detention in places like Afghanistan, Illinois and the countries they were kidnapped from in the first place. But it felt to me that by focusing on Obama and on the law, Nairn was skirting the thorny issue of WHY Obama, along with every other president we've had in my lifetime (and probably before) has kept the killing machine working so smoothly. And that's that there's not the political will in this country to turn our society into one that cares about people, in this country or any other. People who campaign on those promises -- Jesse Jackson, Cynthia McKinney, Dennis Kucinich -- get somewhere between 1% and 25% of the vote.

So the question that I was plagued by, as I listened to Allen Nairn, was how do we create the political will to live differently? To be honest, even most of the leftists who oppose U.S. militarism don't imagine a society not governed through violence. They only imagine the guns in the hands of people they like.

Nairn did say one thing that stuck with me as I turned off the TV. He was running down a list of countries where the U.S. has backed repressive regimes, and he mentioned Honduras, where the oligarchic leader Manuel Zelaya decided to abandon his fellow oligarchs and pursue more social equity. And of course we know what happened to Zelaya, and I think that is exactly what would happen to Obama if he were to make the same decision. Maybe it wouldn't look overtly like a military coup, but Obama would be gone, probably dead, and someone the oligarchs liked would be in the process of becoming the democratically elected president.

So the first thing I thought about after I turned off Democracy Now was that we need to get that this is an oligarchy, not a democracy. I mean, I know most leftists know that on some level, but we keep convincing ourselves that our "democratic institutions," whether in the form of mainstream candidates, third parties, legislators, legislation, legal action or protest, can be made to work. But if we understand that this is fundamentally an oligarchy, then we understand that it doesn't matter how they dress it up; ultimately, you cannot do anything that undermines the power of the oligarchs. Protest, such as we are doing now, actually helps them because it makes people believe we have democracy. Electoral campaigns help them even more because they not only promote the idea that we have democracy but they tie up humongous amounts of time and money and leave lots of demoralized people when they fail. And armed resistance, be it stupid unfocused armed resistance like setting fire to SUVs, or plots like the one embodied by underwear bomber, helps them immeasurably by convincing ordinary folks that they're in danger, and need the oligarchic power structure to keep them safe.

I'm not trying to say that we can't have minor victories. I'm not even suggesting that I'm going to stop organizing protest or that my friends who do environmental or civil rights law shouldn't keep trying to stop the worst abuses (my friend Lisa just won a big victory in court, protecting the Desert Tortoise -- congratulations!). But I have started to think about what it would really take to create the political will to have a different type of society. And that has made me start thinking seriously of building alternative institutions.

Now I have never been very big on alternative institutions. I've done my share of volunteering, there are some organizations I love, but I've never gotten really into the community garden thing or the community food coop thing or the free clinic thing. I admire people who do them, but I've never thought I had anything to contribute and somehow I've always felt that they would take time away from my political activism. And too often, I have felt like the people creating those alternative institutions are anti-political, acting as if it's possible to fundamentally change this society through volunteerism or charity work.

One question that now occurs to me is how alternative any institution that is coexisting with the dominant institutions can be. Pretty much, every time we try to set up alternative institutions we either:
· end up founding nonprofits, which if they are really successful, such as the rape crisis centers or domestic violence programs, end up becoming an arm of the state
· end up creating something that is underfunded, understaffed and therefore doesn't provide whatever benefit it's meant to provide as well as the corporations do
· end up creating something that has too many internal contradictions because it's only accessible to people with lots of leisure time or people willing to dedicate all their non-work time to social projects
· have to abandon the project because we can't fund it; or
· spend all our time fundraising and not much doing what we're supposed to be doing.

Whether our alternative institutions succeed or fail (and they seem to mostly fail), they inevitably end up shoring up the dominant institutions by plugging some hole that it is supposed to fill, and/or proving that "the system works" -- i.e., charity is a viable way to get social needs met, or lack of childcare isn't a problem because people can just set up coops.

But what if we could really separate ourselves from the dominant institutions, withdraw both our money and our labor from them, and completely reject their services?

Everyone I know fantasizes about leaving this country. We know that we can't change its policies, and we neither want to be supporting/funding them nor be repressed by them. We feel dispirited and disempowered by continually ramming our heads against the wall of collective indifference. A few of my friends have actually moved to other countries -- some more happily than others, but for most of us it's not really an option. Where would we go, how would we make a living (do we want to teach English?), would we end up doing anything more worthwhile in some other country or would we be even more alienated because we would not even be citizens and most of us wouldn't know the language?

I have always felt that self-imposed exile would be nothing more than an abrogation of responsibility by a privileged few.

But what if instead of taking ourselves out of the U.S., we could take the U.S. out of us?

Could we create a liberated zone within the territory held by the U.S.?

Imagine:

Everyone within a certain community -- town, street, neighborhood -- stops working for corporations or the nonprofits they fund and stops paying taxes to the U.S. and the State. With our combined unpaid taxes as seed money, we free ourselves from the need to work for them. We declare that we do not want their protection, their schools, their hospitals, their roads. We begin to create our own economy, put our own labor toward building our own schools, roads, hospitals, as if we lived in the free country we want to live in, and in fact, we declare that we are a free country, we are not part of the U.S., we are not subject to their laws, we have our own governing agreements..

We open our borders to whoever wants to join us, regardless of their country of origin, we demilitarize, we educate our kids in the ways that make sense to us, we grow our own food and heat our houses with solar and wind and whatever.

If the U.S. doesn't mow us down before we get established, then we start visiting other towns and explaining how our community works. We invite them to join the experiment, trade with us, start some complementary industry to ours, and so on and so forth.

Okay, obviously, I realize that we would not be allowed to do this. Probably within a year or two, the federal and/or state governments would come in to collect their taxes, bringing their soldiers to throw us out of our houses, raze our schools, repossess (or steal) everything of any value, and imprison everyone in town if they couldn't figure out who the "leaders" were. Or they would just shoot their way in and kill us all. But let's just imagine for a few moments that that didn't happen. Let's play with the idea that we could do it. What are some of the issues that would need to be resolved, just among us, if this experiment were going to get off the ground?

· Where do we get water? Gas for our cars? Are we going to use animals for transportation? Food? Are we vegan?
· What other resources would we need that would be hard to come by?
· How large an area would we need to control? How many people would we need to include to start? What would we need to have gotten together before we could start?
· If all the land and property in town were owned locally, would that be enough to ensure that we couldn't be evicted right away?
· We would presumably need some kind of industry that provides us enough capital to start off with, and some way to deliver our product. What could that be? Software? Websites? Data entry?
· How would we protect ourselves? If we have weapons, then we quickly become Ruby Ridge or Wounded Knee. If we don't, then what happens when some group of people, governmental or otherwise, decides to attack us, for whatever we have, for the political example we are setting, or just because?
· Could we raise enough food to withstand the inevitable siege from the U.S.?
· What happens if people join us and won't follow the "rules"? What if we ask people to leave and they won't?
· Presumably if we had open immigration, the U.S. government would use the possibility of al-Qaeda or other operatives sneaking through our borders into theirs to invade us. And indeed, if we're demilitarized, how would we make sure that people aren't doing that?
· What if someone won't work?
· What happens when the kids grow up (assuming that there are kids, and assuming we last that long), and want to go to college in the U.S.? How would we establish their credentials? Would they all leave, and we would die out like the Shakers?
· What would we do for entertainment? Presumably we wouldn't be able to get much television, or Netflix, if we aren't going to buy them from U.S. corporations. Bootleg DVDs? Would that become a premise for the FCC to invade us?
· Would we give every person in town an hour a week on the local television or radio station to do whatever they wanted with? Would people do interesting things, and would we watch or listen to them?
· If we create our own passports and manage to get other countries to agree to accept them, where do we fly out of? What if the U.S. won't accept our passports?
· Could we create enough medical infrastructure? I guess if we couldn't, we could send people to hospitals in the U.S., just as people do in countries where there isn't enough medical care.

I have to say that all these questions have only whetted my appetite to get started. I keep wondering where we could try it. A coastal area seems best, or at least access to a coast. Emeryville? Alameda? Pacifica? West Berkeley? Treasure Island, with all that new housing created after the Navy left?

Anyone want to get together and discuss how we could make this happen?