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We left our flowers and ego's at the door. |
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Dennis's Trip Toward Spirituality |
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There are 7 areas to search to find a friend from the 1960's: Web laurelrose badabamama thefarm raysender home inreach wheelers diggers Just click the appropriate web site. Here is another place to search: The Diggers Very Early Guestbook |
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Tomas Dennis Diaz as he is today in Marion, Kentucky and in 1968 in
Lexington, Kentucky at his sister Sandy's home. Tomas met Laurel Rose in
Chicago
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Powered by WebRing. |
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"A FRESH APPROACH TO THE PROBLEMS OF THE INNER CITIES: A MODEST PROPOSAL George Bush is being unusually perceptive when he says, "Things aren't right in most inner cities of our country." He is calling for a "fresh approach". A fresh approach requires recognition of the fact that among the underclass in our country there is a certain component -- perhaps the youngest and brightest -- for whom life in the mainstream of contemporary society is a lethal environment. They are alienated and desperate, not because they are unemployed but because they are technologically unemployable. Their labor power is no longer needed in the production of the goods and services which our society requires. They are allergic to working at jobs that can now or soon will be done better by a robot, and their number is growing with every major layoff that corporate America resorts to increasingly in order to remain competitive. Talk of job core opportunities is a joke to these people because the goals and incentives offered by life in the mainstream are insufficient inducement for them to do that kind of work. They are trying to survive in a lethal environment. George Bush and Jack Kemp cannot grasp the mind set of the truly desperate. Bush and Kemp have great difficulty understanding people who would rather bum on the street than earn chump change flipping burgers to come up with the rent for slum housing. Talk of enterprize zones, tax incentives to empower the physical proximity of employment no longer has any meaning for the truly desperate. Even assuming funds were to be made available which is very doubtful, resucitating Head Start, Job Core, Medicaid, and Food Stamps all over the United States will not prevent a repetition of the Los Angeles riots in other cities where the situation for the under-class is as bad or worse. A repetition of the Los Angeles tactic in Chicago when the wind was blowing would be horrendous. What do they want? It seems obvious that right now many need leisure to figure out what is worth doing and obviously prefer the precarious leisure of the streets more than they fear unemployment, incarceration, starvation or homelessness, even though police harrassment and social opprobrium intensifiy their desperation and make this way of life a lethal environment. We dare not underestimate their desperation because new and very dangerous ways of expressing desperation have been devised in Los Angeles. Starting with simultaneous fires in a thousand different places of business for openers. . Just because billions are found to fight the Gulf War and/or bail out the Savings and Loan swindlers does not mean that any real money is going to be spent in the inner city. The desperate know that. So any a fresh approach had better be inexpensive or it wont be given a shot. An alternate, free rent, life style should be made available to those for whom the inner city is a lethal environment. An alternate life style based upon the tradition of intentional community in the United States. The hippy communes of the 'sixties can point the way to a solution. The Bureau of Public Land Management controls 16,600,000 acres in the State of California alone. As a pilot study, I think a dozen quarter sections of that land located far enough away from the nearest neighbors should be open to any and all who feel they are on the brink of madness. It would be premature to begin designing these new towns until we see who takes advantage of this opportunity. It's possible that no one will show up. That's okay, no money has been wasted. Let's not worry about housing, food, clothing etc., etc. The first-comers will be real pioneers. That's a good social role. Let's see who shows up and what they want/need to stay there. There'll be time enough to plan and build later on. One of the fringe benefits of making some kind of rural retreat or a new town available to people on the brink of madness is that a re-tribalization of America begins. A tribe is a group of people living together without written rules. The absence of the tribal relationship in contemporary society is one of its features which makes it so inhumane. There is nothing to fill the gap between the disfunctional family and the oppressive society. Like-minded people living in close proximity is the healthiest enviroment on earth, especially for kids. The only way to guarantee good behavior on the part of the people in these new towns is to deed the land to God. "This land belongs to God, behave accordingly." If there are a dozen or more such pieces of God's land then each will start to build its own tribe. This Western hemisphere land longs to be lived on tribally. And one of the principal problems of intentional community will be solved by the land, namely, who gets to stay and who's gotta go. If you don't like the people here, go to another new town and see how you like it there. There are communitarians alive today with vast experience in this kind of communal living. Many of them could be persuaded to move out on this land and show by example what they know to those who want to learn. I am willing to bet that when the common interest is defined, people who will not work in the inner city will accomplish great tasks in the common interest. We've gotta do something to relieve the pressure and this won't cost a lot. " |
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I talked to him as I held him while placing him in a cat
carrier and I told him that the vet was going to look at his leg and
fix it up for him. I talk to animals
a lot; I normally do not get any responses other than a rub on the leg
or arm.
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