Since the Baby Picture Project launch required me to be out of town, one of the “Triple A’s,” in the Baby Picture Project, Amy, sent me the url for me to watch Gar Alperovitz’s talk in Bloomington on December 3. If you are — or are internally driven to become — a community activist of any kind, then please do absorb this talk! You will come away inspired, and with a fuller understanding of both the dots that need to connect, and ways that people in local communities all across this country are learning how to connect them.
BTW: his 1.5 hour talk and Q&A was recorded by CATS, a community institution in Bloomington since 1973!
Most important: Gar’s focus is utterly local and PRACTICAL. He sketches out the beginnings of a third way, beyond capitalism and socialism, a transformed system created over time from an already-begun mosaic of truly democratic, on-the-ground experiments all over the country that when scaled up regionally, could knit together. He urges us to see ourselves as “historical actors,” much like those who, for 20 years, worked locally all across America in various local experiments that finally got systematized in the New Deal.
And what gets these experiments started? Pain. Extreme, community-wide pain — both cultural and economic. The pain has to be great enough for us to begin to take action.
Are we there yet?
