Dinnertime for Radicals

The last post I wrote ("Bad Education," below) had been on my mind for awhile, was one of the more difficult thoughts I've tried to materialize lately, and in the end, did not completely produce the desired result. It reeks a bit of angst-in-a-bubble, like if the character Doug, from The State ("I'm a rebel...."), were to be converted by The Boondock Saints; "me against the world," and so on. But more importantly, concepts like the desire to possess someone else's time are left mostly unelucidated. Even more so, this giant preoccupation we have with the idea of "becoming someone in life"... well, there's a lot more to say about that.

My plan was to let it sit a week, and then revisit it with corrections. But a week later, and then two and a half weeks later, I'm still not sure how to correct it, update it, modify it, or do anything else to it. So I'll let it stew, on a cyberspace burner, and wait to see if it comes up again, perhaps even in real life.... In the meantime, instead of correcting something I wrote, I will "correct" something that someone else wrote:

Every town in the world of any size should have a neighborhood named "Freetown" (as in Freetown Christiania, Copenhagen). A place where people who don't have any employment or guns or TVs or bitterness or allegiance to a flag can go.

People like that are treated like pariahs in other neighborhoods, kept on the move by cops, teachers, and small-business owners. Like jellyfish, they are happy to move, but it's nice to have somewhere to go, some times....

Somewhere they can continue to drift, to and fro, enchanted variously by a cactus, a castle, and the hairnets of other jellyfish, until they come to rest at the local cinema or library.

Where they can chat and play all day. Where they can plant gardens and farm. Where they can drink in the streets. The basic idea is this one: a place where people can be free of the dominance that they inevitably suffer from under a capitalist hierarchy.