We don’t want your American dream!

We don’t want your dream, we want ours.  Don’t enforce your dream on us or we will fight you away!

Let’s be frank.  It is your American dream we don’t want,

- we want everyone’s different and self defined dream, the ones you can not sell to us

We don’t want a huge house full of automation,

- we want a little home full of rational simplicity

We don’t want a huge car on a huge highway, over huge bridges and tunnels, for hundreds of miles every day,

- we want simple clean transportation to the few places close by and once in a long while to visit some faraway place of interest, even if it takes too long to get there.

We don’t want huge dams and pipelines, artificial reservoirs, and chemical treatment plants

- we want clean local water from natural resources

We don’t want mass produced industrial food

- we want to locally grow clean, sustainable, organic, authentic, fresh food

We don’t want machines made out of strange dangerous metals from deep inside earth and billions of tons of toxic waste pumped through the fields around your mines,

- we want simple machines made of already plentiful recyclable materials that would last for generations

Comments and dialog

For those of you who have something to say about what you read here please write.  We have no interest in preaching with our ears shut.  We are interested in discussion and a dynamic formation of new ideas that are a product of collective input not individual expression.  We wish we had answers and solutions for everything  but we don't.  We are learning ourselves, hence the reference to education, learning, sharing, solving, failing, and best of all learning from failure.

We have also accumulated a ton of practical information and resources that deal with the problems of daily routines of autonomous collective living.  We are trying to find a way to separate and classify information (documents, audio-visual, manuals, etc) but it is harder to do than we originally thought.  we welcome contribution to this are as well.

The only ideal we have in mind and a priority is to add towards solutions and not criticize others' proposals.   We are not bound by any other "idealism"!  No flag no symbol!

1968 : A chronology of events in France and internationally

1968 : A chronology of events in France and internationally

A short chronology of the events which swept France in May and June 1968. Starting as a student revolt, the events culminated in mass workplace occupations and a general strike of 10 million workers.
Followed by a short international chronology.

May 68 - 40 years on

It was a festival without beginning or end; I saw everyone and no-one, for each individual was lost in the same enormous strolling crowd; I spoke to everyone without remembering either my own words or those spoken by others, because everyone's attention was absorbed at every step by new objects and events, and by unexpected news.
— Bakunin, Confessions
May 1968 has entered into legend - to the point where when new waves of struggle break out in France young people get irritated by the inevitable comparisons to 68 that are aired in the media. The 2006 anti-CPE movement is only the most recent example. Yet May 68 was the most advanced movement of an exceptional year of struggle that remains a high-point of the post-WWII era. Hopes and possibilities were raised high - yet the revolution never came, even though the idea of revolution (though often limited and confused) was a part of the general ferment and atmosphere in a way that seems extraordinary now, looking back from where we are. Our times are in many ways the era of counter-revolution that followed - the outcome of the defeat of the struggles of the 1960s and 70s, when 'the social question' dominated life to varying degrees.

The end is near

La ZAD is not a story that is told, it is a story that is lived

Testimonies > La ZAD is not a story that is told, it is a story that is lived 

Friday 18 January 2013, by zadist

All the versions of this article: [English] [français]
 

La ZAD is not a story that is told, it is a story that is lived.

You are sleeping, this is a dream.
After an hour and a half on the road, we arrive at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. We park in a small parking lot, across from the town hall. A graffitied road sign loudly proclaims “ZAD”; we are not very far.
If, regarding urbanisation, the acronym ZAD means “Zone d’Amenagement Differé”(Zone of Deferred Development), for us it takes different meanings. The 2000 hectares upon which Vinci plans to build an airport and companion road network have been re-baptised “Zone à Défendre” (Zone to Defend) by the project’s opponents. This project will not be realised. The project’s opponents already are envisaging the future and the possibilities of putting their desires into practice. Coming from a defensive position, they now fight “for”, for a “Zone d’Autonomie Définitive” (Zone of Definitive Autonomy).

The Effective Extremist Collective

... they can't be too extreme or else they will be ignored ...

"First, social-psychological studies of small groups show that "moral exemplars" -- those who stand outside the general consensus and at first are labeled as "extremists" -- can often be very effective, but with one important qualification: they can't be too extreme or else they will be ignored. Thus, the trick for any social change agent is to be just extreme enough to be an "effective extremist."

Second, historical case studies of social change show that a very small number of highly organized and disciplined people, drawing great energy from their strong moral beliefs and supreme confidence in their shared theoretical analysis, can have a big impact."

What Social Science Can Tell Us About Social Change
by G. William Domhoff
March 2005

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science.html