How exciting that peace mom Cindy Sheehan was arrested in front of the White House with a smile on her face! She should be happy filled with the hope that change is in the air after the massive protest in Washington , D.C. Sept 24th. Officials estimated that up to 300,000 people surrounded the White House and chanted that it was time to evict the president and arrest him for war crimes. Someday real soon I believe that this dream of justice will come true. The peace movement leaders will gain control over the United States and new wonderful policies are able to be enacted that are designed to heal the planet. From there, who knows? Maybe the Earth Charter can really take hold and a whole new world is born. It takes mothers to birth this world and the Gold Star Mothers for Peace are leading the way. So what is the revolutionary agenda once there is a change of power? How do we design a world of equal opportunity for all? How do we create a meritocracy within our democracy so that the striving for excellence is able to be rewarded and those who are excellent in their vocations are able to rise into positions of power? Futurist Barbara Hubbard calls it a synergetic democracy, a term where people have connected with their creative selves and have the desire to contribute to the common good. Most, if not all, revolutions in the past have failed because they were unable to transform the cityscape. Capitalist cities, built on the pillars of sexism and slavery, were founded on social inequality as part of the basic structure. Such a foundation creates a dysfunctional, unstable, and unfair situation. Take, for example, transportation systems. In many cities in the USA , the car is the main mode of transportation. Railroads, streetcars, and subways-a people's transportation network-didn't become a primary concern of the national infrastructure in the United States . The private automobile dominated city transportation to the detriment of public modes of travel. Automobiles are expensive requiring a certain age-limit to operate one. Elders who become unable to operate them when eyesight and reflexes begin to decline become isolated in car-center cities. Private automobiles have stymied a public transportation design, a design that would reflect a democratic structure. Automobiles are elitist, reflecting a tyrannical form of governance structure, a government that will invade foreign countries for oil. During the evacuation of Houston, Texas preparing for what could have been a Category 5 Hurricane, massive traffic jams made a smooth and rapid evacuation of the city impossible. People feared that they would be stuck on the highways when the storm hit land. Stuck in traffic for hours and hours, people's cars ran out of gas and people become desperate in the highway traffic jams without food and water. Did we see any trains hauling people out of the city? No. Why, because public transportation systems in most American Cities are non-existent. The evacuation of Houston showed the American public just how ineffective emergency exit systems are just like the evacuation of New Orleans showed how ignored and forgotten the poor are in the United States. The baby boomer generation, who were the hippies, yippee, and counterculture revolutionaries in their youth, revolted against the war in Vietnam to save their peers from the death and destruction of an unjust war, is now faced with the same dilemma. This time the war is in Iraq . Now the American victims of the war are not our mates but our sons and daughters. Of course, the daughters and sons of rich, powerful, and famous don't have to go because classism is still a ruling "ism" in the USA . So why are we now in our middle age having to fight the same battle? Why wasn't this problem overturned 20 years ago at the end of the Vietnam War? What went wrong in the peace movement's strategy that it failed to defeat the evils of war so that now we can live out the remainder of our lives in peace? To end war requires us to go to the root of the problem as to why we live in a world filled with war and violence. Bringing the troops home from Vietnam didn't end war; it ended that war. The Cold War continued to be waged adding "smart bombs" and "mini nukes" to the arsenal and it continues to be waged today in Outer Space. We didn't rid ourselves of the external causes of war such as our dependence on foreign oil or to build an economy that wasn't based on the production of automobiles. We only started to look at the racist, classist, and sexist foundations on which our civilization was built with the rise of the civil rights, women, and anti-poverty movements. However, the majority of us ignored the war we were conducting on the environment as we bought into suburbs and conformed to the "American Dream." Unless we look at the causes of all aspects of war, we will likely witness our grandchildren fighting another war, perhaps next time over water. So, our way out of this quagmire of history repeating its ugly self over and over again is to think and develop a new, beautiful reality, to visualize utopia or what I call Neutopia. True revolutionary change transforms the core values of people; it creates transformative personalities. In the '60's and early '70's, we had youth with a revolutionary spirit, but a total evolutionary revolution that changed the structures of power, the very foundation of civilization itself, did not occur. So the youth had no where to go except back into the structures of oppression they were revolting against. The communal and back-to-the-land movement wasn't large enough to house all the revolutionaries. Thinking about building cities that incorporated democratic values of equality and excellence wasn't a major part of the alternative culture's dialogue in a way that could redirect labor to begin to build the physical structures of peace that we need so that revolutionary spirit can freely exist. What I think happened with the 60's rebellion around the world is that the power was in the streets, but its artists and leaders didn't have the knowledge, wisdom, and vision to transpose the foundation of civilization, to build a city with a feminine design. The establishment maintained its unjust property laws, the legality of inequality remained, and so the transformation of the built environment wasn't able to come out of the movement. Let's not make the same mistake again. Let's finally learn from the past and set our mind's eye into the imaginal realm of building neutopian cityscapes. Time to start this is now with the reconstruction of New Orleans.
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Eutopia or Oblivion? |