Summer days, not so gentle

Intermission:

My sincerest apologies to the A to Z community for failing to follow through. I fell behind when I was in California for my grandfather's funeral. I wrote a couple posts saved to a word document but wanted to tie at least three related themes into one seamless mega essay. Unfortunately, I can't find them now. I also lost a bunch of time planting the garden and spending six weeks being indoctrinated into how the military runs its evaluation system, but doesn't because it is a hopelessly bureaucratic and insanely conservative organism.

Also in this time, I attended the Age of Limits conference in Artemas, PA. Lots of great speakers and topics. If you really want justice done to the scope and significance of the event, stop by fellow Blogger, John Michael Greer's page The Archdruid Report. It was refreshing to be surrounded by people who were no longer debating peak oil and its implications but scrambling to figure out how to build resilient communities.

The whole purpose of the A to Z challenge topic, Anarchy, was not to say "hey, man, we're fucked." My intent was to explain why we're fucked so we can begin to move forward, and as Greer explains, "collapse now and avoid the rush." The original intent was to play armchair anarchist philosopher and critique the lifestyle anarchists and the professional left, generally. Instead, I started realizing that discussing the merits and/or flaws of Syndicalism and other anti-statist forms of communism, wasn't really worth the time. Instead, we can continue that debate well into the future. I decided--last minute, really--that I would instead employ my knowledge and skill as an historian to untangle the complexities of our current milieu of crises. It dawned on me that we don't need to debate anarchist philosophy, because anarchy will be reality if we understand what forces preceded and perpetuate its existence.

I thought that I could find no more appropriate way of reinvigorating the mind than to explain the purpose of my literary escapades. The legitimacy of the statist system is now in question, even if most don't realize it explicitly. If we understand why we operate in a statist system, I think we can also understand the kind of choices we need to make as industrial civilization collapses to establish the foundation of a truly free society--anarchism.

Hopefully I find those damn essays soon so we can continue our exploration into what our future can look like if we want it and work toward it.