Brewer & Shipley is coming to my vicinity this summer, and that reminds me about how radical a lot of us old farts were in our youth.

"It says right there in the Constitution, it's really AOK to have a revolution."

Well, not exactly. The Constitution was a radically anti-revolution document. I think it was the Declaration that tried to justify the propertied, educated and "reasonable" when they called for revolution, but I get it. "Constitution" rhymes a lot better. Songwriters' perogative.

But B & S's rather prescient song was quite ambiguous in a way. It laid out a problem for the would-be revolutionary. The existing society was so fucked up that it was prone to fall in short order:

Mister Nixon, I ain't a fixin'
To speak Spanish on a plane or polish off the Liberty Bell
I just want to sit here on the shelf
And watch you finish off the place by yourself
Please let me do what I wanna
I just lay around the house and smoke marijuana

Now that all sounds pretty good to me. It's true that those who are screwing us are screwing themselves over the long term, and they've been doing it for decades. This fucked-up society is cruisin' for a bruisin'.

The issue is whether somebody has some responsibility for creating alternatives to this fucked up way of doing things.

I think we do. For those with children and grandchildren, you're damn right we do.

I have serious doubts that we can turn this hell-bound ship around, but I am also sure that we can deviate, illustrate and demonstrate so that as many people as possible can change the way they live and interact. They will be the lead cohort in a revolution that is more about survival of the human race than Marxian class revolution.

There are some fine historical examples like the CNT in Spain. The focus was never electoral poliltics. It was about helping people in the here and now, and it would have resulted in a place where hope outweighed cynicism--as Orwell put it--if the whole world, Right, Left and Middle, hadn't united to destroy it.

Our culture has become anti-human. The starting point is to re-acquaint people with what it means to be part of human society, i.e. cooperation, mutual aid. This can never be accomplished by some grand pronouncement from above whether by a President, a Congress or a Supreme Court. Social relations have collapsed to the point that only those enlightened enough to recognize the critical importance of those values can work to restore them. The impetus is there in everyone, provided through our genes and the logic of survival, but we live in a social structure that denies those impulses and leads us to destruction.

People are listening, hoping for a better life. Our current politics is conveying one message: people hate the way they are forced to live. They don't see the necessity of their misery. They don't believe in the fundamental logic or moral validity of the system they're living under.

If the Left can provide even small, neighborhood-level examples of an alternative way to live, a way that allows for the flowering of our humanity and our love, that will prove more powerful a force for change than the cleverest political slogan or the most frightening (to the elites) demonstration of popular power in the streets. A real revolution requires a growing realization among the oppressed that the misery they experience is not dictated by the natural order of things but is instead the result of the cruelty and immorality of their oppressors. Nothing can demonstrate that better than little "alternative worlds" where human values prevail.

That's what I believe is our fundamental responsibility: create little islands of humanity where mutual aid becomes the fundamental credo.

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