https://occupythehearth.org/manifesto-s4/
#commonsensesocialchange
The #Localist #Manifesto
section 4 getting started – the local festival

..."The Robin 99 campaign begins wherever and whenever there are enough people who like the idea to get something going locally. Our primary means of gaining support and generating excitement will be the local festival. These festivals will be free, informational, and … festive. Local organizers will try to assemble the kinds of people we will need if we are going to create prosperous local economies: family/small market farmers; appropriate technology and clean energy specialists; permaculturalists and gardeners of all kinds; anyone with any good ideas about dealing, at the neighborhood and regional level, with waste, pollution, and carbon emissions; artisans who can build greenhouses from recycled windshields; brewers of beer and bakers of bread; practitioners of street medicine and partisans of free, just-down-the-block health care; local currency and slow city advocates; visionaries in the causes of transition, resilience, and regeneration; booksellers and librarians; musicians, poets, dancers, jugglers, acrobats, magicians, sculptors, whittlers … you get the picture. Some items on food and beverage tables can be displayed under a sign that says “free,” others will be wearing price tags. The choice between them might then be compared with the choice, confronted on election day, between Robin 99 and a tagged politician.

With one exception, Robin 99 campaigners will do no fund-raising. We will not take out a full-page ad in the New York Times. We will not bend the knee to the moneychangers. We have no use for a staff or an office. We do not intend to create a national organization. Local organizers will, however, need to raise money for the festivals. Farmers in particular should be fairly compensated for showing up with their food and their knowhow. If you set up a booth and need cash for travel or supplies, you should get it. The 99% is a broad, diverse social grouping – many of us have some money to spare. Money donated to local festivals stays local and helps nurture the new ideas and relationships being cultivated there. The festivals are live, locally funded advertisements for the way of life we can begin to create together once we stop voting for servants of the 1%. They are arguments-in-action for what we can achieve if enough of us vote for Robin 99.

They will also serve as training grounds where we might find a workable balance between a locality’s need for solidarity and its members’ right to think and do as they please. Festivals and fairs throw people from diverse backgrounds into a shared experience of commerce and pleasure-seeking. The benefits of trade and the joys of revelry, when jointly pursued in a setting where everyone might reasonably expect to attain them, overpower the mutual suspicions that in ordinary times impede the development of cooperation and fellow-feeling across the usual lines (race, class, gender, creed) of separation. Participants in a festival do not suddenly abandon their differences; they do not have to agree with trading or dancing partners to enjoy the fruits of trade or the pleasures of dance. But they do have to resist any compulsion to impose their beliefs on other festival participants. Intolerance destroys the conditions which allow mutual respect and trust to flourish. When the monotheists showed up in ancient times brandishing their jealous God, the first targets they selected for heaven-sanctioned retribution were the myriad pagan idols brought along and displayed by festival participants to sanctify their negotiations and celebrations. Pagans understood that without toleration there could be no festivals, and without festivals they would likely endure a woeful depletion of material comforts and bodily delights. Monotheists outlawed the festivals with the idols, leaving the individual to stand naked before a wrathful God and a market stripped of the warm adornment of ritual and thus impervious to local standards of fair dealing. By returning festivals to the center of community life, we re-insert the market into a network of mutually acknowledged obligations and time-honored traditions. The healthier that network, the more immunity a locality will enjoy from corrosive intolerance."...