in my perfect world, we stop chasing after government to do what we want, and we start making it happen ourselves. all the people working for national healthcare set up a national healthcare system that’s independent of government. all the people concerned about police harassment and brutality form cop watch and intervention groups. all the people worried about world peace start mobilizing to intervene in armed struggles. all the people tired of the bullshit corporate press start being their own journalists. people concerned about homelessness and hunger start taking poor people out to eat and setting up squats in abandoned buildings. people concerned about our wasteful society start beating the garbage men to the dumpsters and start setting up free stores on every corner to redistribute the ‘waste.’

in my perfect world, we storm the castles and get all the secret documents, and we make them all public. we read them all out loud on television and the radio, and we print them in books that are distributed to libraries all across the country. in my perfect world, there aren’t any secrets because we will actually be a democracy, and a democracy can’t keep secrets from the people. we’ll finally make decisions based on what’s real, not on what we’re told is best ‘for our own good’ and what we are not told ‘for our own safety.’ we’ll be the kind of democracy where people don’t need to elect people to decide for them how to live, because we’ll have the time and energy to decide for ourselves. we’ll be the kind of democracy where the rules are made locally, because our communities are more important than homogenization on a grand scale and mass control. we might keep congresses, but we’ll never have executives or chairmen. we’ll be leaders without the need for followers. if we have conflicts, we’ll communicate in the communication age. if we have fights we’ll be small enough to keep the fight small and not accidentally kill millions of people in the process of working out our differences.

in my perfect world, there won’t be any censorship at all. information will be freely accessible by everyone. instead of protecting children or anyone else from ‘explicit’ material, we’ll actually be frank and honest with people about what motivates people to do what they do, create what they create, and appear as they appear. with this valuable information, children will begin to have the tools to make informed decisions earlier in their development, rather than having to rely on commands and assumptions and unsubstantiated ‘values’ outside of their own experiences. we’ll begin to see people as complex beings with complex motivations, rather than in over-simplified terms of good and evil. we’ll stop thinking of the human body as obscene. nudity won’t be a crime. we’ll start dealing with variety and differences on their own terms, rather than comparing them to some alien ‘standards’ and ‘ideals’ determined by someone else or patriarchs long dead. we’ll make society fit today’s needs and today’s desires.

in my perfect world, we’ll liberate commercial spaces and make them into eclectic spaces. there won’t be anti-loitering laws because happiness won’t be measured by how much we can buy—standing around enjoying ourselves and the day will be encouraged. we’ll no longer try to hide unfortunate people away, we won’t try to erase them from our consciousness by kicking them off the streets, out of the parks, out of our neighborhoods. we’ll try to include them in our activities. we’ll have spare time rather than spare change. instead of making stuff just to sell, we’ll make stuff we enjoy making or to fulfill someone else’s need. if we have extra, we’ll give it away because we love sharing what we don’t need with other people who are in need. we won’t need expensive security systems because we won’t need to lock up the food and the goods—we’ll be generous and live generously. once people realize they won’t have to struggle to maintain themselves because we have the resources to happily clothe and feed and entertain each other, people will stop trying to hoard from each other.

in my perfect world, we’ll take over companies and give everyone who works there equal hourly wages, because everyone makes the company profit, not just the CEO. we’ll make coca-cola average out their salaries and pay everyone the same, using their assets to pay off their employee’s debts and loans. then we’ll make sure all the workers are doing what we want to be doing. if the company makes more money, then everyone makes more money. how’s that for incentive to work to benefit the whole? of course, all of society will be structured in a similar way, because we’ll sack the privileged in their homes and use their mansions to house the houseless. we’ll lock the gated communities up and refuse to let the people who live there out because we make their clothes and their food and their roads and their electronic gadgets. if they want to live inside a gated community they can try living without the stuff we make for them. they can starve. we’ll kidnap rich politicians and cuff them to poor and righteous people living in the ghetto, where they’ll have to live in the very conditions they despise until those conditions disappear. we’ll erase the privileged class by taking away their privileges and so erase the pressure to live by their rules or die neglected in the street. we’ll take responsibility for our own.

in my perfect world we shatter the propriety and puritan value system once and for all. we do it, because we are the many, unruly masses. we reject dress codes and expense-based values, we reject celebrity. we’re all celebrities. we are the individual citizens, sick and sickened by the excesses of our ‘leaders’ and ‘authority figures.’ we do it by getting rich off of cheap art made unskillfully and without tact, poise, or professionalism. we get rich off it, and we take all the money out in a big square in the middle of the city and we burn it. we burn the fucking money, and that makes us famous, but not as individuals, because we do it all anonymously. we alter existing edifices and blight to suit are eclectic tastes. finally, public space is really public. if it’s in the public space, it’s never finished—it can be altered by anyone at any time. we realize art and literature and music cannot be judged on objective terms, because there is no such thing as objectivity. we realize judgments are based on arbitrary criteria, criteria to suit certain purposes that we come up with. we realize that quality is relative to what we are trying to achieve, and we allow different people to try to achieve different things, and appreciate their work on their work’s own terms. people won’t place value in things. we’ll place value in how things are used, and what they are used for. we’ll realize that there is no such thing as intrinsic value, that the more powerful the tool, the more dangerous it can be. we can start bartering based on the value we place on objects or services rather than depending on values set by some bank or some shiny rock sitting in someone’s basement. we’ll realize that a van worth $20,000 is not equal to 20,000 avocados worth $1.

in my perfect world, people will realize that you can’t dissect something and put it in a box without killing it. we’ll see that there are thousands of ways to cut a pie, and sometimes it’s best left whole. these realizations will help us to stop thinking in terms of boxes, to stop seeing the world as ‘us and them,’ and start seeing instead the continuum and full spectrum of life. we’ll stop trying to talk or listen and realize that we are always doing both at once. we’ll realize that perception depends on perspective, and we’ll act accordingly—with respect and patience towards others and their experiences. we are being effected as much as we effect change. the whole world is in a constant state of flux, and we’re part of that. we’ll realize we are not outside of nature and begin to notice that the natural order of things is equilibrium. if we upset the balance in one direction, we should expect a counterbalance. when a body overextends its resources, it is susceptible to illness. when we over-use the world’s resources, our environment becomes more hostile to our survival. when we act without the whole in mind, the right hand lights the left on fire.

in my perfect world, we’ll slow down and stop working so much. we’ll realize that free time is as valuable as pay increases. we’ll start sharing our resources because it gives us more free time and allows us to interact more with other people. instead of everyone on the street having to work 50 hours to buy a house and a car and then come home and watch their own kids, we’ll work less, pool our resources to meet our group transportation and housing and other needs ( like having amazing public transportation, sharing vehicles for longer trips so we won’t have cars sitting unused in garages, and rotating who watches the neighborhood kids so each person does it once a week). we’ll stop trying to compete and start working together. once we slow down our pace a little, we’ll see how unhealthy we were—working ourselves to the bone and fucking up the environment and our communities along the way. we didn’t do it on purpose, we just didn’t have the time to notice it before. now we suddenly have more free time, and we can start creatively working out solutions to some of the larger problems. we can begin to take more responsibility for our actions. we can try out different things. we’re not so stressed all the time. we can grow our own food and take up fun hobbies. we can play. we can be families and communities again.

in this world, we only possess one thing, our lives. in this world, what are you doing with yours?