Summer                                                       Most Heat Moon

This world is rapidly changin’. Dylan

Today Kate meets with the first of the Colorado realtors, tomorrow the second. She’s in full Kate mode which means intelligent, decisive, energized, sensitive. An excellent scout. She is our advance team, sent to reconnoiter while the main force of four canines and one human plus all our stuff remain behind. We will follow.

Her task, eventually, is to narrow the options in Colorado to three. Then the other human will travel with her, probably joined by the Denver Olsons as a consultancy. We will decide together. This may seem clumsy to many of you, but it is the way I have learned throughout a lifetime of politics and one I adhere to out of conviction.

No decision can be made independent of the effected parties and if I could include the dogs, I would. In their case we have to imagine their feelings and response to a particular place, then act accordingly. Yes, I suppose it is true, as many tyrants say, that people want only food, housing, security, that they really don’t want to be involved with the messy business of guiding their own lives in the larger frame.  Over that same lifetime in politics, however, I have acted with the precise opposite assumption.

That is, people need to guide their own lives in the larger frame. To do this they need to join each other, sometimes in unions, sometimes in political parties, sometimes in issue driven organizations, sometimes in neighborhood organizations or rural co-operatives, sometimes in businesses, but always with others who share their convictions and have similar life situations. This is democracy with a small d, one driven not by the constitution or by the greater idea of democracy as a political philosophy to organize nations, but democracy itself which means, in its original Greek etymology, people (demos) power or force (kratos).

This remains a radical understanding of how to organize the commonweal, but it is just such an understanding that many of us soaked in the culture of the late 1960’s came to embrace. Yes, it is at times unwieldy. Yes, it is often prone to lengthy decisions. Yes, it can be perverted by a determined minority or damaged by a narrow-minded majority, but it is the best way of turning aside the tyranny of oligarchy which is the bane of our late stage industrial capitalist society.

And so, even in the small decision of which home to buy, small in the grander scheme, but large in ours, there will be many voices, all significant. And Kate and I will listen to them.