A friend pinpointed the main reason that I am attracted to New Orleans several years ago. More than the food, music, architecture, Mardi Gras, etc. it is that New Orleans has no social pressure to conform. I can be a white nerdy engineer and have gay banker, gay artist, black musician, etc. friends. My social status is MUCH more dependent on the good that I do than the money I make.

In three different "recovery planning" workshops (different demographics for each), we were asked what did we most want to preserve about New Orleans. In all three, the #1 answer was "the way we relate to each other".

At parties here, it is quite unusual to be asked "what do you do". Sex, religion, politics# are freely discussed, but "what you do" is not. Elsewhere, I am asked that in the first 5 minutes, so I can be comfortably ranked socially (my assumption).

The post-K public involvement remains at sky high levels. Recent reports/test results are showing a marked improvement in public education. Volunteer help has been part of that.

No society is perfect, and that is a goal New Orleans would never even aspire to, but we are very human and recognize, and accept, the humanity of our fellow citizens.

Elsewhere in this thread someone wrote:

But people don't want to live in huge complexes that are efficient and close to downtown. People want the illusion of space and security in their own home, away from the city,

I have the illusion of space (it is called the Lower Garden District for a reason), the efficiency of our urban form is well hidden under several layers of chaos (so is the density), it is beautiful in several different ways, and I live 1.2 miles from a 51 story office building.

Best Hopes for Learning from our example,

Alan

# Sen. Vitter's sexual preference for having prostitutes give him enema's while in a diaper, and his hyprocrisy with "family values" (condemning those without his stated family values) and church endorsements covers all three I think. OTOH, Gov. Edward's claim that he and opponent David Duke (the election from Hell) had something in common, they were both wizard's beneath the sheets, was received with a chuckle.

Well, I may be in a minority here in that I see peak oil as a presenting symptom and not as the cause of our problems, so my response is tempered by that belief. The incompatibility you note between the necessary change needed and our politico-economic system suggests one of two things;

1)the necessary change can't happen because of that system, or
2)that system must come to an end.

By calling that change necessary, we have already indicated that option one is not acceptable to us. That means we must work towards the second option.

Yes, it's that big.

Jeff, I believe you have hit the crucial point of the whole problem , we need a fundamentally different structure, one that is incomptabible with our current centralized politica-economic system. Of course you blog about this in the possibility of an emergent distributed rhizomatic structure.

The thing though that I take away from your writing is that we can get working on these rhizome nodes right now, in the cracks of our current system, so that when it falls the landing is not as harsh. So a resilent suburbia is just a few steps away from morphing into a rhizome node.

I say lets get started by first developing a simple open source set of sustainable technologies that will allow suburbia to produce its own energy, tools, manufacturing capabilies and food production. I shamelessly must promote this open source site where all this is happening openfarmtech.org