Member-only story
People don’t want to be cruel, but kindness is ridiculed. We should overthrow the culture of greed with defiant generosity.
Little free libraries—those small wooden boxes for sharing books—are tiny hotbeds of revolution. They implicitly reject property, hoarding, selfishness. We think, perhaps, they are charming and innocuous. They are easily dismissed — as long as they remain an outlier, a tiny exception to our consumer culture.
Anything that doesn’t make money is seen as sweet, playful and reassuringly insignificant.
Fine. Let the bigger culture ignore us. We will change everything from below, from the operational level, from the position of the ordinary invisible citizen.
Taking A U-Turn From the Path to Doom
The consumer culture, the commoditization of everything, the reduction of life itself to merely a means to greater profits for an undeserving few, is the deadly path we are on. This is our civilization, its systems and leaders and its animating ideologies.
From prosperity theology, which poisons religion, to neoliberalism which empowers the favored few to brutalize and abuse the rest of us with little or no impediment, to the worldwide determination to extract toxic fossil fuels from the…
