Utopia

My vision of a utopia involves a gathering center where people from the community can go for support, information, guidance, celebration, food. I don't know. If utopia doesn't exist, it is perfection, what is my idealized vision for downtown LA?   I suppose it entails creating democracy with the voices of the people who live there as central to the process of development and change. Just staying the same is not the goal. But change that is initiated by an empowered community is a good thing. I was working here and I saw the artist space lofts. I imagine they will be very beautiful and well finished and quite expensive. I imagined how they would float above everything going on in the neighborhood. Big intrusion and avoidance. This is not progress for those who live here. Utopia. Utopia. A shore. The shore of the island where all is perfect, in place. There is a poem about it. Dreaming the impossible I cannot even think of what that would look like. All I keep coming back to is empowering voices from within to speak and not intruding from the outside with money and no understanding.

A vision of perfection. Of course how could I hear such a thing, conceive such a story, and every thought that arises seems to offer contradictions. But I'm always starting from this: a society not predicated on ownership. Needs met buy reasoned allocation of resources. There would be no impulse towards gentrification, driving the dispossessed to further and further margins while the possessed and possessing discover inexpensive recourses to acquire as an investment, as a carefully calculated valuation. Of course, it's not all economics and there would still be the question of the surplus – the right to, the sharing off. There is also the more fundamental issue of respect and the awareness that violence; physical, emotional, social, institutional, stems from the ability to stop seeing the humanity of some set of people. So,utopia maybe first and foremost, a society in which the humanity of all its members is the leading principal driving all social and cultural institutions.