Every neighborhood must be a village

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

In the same way that every home must become a homestead and every roof an electricity generating plant every neighborhood must become a village, a self-governed community.

Democracy can a will – I mean here real participatory democracy – never work in large groups and definitely not in nations states and even less so in federation of nation states. Only on family, clan, and small community basis, as this has been proven, can it ever work and the numbers have to be below 150.

In order to actually live in a way that is self-governable we, first of all, need to get rid off our national governments which lord it over us and then work again at a completely local level.

But not only for this every neighborhood and every city block must be a village; it must be so also in order for us to treat more lightly on the Planet and to be able to live and work in a (more) sustainable way and manner.

We must, once again, live where we work and work where we live, regardless of countryside or town and that means that also our power must be generated locally and our food grown there; at least to the greatest extent, as far as the latter is concerned, the former is a given.

Only when we reduce everything, once again to a human scale, and that equally applies to the places where we live as to how and where we work and how we govern ourselves. Note the stress in on “govern ourselves” and not “being governed”.

Only this way can we heal ourselves and the Planet.

© 2012