Our intentional community has for the last four years bought all petroleum from specialists living further east of along the Oregon Trail. The drivers and support community that move the oil are all African-Americans originally from Queens New York. They call themselves The Walkers. Their story is an interesting perspective on black communities since the collapse of government.
They no longer live on the East Coast, preferring a nomadic trucking existence between the upper Mississippi River and Pacific Coast. Upon arriving west of the Mississippi, the distance from urban black culture was not a shock. While in New York they had begun to forge an outlier culture all their own. Their cultural transformation began in 2008.
In overnight stays at our "commune" ( one might call it that ), a few of the drivers have related the chain of events in New York 2008-2010. It goes basically like this (excuse the bullet list style, use of the word "thugs" and lack of details, its all I remember them saying):
Undercover cops were at the drug and prostitute haven Club Kalua when a group of known drug dealers with former weapons violations started acting aggressively and then one tried to attack the undercover agents using his car to run them down.
The undercover agents shot over 50 bullets into the car, killing the drug dealer and also successfully stopping the car.
The drug dealer in the car was Sean Bell, a black man. All the men shot at were black, two of the police were black.
Career agitator Al Sharpton called for protests that would shut-down the city. In those protests were signs such as "Kill the Cops" and black women were screaming at black policemen to leave the force.
The protests did cripple the city economically, and the police ceased to patrol or enforce laws in most of Harlem, some of Brooklyn and Queens.
The black communities were in meltdown. The very factions expressing rage over the killing of a thug turned out to be the thugs and activists of the black community, and not any of the black business owners or professional classes. Crime was unmitigated.
The Walkers were already unique, and uniquely empowered, getting all their income from Chinese needing local orienteering in business investments.
They were sponsored by the Chinese to clean up the anarchy, rid the black neighborhoods of people and institutions Mao Tse-Tung would have considered scum. They were issued a little black and gold book written by Mao with descriptions of the scum and recommended means of eradication.
The first target was the Club Kalua. The Walkers waited until a wedding party for a notorious Harlem crack dealer was being held there. They burned the place down with everyone still inside. This was the first of many similar measures.
Black business owners were thrilled, and gave The Walkers praise in the local neighborhood newspapers. Many credit them with forging the now dominant role blacks have as proactive anti-crime agents at the community level.
The Walkers had massive income and credibility, but knew organized black crime would be targeting them soon. They purchased a fleet of oil tanker trucks from Russians ( see photos in this post ) which they use to live in and transport energy and chemical supplies for a living.
This year The Walkers began special support of our commune in an effort to enable the one-global-Google-planet-brain, and are helping end the schismatic BlackGoogle.com
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3 comments:
Modern New York was built to embody specific class and race relationships. Robert Moses invented a car-centered culture with parkways and suburbs around a city of tall towers. Low bridges over the parkways act as gates keeping buses full of workers and blacks out of the islands of affluent whiteness.
Moses embodied the spirit of the engineering genius designing a society from the outside. In spite of his romantic view of private automobiles he never learned to drive himself.
The Black Panther Party of the 1960's and 1970's tried to re-engineer society from the inside, pioneering programs such as free breakfast for children which are often taken for granted today.
Unfortunately the United States of National Security in it's paranoid crusade against "communism" did not see how the BPP's growth and self-sufficiency agenda was in perfect harmony with the long-term needs of business even if they did threaten the corrupt businesses of a few slumlords. (Parallels can be drawn to the contemporary failure to find common ground in repeated negotiations with Vietnamese "communist" leaders.)
The federal government cannot provide effective response to highly empowered local threats such as drug dealers, so in the post apocalyptic era an agile network of independent guardian organizations has evolved, not only to provide private security but also public security and the "reeducation" of dysfunctional communities as seen in the The Walkers burning of the Kalua Club.
(Note that the highway system, such as it exists in the Post Apocalyptic era, is probably maintained by organizations like The Walkers, and shaped by who has use for the products they traffik.)
So what about the cannibals? You know, in every post-apocalyptic scenario there's always the survivalists/zombies/fascists that get a little over-exited about the post-apocalyptic conditions.
I would assume that in the conditions described in Lance's dystopia the cannibals would be WASP survivalists - since they start off with the arms, sense of entitlement, ability to objectify non-Christians as non-human, and lack of solid contact with the outside world to keep their ethics from being twisted by conditions.
How would a petro and information rich, cloud-computing, bike-driving, airship flying, four-wheeler droned "intentional community" deal with the threat of bayonette-armed, ammo-hoarding, hummer-driving cannibal-militias? Would the intentional-community protect it's pet vegan communities, or would the vegans agricultural products not be worth the armed conflict?
Does the intentional community send missionaries to convert the cannibals to the way of the cloud? Does the intentional community beat up the cannibals first so they are humble enough to listen to the gospel of the cloud? Or are the cannibals genocidaly culled and their children shipped off to be raised by vegans?
The idea of a post-apocalypse world has fascinated me ever since I saw Mad Max.
I find your scenarios interesting.
However, I find it hard to believe that the Walkers would be flunkies for someone else. Do they not realize the power they now hold in their hands? No Walkers, no supplies!
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