Dreaming of Utopia

Some people say there were drugs involved.

Others think it was hypnotism. Some kind of mind control anyhow.

I don’t see what they’re so fussed about myself. No one’s gone hungry in America in years. “Homelessness” is being taught in the schools as a historical fact along with apartheid and slavery and all the other nasty things humans used to do to each other back in the day. You’d think people would be grateful and I guess most of them are, but there are always a few conspiracy nuts that just can’t accept a good thing even when it’s staring them right in their faces. They want to explain it in a way that fits their ideas of human nature and all that, and that’s tough to do.

It all started with Carlin. You’d think the savior of mankind would have a more religious sounding name, but maybe he (Or is it she? I couldn’t tell you.) didn’t want to be too obvious about it. At least not right at first. No one saw his gig for what it was until things were already under way. If they had some of them might have quit before anything really big could be accomplished. But maybe Carlin wouldn’t have let them. Who knows?

I think there were fads about guru’s before. But the really rich don’t seem to have followed them, generally. With Carlin it was different. You needed a net worth of billions before you had a chance of meeting him. At least in the early days. And did they ever line up to meet him, to hear him talk, to learn his secrets. I don’t know what exactly he promised them, some sort of secret to life I guess. It must be easier, changing the world, when your first converts own so much of the world’s wealth. I wonder why Jesus never thought of that.

Cause these people, the richest of the rich, started to change. Not too quickly, not all at once, but in ways that mattered. No one else knew anything was up until things were already well under way. And then there were protests, lobby groups, objections all round. Because one of the first things they did was buy land. Lots and lots of land. A lot of it was farm land, and no one could really object to farm owners selling their own property, but a lot more of it was protected land, government land and the like. And people sure got bent out of shape about that. As it turns out, they needn’t have. These richer than rich were suddenly all about “holding things in trust” and “creating a community” and they didn’t block other people from the land, they actually invited them to share it. With conditions, of course.

They started with the homeless, the addicts, the bottom of society. People who had nothing left to lose. Offered them an alternative lifestyle. And it worked. These drunks and addicts and prostitutes became happy, productive farmers on the communes, living right alongside those rich men. Once you were there, on the communes, then you got to meet Carlin, no matter who you were, at least once. And he’d talk to you, they say. Convince you to see things his way. And once he got a hold of them people stopped hording up stuff, and started to only take what they needed and to live in ways that hurt nature less, and if they didn’t agree on every little thing, well, they let each other alone instead of fighting about everything.

Once word started getting around about how good things were on these farms, people started lining up to join, first the poor, or the ones with tough lives, but after a while it was even people who had regular jobs and could afford to eat, and everyone was welcome, more or less. They’d make you listen to Carlin and agree to what he said, about all the mixed up priorities people had learned to have, and how greed was killing the planet and everyone on it, whether they realized it or not. And as long as you agreed that you didn’t want that anymore, that you’d live the sort of peaceful, quite life they were offering, then you were in, simple as that.

It sure opened up opportunities for some people. Grandmothers rotting in old folks homes were brought out of retirement to teach a generation of young men and women raised in the concrete and steel world of American cities how to preserve the food they’d grown, how to spin and weave and knit and sew the clothes they needed. And the grandfather’s too, the few still around who could remember a simpler way of life, and how to work the land without doing so much damage, they were welcome too, although less of them seemed to want it. Maybe they were just more set in their ways, but no one forced anyone to join, you understand, it was all voluntary, and that’s the part some folks find hard to believe.

That and the fact that, once Carlin’s talked to them, it doesn’t seem like anyone ended up seeing things different than him. Maybe he’s just that convincing, but some of us prefer not to test that theory, just yet, and so far he’s left us alone. Not that we haven’t been affected, oh no. It’s a lot harder to run a government when all the lobbyists have stopped 

paying politicians and are busy building farms and protecting all the trees and whatnot. It’s been pretty hard on the government budgets, since the farms aren’t run for profit and no one living on them seems to make a taxable income. I guess the politicians might have found a way to tax carrots, if they’d realized the risk sooner, but by the time they started to raise a stink too many of their voters were already in on the deal and there wasn’t much they could do.

Rich men turned pacifist was hard on national defense too, let me tell you. Too many non-government weapons contracts and suddenly the owners of these massive companies were closing them down, even when it cost them a bundle, and turning their factories into giant greenhouses and grow-ops and what-have-you. It’s a good thing Carlin had taken his show on the road by that time. America would have been in a whole lot of trouble if they’d been the only ones falling into line. But its spread, this new way of thinking and living, and other rich men are setting things up so that ordinary folks can choose a different life all around the world. They seem to be happy. Happier than the rest of us still trying to make a go of it without “the community” to back us up, anyway.

It’s hard to be greedy when no one’s ready to work a crappy factory job anymore, so all the normal stuff we used to collect in our normal houses are luxury items now, and no one builds real luxury items anymore because no one rich enough cares to buy them. Not that we’re going to starve or anything. The communes sell whatever they don’t need to live on at pretty low prices, considering they’ve got a corner on the market. But some of the older ones, the one’s who remember what it was all like before, miss stuff like sports games and big screen TV’s and eating junk food that made you sick. My old man talks about it with the friends he’s still got on this side, all the time.

They figure it made sense for the artists and musicians and poets and such to run off to the farms. They always were into that sort of lifestyle apparently. My old man never cared much for art anyway. But they say all the best educators went too, and that’s why there isn’t more literature and the like in the cities now days. Some of them even say the young ones don’t know nothing like they used to. I dunno, I guess I done ok. I gotta admit, the best doctors are out on the communes, and that’s a pain for us, here in town. But if you can get to them they’ll treat you, same as anyone else. So long as you can get to ’em. There are a lot less lawyers now too, since most people don’t want to sue each other, and the few that would like to would just be wasting their time chasing the likes of Carlin and his fans. Because, really, what do you charge them with. Feeding the hungry? Sheltering the homeless? Explaining to any judge still working for the system that all this kindness is killing the GDP is a bit difficult, and even if you could, the other side can afford better lawyers, even if they don’t like the idea.

There’s the question of population, of course. People seem to have a lot less kids on the farms. That looks like proof that something suspicious is going on to folks like my old man, but the community has an answer for that too. According to them Carlin got to us just in time. They say that one person can live on less than an acre of land, if they know what they’re doing, but that things were getting awfully tight, before he showed up. Apparently, and this seems to have been known even before Carlin came along, there are something like 7.68 billion acres of farmable land on this planet. And there were about that many people on the planet the year his name first hit the news.

So maybe making too many babies isn’t such a good idea either. And it’s not like they’re cruel about it. Any woman wants to have a kid, that’s ok. And if she wants a second bad enough, they say she just has to find another woman who doesn’t want kids to agree to let her have her quota. So even that’s a win win. Far as I’m concerned the whole thing seems ok. It’s my old man that won’t let go of the whole conspiracy drugs and hypnosis thing. And he’s getting up there. He wouldn’t do so well on his own, without me to look after him. So I’ll wait ’til he’s gone, and then I guess I’ll head out to the nearest commune with some room to spare, and be grateful for the fresh air and do my bit of digging and maybe find out what the big deal is about art and music and all the rest.

Someday. Not just yet.