That’s how the
name began, as a bedtime story I made up on the fly for a little boy who really
wasn’t all that keen on the idea of sleep.
The story of the crackerbush, that is, a mysterious magical thing that
only grows right at the very edge of dreamland.
To find the crackerbush is a quest only the very young may attempt, it
is beyond the reach of those older and less innocent. To find the crackerbush is to understand how
to keep the happiness of the very young for ever and ever, it is a high prize
indeed. There are a few who did find the
crackerbush when they were young, you’ll see them from time to time among the
grandma’s and grandpa’s, those who glow oh so slightly when you look at them
out of the corner of your eye.
A year and some
later the name got recycled, just because it really is kind of a neat name,
just because being a thing from a bedtime story it implies dreams, and a dream
is what it now represents. The
Crackerbush Community is the dream of a friend of mine, the hope of restoring
the American dream as it began to those for whom the dream has most often been
betrayed, those who survive into adulthood from the foster care system. In the last few days I’ve been entertaining her
dream, and the longer I consider it the more worthy a dream I find it to be.
At one time it was
called The American Dream, the idea of a peaceful and prosperous land that lived
in harmony with itself and with the earth.
It was a beautiful dream, it really was.
For a time, a short time, it was almost reality. The American dream picked up where Camelot
left off, and it almost made it. As I
think on those dreams, as I compare them to the world I see around me, I find
no better an ideal to defend and restore than the concepts that make up what my
friend honors me by calling the Crackerbush Community.
Think about
it. Very few of the true greats of American
history began from privilege, the majority were those tempered and honed in the
lowest echelons of society, the penniless immigrants who across the 1800’s
transformed the land from wilderness into a truly great nation. The remnants of that great nation still ride
the land, and the nation as it is today is in dire need of a supply of
greatness to restore it and take it beyond what it was, to build it to meet challenges
the founding fathers never imagined. The
original source material remains in the form of the survivors of the foster
systems, it is their ultimate strength upon which the dream is founded.
The Crackerbush
project is a designer village deliberately constructed to bring together
individuals from several diverse disciplines to refine and integrate concepts
that must, must be taken into the general culture. It will take great people to take those
concepts into the culture and make them work, and great people is the ultimate
goal of the project.
How do you build
great people? You build great people
with challenge. The challenge of the Crackerbush Village
To meet such a
challenge cannot be brought into reality by some ongoing charity case, it must
and will be a fully functional element of society that pays its own way in the
world trading value for value in the open market. Will it need start up capital? Of course.
There are those who gamble on the future, and the markets the project
will open are virgin markets with truly immense potentials for those with the
foresight to help develop those markets.
More than trading
material value for value it will also provide a template, an example, of a most
critically needed understanding to assure that the markets opened remain free and
fair markets. That is the understanding that life is better when the flow of
money, things of the material world, are understood as a responsibility to the
lives who provide the value of such things rather than the all to common stance
seen today that wealth is a license to squander that value in short sighted personal
excess supporting the arrogance of artificially inflated egos. For
those who know more than the name, for those who truly understand the idea and
ideals? The Crackerbush project should get along
famously with those who live in Galt’s gulch.
I’ve called myself
one who rides with the Lords of LaMancha, I’ve claimed myself a veteran
SoulMarine in the tradition of Socrates.
From a thirty year career in the trades and industries I’ve got a
bazillion hours of technodream recorded as concept drawings in the cause of eco
friendly technologies backed by more than a bit of study, I’ve spent more than
one night walking someone across that terrible divide between believing that
perversion is all that’s left in the world and knowing that perversion is just
a manifestation of other despairs. I’m
fully qualified. The despair I’ve set
myself to combat cannot exist in the land of the Crackerbush dream, to
establish the latter is to banish the former, the causes are fully compatible.
I think I’m headed
home. Horse, it’s thata way. I’ll keep you posted as it goes.
I say again, Cyranos: You don't ride alone. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of a line from the movie Hook, spoken by Tinkerbell toward the end: "You know that place between asleep and awake? That's where you'll find me."
And the equitable distribution of goods? It lines up very well with Biblical principles, so you'll find Christians like me along your way who are trying to build their own Crackerbushland and may join you in this venture... I foresee a time when cell colonies of independent thinkers may comprise all that's left of "civilization."