People always ask me where I’m “from.” I don’t know how to answer: I was born in the city of Philadelphia, grew up there and in towns on both sides of the Delaware River, and lived as an adult in Wildwood N.J., Oakland Park Fla., San Francisco, San Rafael and Novato Calif., Hakalau and Hilo Hawai’i, San Diego Calif., and Boston Mass.

So what’s “from” mean? Where I grew up? I spent most of my life elsewhere. Where I am now? It’s cool, but I’m not a Bostonian, or even a Masshole… been a lifetime assoholic and I can’t blame geography for that.

Fact is, though, I feel more sort of “with my peeps” when I’m in the Northeast. Yes, there’s a lot of small-mindedness, and willful ignorance… a sort of cultural anti-intellectualism that pissed me off growing up and still chaps my ass. But there’s a bluntness here that I really appreciate, and the cities are walkable. You hear a dozen languages on the street, and you can actually run into people who are different from you, as opposed to California, where you go from house to car to office to car to mall to house.

People are racist as fuck, but probably no more than anywhere else. And, for the most part, at least they are honest about it, which is I guess preferable. Still.

Anyway, I’ve been from Boston to New York and Baltimore in the past week, and headed up to my birth-lands in the Greater Delaware Valley for the weekend. New York is fucking fantastic, but I’d have to completely get rid of my car if I lived there. Driving in NYC made me want to stab myself repeatedly in the pancreas with a dull salad fork. I’d rather walk ten miles than sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Canal Street ever again. Baltimore is equal parts retro cool and white-trash ghetto. I like the edgy style of B’more, but it ain’t me, yo. I’d have to get my tattoo removed if I settled here. It’s like everybody from toddlers to senior citizens has ink.

I have a love-hate relationship with Philly. I’ll be honest: mostly hate. What I remember from growing up there is that people don’t know shit and hate anybody who does. I fled as soon as I left my parents’ house, never to look back. While I’m open to changing my prejudices, a couple hours spent on layover at Philadelphia International earlier this year made me feel like the “City of Brotherly Love” is still the Shithole of Sullen Hostility, so I’m not holding my breath. But still, it’s a good old-fashioned spare-me-the-bullshit town… and there’s cheesesteaks, so that’s cool.

I’m glad I spent the time I did on the West Coast, learning to not be such an asshole. But I’m firmly of the opinion that a man’s got to have a bit of an edge: Sensitive New Age Guys (SNAGs) get on everybody’s nerves: women and men alike. You don’t have to be a macho prick, just be a man with some fucking heart:

The weather sucks, it’s dirty, polluted and corrupt, and you’re taking your life in your hands if you get sushi at any place where you can actually afford it. But fuck it, it’s home.

Pretty much all of the ugly problems of the world – economic inequality, climate change, domination of our politics by money, and just general crap quality of life – are made worse by the gargantuan scale of our institutions. Bigness may not be the cause of our many problems, but it goes a long way towards preventing any progress in solving them. Government is vast, impersonal and distant; corporations are faceless monoliths that have their own needs and logic. I’ve long believed in the principle of subsidiarity: that institutions should be as close as possible to the people they affect. It’s why I believe in DEVOLUTION rather than revolution per se: revolution would keep our institutional elephantiasis, while devolving to smaller units of government and of business would make progress much, much more possible.

I think collapse of the US, Soviet-style, is not a matter of if but of when… and HOW. Empires crumble, and they’re often messy on the way out. I’d much rather see a planned devolution, rather than the Republic of New England skirmishing with the Union of Great Lakes States over access to the St. Lawrence Watershed, or nuclear war between Texas and California. But history will decide.

Even the Wall Street Journal is positive about the benefits of a breakup, and it’s true that this is one area where the far-left and the hard-right have often met. I think, though, that they envision a US much more like the EU than my own preference of a patchwork of city-states and county-scale governments from sea to shining sea, with a functioning judicial system to arbitrate disputes and ensure civil rights, so that the remnants don’t turn into apartheid states.

I think we’re much more likely to devolve into some Beyond Thunderdome dystopia than an anarchist commonwealth, but the future has a way of surprising you…

I was at a nonprofit I volunteer for, talking over the pros and cons of moving a database they use onto the Internet. As a community organization, they don’t have private or confidential information, but there was still a reluctance (understandable) to put their data “out there.” I reassured them that they’d be able to password-protect their data so it couldn’t be inadvertently modified. But I know that someone sufficiently motivated can always crack anything they want, and I’d certainly never recommend they put anything sensitive out on, say, Google Documents. It’d be like pee in a pool.

It got me thinking of the amount of personal information I have out there. I’ve been online since the early ’90s, have an Amazon account going back over a decade, and I’ve got active and inactive profiles at a number of social networking sites, from Facebook to match.com to LinkedIn. It’d be trivially easy to put together a fairly complete dossier on my political interests, my purchasing habits, my sexual proclivities and my health history. And, yeah… I’m a little creeped out by that, but I’ve pretty much accepted it from before the time I linked my Google account to my old blog. And part of it may be that – having spent my formative young adult years in a communal living situation – I’m used to living under a microscope, and I don’t have that big an issue with people knowing my business.

The fact is, our sphere of privacy is vanishingly small. And the danger lies in the fact that there is less and less accountability of the corporations and governments that possess and control all of this information As security writer Bruce Schneier notes, “those entrusted with our privacy often don’t have much incentive to respect it.”

I used to be an advocate for personal privacy, appending a PGP key to my personal emails and whatnot. Now I find myself moving closer and closer to the Transparent Society vision of British author David Brin: given that personal privacy is increasingly a joke, we must demand similar openness from those who run the show. If there is no one to watch the watchers, then this power will be abused, sure as winter follows autumn.

The up side is that we’ve never had better tools for keeping our governments accountable. The down side, of course, is that our governments have zero interest in being accountable. Even President Transparency is moving to retroactively hide information and prevent anyone from finding out whether they were illegally surveilled.

We’re at a delicate stage of the whole secrecy/transparency curve… in fact, the inflection point is probably well behind us. There is probably still time to reverse the trend… but it will require fairly massive sustained effort.

And in these days of Terror Terror Terror and PATRIOT Acts, the momentum is clearly in the other direction.

“Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.” – Tim Wise, Of National Lies and Racial America

The right-wing outrage about Judge Sotomayor is the kind of thing that used to freak me out, as did paranoid rantings like Frank Gaffney’s jib-jabber about “our first Muslim president.” There are a great many white folks in this country with chips on their shoulders the size of Toyota Tundras, armed with a sense of entitlement and Remington shotguns. So as a bicoastal libertarian socialist, these types naturally make me grab for the oh-shit bar. Moreso even than my left-wing comrades, pale males like these are fond of revolutionary rhetoric – and seem much more likely to carry it out. Urban radicals are too broke to afford firearms, and they have to take the bus to the barricades.

The truth of the matter is, though, outrage is cheap, like box wine, and just as intoxicating. And it’s ludicrous, in this case; as Wise continues:

Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

However, I think there’s reasons to see hope in white outrage. First off, America is headed inexorably toward being a mestizo nation. As Nezua points out, as much as the ruling system will add more black and brown (and female) faces in an attempt to hold onto power, this country is going to look very different in a generation. Not only our ethnic makeup, though (and I remember how struck I was, when I got back to the Mainland in 2004, by the fact that you hear Spanish everywhere), but also our position in the world is going to undergo massive, epochal change. America on the way down is going to look hella different than America on the way up.

I’m not saying that there’s not going to be real danger for individuals over the next bunch of years. Some of these people are definitely going to go crazy. But I’m less worried about a Turner Diaries-style fascist uprising than I once was. For one thing: they lazy. For another: they may have the guns (for now) but we got the numbers.

“And by “we,” I mean the world.“

I don’t vote.

It’s not easy for me to say that, because I have always taken my voting rights very seriously… ever since voting for Walter fucking Mondale in my first-ever election. But I didn’t vote in either of the two primaries California had this year, and I have no real intention to vote in November.

I chose, very consciously, to withdraw my support from a society I see as immoral and a system that I feel hoodwinks people into thinking they have a voice. The vote is rigged ten ways from Sunday: not necessarily through outright stealing of the election (though that has happened and will happen again), but by controlling what candidates get on the ballot, through using the money primary to marginalize outsiders, and through the whole superstructure of finance and control that makes legislators pawns of the power elite.

It’s clear that neither of the men who are running for President has any intention of making any change to the imperial policy of the United States to order the world as it – and it alone – sees fit. In 2012, and in 2016, we will still be in Iraq and threatening other nations in that part of the world – barring of course, some cataclysm almost too awful to think about and growing more likely by the day.

The possibility of the United States going through some kind of awakening — of all its citizens, elites and plebs, suddenly realizing that our current course can only end in tragedy for ourselves and for the world — is so remote as to not be worth considering. I mean, if there were some movement, even the blastocyst of a fistula of an embryo of a movement, in that direction, I’d give it whole-hearted support. But there is nothing like that. There’s TV and sports and the quadrennial reality show we call Election.

So I’m out.

At 5:04 EDT today, 11 June 2008, an Aer Lingus jet left JFK for Dublin, with a connecting flight to Rome early tomorrow morning. I was supposed to be on that flight. My plan was to leave this sick, sad society behind and make a new start in the country of my ancestors. For a whole host of reasons, I chose not to go. And it’s still not clear why, but I had – and have – a strong intuition that my karma lay in these here United States. A big reason for my upcoming journey, uprooting myself from a comfortable existence in “America’s Finest City,” is to find out why.

Since I was a teenager riding the Hi-Speed Line into Philadelphia and walking to the Wooden Shoe bookstore to soak up radical literature, I’ve been searching for a different way. And through college and communes and back-to-the-land in Hawai’i I’ve tried to find that way, so far without success. But as Edison once said after yet another of his experiments went wrong: “I have not failed at each attempt; rather I’ve succeeded at discovering another way not to invent an electric lamp.”

It really might take the total collapse of American society to shake things up to the point at which they can change. And I’ve dreaded it every time I’ve come to that conclusion: with all the guns in this country – and the increasing number of well-trained, hardened warriors coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan – a new American Civil War would make the breakup of Yugoslavia look like pro wrestling. But we are headed down the Slip-n-Slide to disaster at an alarming rate, and there has to be something on the other side of that – something other than a new Fascism and culture war – for people to look towards.

There is another way – a uniquely American way – for us to live with each other. Consumerism and the lust for power has deformed the ancient spirit of community and turned people into drones who work until they drop, then go home and narcotize themselves with drink, with drugs, and with American Idol. It does not have to be that way.

I’m going to be thinking a lot and talking to a lot of people all across the country about what that might look like. Eurocommunism won’t work, not will Latin American-style socialism or any other system that works in different countries. Deep in the cultural DNA of this country, however, is the ethic of cooperation and struggle that brought us the eight-hour day, cleaned up the slaughtehouses and began the still-incomplete work of extending full civil rights to women and people of color.

The question – and it’s an open question to me – is whether anything, even a full-blown apocalyptic collapse of society, can reawaken that spirit, if only on a very small scale.

I’m very curious.