I was just reading a great interview with our local Ubuntu community’s ‘buzz’ generator, Randall Ross and The Agora National (I will post it later), and it got me thinking about making mistakes. We’ve all grown up in a world where mistakes are a big deal. In the world we live in now, you can make a mistake and end up on the street quite easily. In the world of Ubuntu, on the other hand, mistakes are opportunities, nothing to hide under a carpet, or get spanked for. What a mind-shift, imagine growing up in an environment like that!

Speaking of ending up on the streets, in many ways I feel I made a mistake in going to work during the Olympics and getting caught up in selling my energy to make a few $$ off of the whole situation. I got pretty exhausted from working, I met some great people, but it did help to remind me why I don’t want to put myself on the daily slave-wage treadmill! I spent the most the time I wasn’t working arguing that the Blac Block group was entirely justified in what they did to Hudson Bay Co. and that, really a chair in a window wasn’t violent so much as symbolic. To be honest, I seem to remember there being a riot nearly every fortnight (payday) in Mt. Hagen, Papua New Guinea. Now those would get violent–too many different tribes in one area with money, spears and taverns nearby!

I confess to believing that Derrick Jensen is a prophet, just like Martin Luther King Jr. was, although he sure doesn’t preach non-violence 😉 . His point, that we have put up with this environmental destruction and the extinction of species for way too long, is entirely justified and should have been said long ago, we don’t have time to sit back and count on the legal system to work it out for us anymore…. I was just watching a BBC program on The Virtual Revolution which mentions the cyber attack on the banks in Estonia by a Russian kid, which shut the country down–what a concept! There are ways to get more effective with how we use our energies, either to create a better world or to topple the old. Imagine if The Hudson Bay Company had been unable to sell anything for even a couple days during the Olympics, they would have lost a lot of money and really been pissed!

To be honest, I have no idea how such a thing might be done or what possibilities are out there, but I guarantee there are more than we imagine. The Ubuntu community is a great place to start, not only can you get hooked into free software, but the community will help you with any questions or problems you have and help you learn how to use it, who could ask for more? These sorts of interest-integration and cross-community problem-solving are creating unstoppable movements around the world.

During the Olympics various anti-capitalist communities pitched tents in a Vanoc parking lot and on the day of the closing ceremonies, we finally got a chance to go and check it out. We were fortunate, just as we got there a march took over the street, it was the heart of the Olympic protesters, a friendly masked fellow was cleansed by an Elder woman with sage, as the drums beat. “This is just the beginning of the downfall…” I heard the beat say.