By Nathan Good and Heather D’Alessio.
Happy New Year Everyone! We just want to thank every participant who showed up to our pilot meeting, and who showed how democracy works! Twenty five folks showed up and shared a pot-luck-of-ideas, and proved that the Pulse of the Community is alive and well!
The main idea for the meeting was to build toward an official, first Crestone-Baca (CB) Solutionaries’ meeting in January. No date or location has been set as of The Crestone Eagle’s January deadline. Information for this will be posted on The Crestone Eagle website and social media.
The participatory involvement that was shown here on December 16 appeared to be definitely coming from sense-makers and experienced community leaders. The first two straw polls showed: 22–yea and 3–nay for having continued town hall meetings. The second straw poll showed six new priorities desired to be communicated to the whole community. They are: two people said to build an independent community center, and one person each asked to make room for young people to create a living, to have consistent community meetings, and to consolidate governance. Feedback post-facto has also been, on the whole, very encouraging. We have proven once again that we do have momentum. Democracy is not dead and gone. Our children and our future are worth fighting for. None of us will just lay over and allow our rights to be transgressed.
The question of what could bind us on common ground came up, and most agreed that youth are a core driver for the future health and happiness of our entire community. Our job is not only to encourage them to remain in Crestone, but also to make it possible to thrive here. Enriching the activities that youth can engage with could be developed in a community commons. Gathering space with elders for continued incubation and multilateral generational infusion also feels right to us.
We would like to find more common ground and determine what folks really want for the future, and how to achieve it. A big part of the “how” will be allocating community spending ourselves (guiding the direction our tax dollars go for). We have started the process of building unity toward that goal of inspiring our local leadership to represent us. Once the majority of our community has voiced our wishes, and voted our conscience, then the pulse can be made irrefutably clear to our leaders. This way our projects can be supported and achieved.
The December Solutionary commentary is available at The Crestone Eagle website. Here is a part of that information:
We are doing our best, cooking our potluck dishes now, all while trying not to be overly distracted by the matrix. We know that no matter what happens, we’ll just have to evolve alongside the latest hybrid monkeys & GMO zombies that seem to have appeared lately. So, we do our best to stay present, often having to eat a little humble pie in order to responsibly and patiently collaborate. It’s not so bad, really. The beautiful part is we all are following our intuition, learning to balance this interminable human-doing with the ever-changing, obviously divine living-being.
The country, and the world, is shockingly altered now. Could it be somehow even our local government caught a bug? Have we contracted some of the global mono-cropping culture that’s accelerating down a technocratic highway of dogmatism? From small townships to high level governments our elected officials are asking artificial intelligence to make decisions for us and our future that may not be in our best interest. So it seems our CB village has a big challenge to address. Democracy in action. If the majority vote and the vision is supported by the remaining populace an even stronger voice towards the goals can sing out, achieving huge accomplishments for our CB village! With a unified-yet-diverse voice we can stay free of local as well as global abuses of our inalienable rights and responsibilities. Do no harm. Live and let live, for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights. And we are still and always will live fully, raise our young and grow our food, on this loving journey for generations of living men and women. Our intention for the next, January, meeting is to bring forth more voices and to increase and improve upon the straw polling. This conversation is bracketed this way, and ongoing documentation developed that can then be passed to the Crestone Town Board and the POA. Thus we exercise our voices in unity and strength in numbers.