We're only here to learn to love.

This is an article about love. Love isn't something you can be given. Love is something you're born with and learn as you grow. I want to tell you about a revolution that's going on: people are remaking the world, not in the way we thought before, but by learning to love and care for one another. This is a chance for all of us to come together, realize our mistakes, forgive them and ourselves, and remake ourselves. It restarts with this: when somebody reaches out their hand, they ask no more than it is taken – touch me, please? All they need is love.

―Bill Hicks

One of the most important things we can do as individuals are love and care for one another.

Creating autonomous communities is not new, nor does it start in the United States. People have attempted to create communities based on mutual aid for thousands of years.

Unfortunately, throughout history, these experiments have always been co-opted by a ruling class who used its control over the economic base to suppress the members of those 'communities'. As a result, many "liberated" communes withered and died away. This is true not only of intentional communities but also with more conventional towns and villages as time passed.

But other communities have persisted, such as Port Royal, the French and Indian colony founded by the French explorer Jean Ribault in 1562. The settlement lasted until 1697, when a slave uprising, led by one of their own, overthrew their colonial overlords.

The example of Port Royal is not unique. Throughout history, many people have tried to create 'autonomous' communities based on mutual aid, and they all perished at the hands of those who sought to keep those communities subjugated.

What is different today is that the seeds of mutual aid, a seed that was planted over thousands of years, have finally been re-awakened and are spreading in many people's minds.

The question for most people today is: how do I bring this into my life? I'm going to provide some options here. These all stem from the idea of Bread and Roses, which many people will know as Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream speech.

When Dr King spoke his famous speech in 1963, he said:

"I know they [the white establishment] dismissed me as some kind of an "Uncle Tom"," said Rev James Lawson, a civil rights leader in Memphis, Tennessee. "And some of those people still do. But the more I've thought about it, the more I doubt that the white establishment would have wanted to hear what I had to say anyway."

―Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream", 1963

We can think about Bread and Roses as a metaphor for self-sufficiency and liberty in a society where others control work. This idea of mutual aid makes culture accessible; it's what makes society allow the freedom to pursue happiness.

Bread and Roses pictures some roses, representing our lives' individual and collective aspects. The red roses represent the individual aspect, which symbolizes passion, love and beauty. The white roses represent the communal aspect, which means peace and unity.

The bread symbolizes the necessities of life, the 'survival' aspect of our lives.

Ultimately, this is what a 'liberated' society would look like: one in which the individual and collective aspects of our lives are in harmony. This is what we should be working towards today, so I've chosen Bread and Roses as my talking point for this piece.

The central issue of why we must create self-sustaining communities comes from energy. The energy available determines how much liberty we can have in our society.

I've chosen the energy issue because I feel it has the most to do with decentralization. With the idea of decentralization comes a great deal of control over our lives and, most importantly, control over our jobs and work lives. This matter of control is crucial: it allows those in positions of power to keep what they have. It prevents those not in positions of power from gaining access to work and therefore gaining access to energy.

What bread and roses tell us is that we must use energy in such a way that we don't waste energy; we don't waste the food we eat, the water we drink, or the air we breathe.