Earth Commune

I wrote this piece for Cowbird, a storytelling collective and network which grew out of the Occupy movement. It started in the NWP iAnthology, with one of our weekly prompts. I'm cross-posting here: One of the original participants in Occupy Oakland was speaking on KPFA several months ago, and she said how she prefers to use the term "the Oakland Commune" for their movement. Without saying so, explicitly, she's obviously harkening back to the Paris Commune, the shining moment of Utopian communalism. When a writing group of teachers recently had the prompt "Design your own Reality TV Show," I flashed on the notion of the whole Earth as a Commune, and wrote a blurb for the show that I think worthy of a pretty slick Hollywood pitch-person. Earth Commune: the ultimate global deimplosion of the simultaneous online presence of everyone on the planet, as the "Occupy Everywhere" movement succeeds in trans-manifesting all means and modes of communication into a single instantaneous realization that we are our own TV show. This is reality, and we might as well live it together, peacefully. Once everyone could see, hear, feel, and understand everyone else all at once, it became obvious that "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" was a clear, easily understood, and easily implemented way to organize not only human life, but all life, and disagreements about the allocation, distribution, and enjoyment of the earth's resources ceased instantly. The only tasks that remained all revolved around healing the grievous harms inflicted before the "Communal Realization," as it came to be known. We never had to turn any of the TVs on again. We just looked at each other every once in a while, as we worked, and smiled.