The point of intentional communities is that they're *intentional.*
Bittersweet Farms is not an intentional community.
The point of intentional communities is that a person *intends* to live there. If they decide they no longer want to, they can leave. They make decisions about their own lives.
If a person is placed into a community by someone with greater power, forced to stay there unless the person with greater power moves them out, and has important decisions about their life made by those people in power, then they're not in an intentional community. They're in an institution.
Yes, even if it is on a farm. Yes, even if they are doing work on said farm.
And no, I will never willingly consider such a living arrangement for myself, even if I think intentional communities have the potential to be really cool, because Bittersweet Farms, and the Sacramento-area farm-institution in the very early planning stages are not intentional communities.
The rantling above was triggered by one of my parental units telling me that she was interested in attending the planning-discussion meeting because before she had met my father, she was considering living in an intentional commmunity. She and my father still want me to attend the meeting, because they think that maybe I could urge them to take autistic perspectives into account in this whole process.
Perhaps I'm just too cynical and jaded, but I'm not sure it's worth bothering. At most I can only realistically imagine an autistic getting a token role in this planning process. There's no way we can get a majority. Even if we did get a sizeable minority, the power structures will still be the same, and they're the most dangerous part of the whole thing.
Googling the name of the person in charge shows that they're a Rescue Angel and that they were somehow involved with the Green Our Vaccines Rally. I know what that means from an autism-science perspective, and I'm not happy with it, but I don't know if it would have any significance from an institution-masquerading-as-pseudo-utopian-community-planning perspective.
The point of intentional communities is that a person *intends* to live there. If they decide they no longer want to, they can leave. They make decisions about their own lives.
If a person is placed into a community by someone with greater power, forced to stay there unless the person with greater power moves them out, and has important decisions about their life made by those people in power, then they're not in an intentional community. They're in an institution.
Yes, even if it is on a farm. Yes, even if they are doing work on said farm.
And no, I will never willingly consider such a living arrangement for myself, even if I think intentional communities have the potential to be really cool, because Bittersweet Farms, and the Sacramento-area farm-institution in the very early planning stages are not intentional communities.
The rantling above was triggered by one of my parental units telling me that she was interested in attending the planning-discussion meeting because before she had met my father, she was considering living in an intentional commmunity. She and my father still want me to attend the meeting, because they think that maybe I could urge them to take autistic perspectives into account in this whole process.
Perhaps I'm just too cynical and jaded, but I'm not sure it's worth bothering. At most I can only realistically imagine an autistic getting a token role in this planning process. There's no way we can get a majority. Even if we did get a sizeable minority, the power structures will still be the same, and they're the most dangerous part of the whole thing.
Googling the name of the person in charge shows that they're a Rescue Angel and that they were somehow involved with the Green Our Vaccines Rally. I know what that means from an autism-science perspective, and I'm not happy with it, but I don't know if it would have any significance from an institution-masquerading-as-pseudo-utopian-community-planning perspective.
posted by Danechi at
12:14 AM
2 Comments:
She and my father still want me to attend the meeting, because they think that maybe I could urge them to take autistic perspectives into account in this whole process.
Perhaps I'm just too cynical and jaded, but I'm not sure it's worth bothering.
I agree with you--even if they took autistic perspectives into account, the basic idea of the thing is a problem. (For instance, for it to be an intentional community for autistic people, autistic people would've already had to have been deeply involved with its planning already.
By
Tera, At
9:18 AM
Hi Danechi,
I'm going to chime in with Tera, that your parents' involving you (and *ONLY* you? They seriously hadn't "taken autistic perspectives into account" before?!) at this late stage in the community's planning does not indicate any commitment on the community planners' parts to creating a community by or for autistics.
(I am an autistic woman looking to start a neurodiverse intentional community, so yes, this topic is a big deal for me.)
By
Lindsay, At
2:48 PM
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home