I Think That Fear Of The Mob,

Globally, As The Nation-state Becomes Increasingly Less Meaningful - A Provider Of Positive Goods And More And More Just An Army And Some Domestic Enforcement - People Are Withdrawing To Shape And Support More Localised Forms Of Organisation And Power. To The Extent That It's Part Of That Civilised And Localising World, The Same Is True Of The U.s.

The Language Of Commerce Has Been Engineered To Describe The Overt Purpose Of A Thing, But Cannot Encompass Fringe Benefits Or Peripheral Pleasures. It Weighs The Obvious Against What In Its Terms Are Incomprehensible. When I Drive From Here To There, Speed, Privacy, Control, And Safety Are Easy To Claim. When I Walk, What Happens Is More Vague, More Ambiguous-and In Many Circumstances Much Richer. I Am Out In The World. It's Exercise, Though Not So Quantifiably As On A Treadmill In A Gym With A Digital Readout.

A Lone Walker Is Both Present And Detached, More Than An Audience But Less Than A Participant. Walking Assuages Or Legitimizes This Alienation.

The Oil Corporations Spend A Lot Of Money To Get, Say, The Tar Sands Pipeline Through, But Nobody's - You Know, There Are Definitely Environmentalists Being Paid - But A Lot Of People Are Acting For Something Other Than Financial Compensation. So If The Tar Sands Pipeline Doesn't Get Made, It's Because A Huge Amount Of People Are Doing Something That Doesn't Involve Remuneration, Money, Etc., Because We're Not Actually The Self-interested Financial Instruments That Economists Like To Imagine We Are.

Some Things We Have Only As Long As They Remain Lost, Some Things Are Not Lost Only So Long As They Are Distant.