My Amherst Day

Taking it easy. 

 

Yesterday, while waiting at the bus stop, one of my co-workers at the Amherst Survival Center took my picture. 

We have new signs at the center welcoming people in several languages.

Here is a wise sign they put up recently in the meeting room of the Northampton AA meeting known as "The Looney Nooner."

At UMass I stopped in at the convenience store known as "The People's Market."

It is a non-profit co-op, but from the crowd it draws at its Campus Center location I've gotta believe it must make a buck or two.

On the campus concourse some Pagans were promoting their religion. 

Here's an unlikely bumper sticker I came upon at UMass. 

Some people however are not taking the election, or much else, very seriously.

 

Nice

It's a great day to be alive.

It lifted my spirits to look at the beautiful view out my window this morning.

Near the Amherst Survival Center where I work in selfless service to humanity (translation: for free) is this symbol of the American Dream; pretty flowers in front of a white picket fence. 

After my shift at the Survival Center I went to UMass, where some of the students were just hanging out enjoying the sunshine.

Other students were calling for the liberation of Tibet at a rally in front of the Student Union.

One protester was displaying gross pictures of people allegedly tortured for wanting freedom for Tibet.

The campus police were nearby, but the rally was peaceful. 

Monks were posing with a picture of the Dalai Lama.

 



Last year around this time the Dalai Lama came and spoke at Smith College. Here is a video of him arriving at the Hotel Northampton.

 

The Dalai Lama seems like an okay guy for a dude who runs around the world in flowing robes blessing everybody. But a government under him would still be a religious dictatorship, and history has shown that no matter how benignly these things start out they always end badly.

Since whoever controls your money controls your life, economic liberty is essential for all other forms of liberty. Free markets and free minds are self re-enforcing - you can't sustain one without the other. Capitalism is the only system that allows you to produce products or sell your skills as you wish and to keep the money you earn doing so. Therefore, no society can be called free that has any other economic system other than capitalism.

Also, no government is legitimate where those who must obey the laws are not allowed to participate in making them. Therefore no society can be considered free that does not practice democracy.

Therefore, the only form of civilization that provides for the maximum freedom and the highest level of well-being for the most people is a system embracing a capitalist democracy.

Unless that is what the goal of the free Tibet movement is, then their talk of liberation is just so much blather.




Here is a song of freedom.