The trouble with uniforms.

I'm not talking clothing here. Well I wasn't going to talk about clothing, but you never know. UNI - FORM see what I mean? Where do you see it? A landscape of wheat, or pine trees, A line of houses, a battalion of people, a national religion or politic, the face of a clock 9-5: the constant drive for conformity, regularity, the push to define what it is to be human into an ever decreasing number of models. The same government that wants you to wrap your water with a fence and wear a helmet while riding your bicycle and concerns itself with what herbs you smoke, all in the name of making you safe, will send you to war with other nations because they do things differently there.

It's driving us mad.

Someone bangs in their garden shed, a neighbour complains, before to long nobody anywhere in the western world has the right to bang in their shed. All suburbs are quiet and LIA's are special suburbs for banging and no signs are allowed on a residential street. No backyard business is allowed - banging or not.

It stifles entrepenurial energy, it makes neighbourhoods bland, there's an invisible blanket of red tape smothering our lives. You know, a lot of people don't want to live like that. Why can't some suburbs be free? Why can't we have the 'street of carpenters' back? We can if we organise.
If we organise we can undo every scrap of protectionist conformity that has ever been erected. We can have suburbs that are communities with corner delhis, just like we used to have, and neighbourhood coffee shops where we can natter in the garden, 'eating houses' too. We can have the Freedom to demand, rather than the freedom to obey directives... just by deciding to.

We can demand that visible pollution, like power lines, go underground instead of festooning the landscape like the dirty remains of a giant spiders drunken night out. We see so much of it so often we aren't conscious of it. It's like a bad habit we learn't from our parents, we aren't conscious of it but its screwing our lives up. Imagine, get up, go out into your street and imagine no power poles and lines. Feel the relief.

Why am I told that a notice advising that the occupant of a house gives music lessons, or sells paintings, or fish even, is visual pollution that doesn't follow council guidelines; while I'm expected to put up with 19th century power technology?

Organise - block by block, know your neighbours, this is HuArchy - the resistance of tyranny.