COMFEST TIME !!
Hey Folks,
It's COMFEST TIME - this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday !!! It's something !! Check it out!!
Here's the Show Schedule: http://www.comfest.com/schedule.htm
And here's the Welcome by Steve Abbott, from the Program; it tells it like it is!!! Check it out, and come by and be a part of it.
- Uke Man
Welcome to the
2007 Community Festival!
It’s a place and time where you can kick back for a few hours or three full days, soaking up the vibe of an enviable exercise in participatory democracy.
Volunteer committees work for most of each year to attend to the thousand details involved in making this annual event come true: organize vendors, seek out and schedule bands, arrange permits, organize activities for children, collect ads, produce a program, and contract for a range of services ranging from safety and sanitation to utilities and sound. And this isn’t half of it. It’s a big job, but to celebrate the ideals that shaped the first ComFest in 1972, it’s worth it.
Who is ignorant of the past remains forever a child. —Cicero
The spirit that produced that ramshackle street party was shaped by the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the antiwar movement of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, and the success of the first Earth Day in 1970, when over 20 million people nationwide participated in actions demonstrating that people wanted their "leaders" to take action on environmental issues. Those grass-roots efforts showed that everyday people, working together, could not only stimulate political action but improve social relationships as well.
The first ComFest took shape when a handful of political hippies who had already formed, among other things, a free medical clinic, a food co-op, a tenants union and an alternative newspaper, pulled off a big street party at the convergence of East 16th and Waldeck Avenues in the OSU area. OK, it was a couple of street barricades, a bunch of card tables staffed by service groups, a few children’s activities, four beer taps, some great local bands, and regular and high-test brownies at the Yippie table.
That first festival was tense. On opening morning, police arrested several community antiwar leaders, including a few ComFest organizers, and they were hunting down others. They swept through the festival area hoping to locate them. Released on bail, one returned to 16th Avenue, took the stage and urged the crowd to continue its resistance to the war.
The communal work that brought that two-day event together produced a festival celebrating a form of "extended-family values." People with similar interests, but doing different things, united around a common belief: Everybody does better when everybody does better.
The following year’s ComFest had a lot more booths and a lot more people. The early video production group Datagang gave people the opportunity to experiment with video equipment and techniques. Saturday night ended with a transcendent set by the incomparable Rahsaan Roland Kirk—the Columbus native and jazz innovator’s last show in the city—and the crowd dancing to the refrain of "Volunteered Slavery."
Thirty-five years on, cooperative progressive values are imbedded in the principles of ComFest (on page 9). ComFest volunteers believe that, to the greatest extent possible, people should control the decisions and the tools that shape their lives. Within ComFest, the larger decisions are made by the group in open meetings. Smaller decisions are reviewed by the entire group. The entire process is guided by the bylaws of the not-for-profit organization created to ensure ComFest’s continued operation.
You might say, "So what?" It’s a fair question, especially in a culture and political system that tout freedom as the ultimate value. But the difference between what they say and how they operate challenges the very spirit that formed and fostered this incredible event.
They do everything possible to shackle us to things. The consumption-driven demands
of a capitalist system ignore the organic elements of life on this planet. The legal requirements that corporations maximize profits for investors do not consider the harm that occurs in the relentless drive to increase financial wealth. When every resource, human and natural, is treated as a tool in the service of material acquisition, the true value of each is diminished.
You say it’s money that you need
As if we’re only mouths to feed —The Arcade Fire, "Intervention"
Our economic and political systems, whatever advantages they offer us, sell freedom with a hidden price: an expectation that we become passive observers to the exercise of real power. The wealthy believe we should participate economically but not politically, that we should channel our energies—our ability to influence the forces that shape our lives—into the purchase of things that give us the illusion of control.
So we seek bigger houses/vehicles/ TVs and smaller computers/cell phones, lots of gadgets we can manipulate at will. And not surprisingly, our focus on diversions further isolates us, physically and psychologically, from others.
MTV, what have you done to me? —The Arcade Fire, "The Well and the Lighthouse"
We’re not unaware of our powerlessness. We vote to bring troops home from an unnecessary and disastrous war, but our leaders ignore us or waffle on decisive action. We agree that the health care system is broken, but our leaders cringe before the insurance cartel. We sit gridlocked in traffic and oil prices continue to climb, but our leaders keep their faces pressed to the cowboy boots of their petroleum pals and mumble that alternatives aren’t cost efficient. We complain about all of this to each other, but we flounder in our dissatisfaction.
You take what they give you
And you keep it inside —The Arcade Fire, "Intervention"
But rather than confronting those responsible, or uniting and channeling that frustration into political organizing and action that will call those responsible to act in our interests, we distract ourselves with entertainments and turn the anger on each other. To escape our sense of powerlessness, we numb ourselves with "reality" TV and the soulless envy created by celebrity culture. Told we are free, we pretend that our freedom to consume and to bury ourselves in bling and trinkets will make us feel better.
ComFest has survived in the face of cultural and political forces that every day gravitate against our collective welfare. In putting this annual party together, we reassert the belief that together we can produce decent jobs and fair wages, health care that cares for everyone, housing that is affordable, peaceful relationships with others, and food that doesn’t undermine our health. We believe that self-interest is best realized through what’s in everyone’s interests. And we believe that it’s valuable to celebrate struggles and successes.
Between our primitive survival instincts and a relentless drumbeat of advertising and empty political rhetoric, we don’t need any encouragement to think only of ourselves. What we need is recognition of our common humanity and the inescapable fact that we are all linked inextricably. Our shared effort produces a commonwealth.
We believe in things
We’re told we can not change
Why shouldn’t we?
Why shouldn’t we? —Mary Chapin Carpenter, "Why Shouldn’t We"
Ultimately, ComFest is as much an idea as it is a place and event, a way of seeing what can be when people decide to abandon fear, embrace hope, and work together. It’s a vital and vibrant idea, one that says today you can kick back, relax, soak up the sun and good vibes, and dream a little. Each of us contains seeds of change. Plant, them, nurture them, and bring their possibility to reality. Make something happen. And then come back here next year and celebrate it. That’s worth looking forward to.
—Steve Abbott
It's COMFEST TIME - this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday !!! It's something !! Check it out!!
Here's the Show Schedule: http://www.comfest.com/schedule.htm
And here's the Welcome by Steve Abbott, from the Program; it tells it like it is!!! Check it out, and come by and be a part of it.
- Uke Man
Welcome to the
2007 Community Festival!
It’s a place and time where you can kick back for a few hours or three full days, soaking up the vibe of an enviable exercise in participatory democracy.
Volunteer committees work for most of each year to attend to the thousand details involved in making this annual event come true: organize vendors, seek out and schedule bands, arrange permits, organize activities for children, collect ads, produce a program, and contract for a range of services ranging from safety and sanitation to utilities and sound. And this isn’t half of it. It’s a big job, but to celebrate the ideals that shaped the first ComFest in 1972, it’s worth it.
Who is ignorant of the past remains forever a child. —Cicero
The spirit that produced that ramshackle street party was shaped by the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the antiwar movement of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, and the success of the first Earth Day in 1970, when over 20 million people nationwide participated in actions demonstrating that people wanted their "leaders" to take action on environmental issues. Those grass-roots efforts showed that everyday people, working together, could not only stimulate political action but improve social relationships as well.
The first ComFest took shape when a handful of political hippies who had already formed, among other things, a free medical clinic, a food co-op, a tenants union and an alternative newspaper, pulled off a big street party at the convergence of East 16th and Waldeck Avenues in the OSU area. OK, it was a couple of street barricades, a bunch of card tables staffed by service groups, a few children’s activities, four beer taps, some great local bands, and regular and high-test brownies at the Yippie table.
That first festival was tense. On opening morning, police arrested several community antiwar leaders, including a few ComFest organizers, and they were hunting down others. They swept through the festival area hoping to locate them. Released on bail, one returned to 16th Avenue, took the stage and urged the crowd to continue its resistance to the war.
The communal work that brought that two-day event together produced a festival celebrating a form of "extended-family values." People with similar interests, but doing different things, united around a common belief: Everybody does better when everybody does better.
The following year’s ComFest had a lot more booths and a lot more people. The early video production group Datagang gave people the opportunity to experiment with video equipment and techniques. Saturday night ended with a transcendent set by the incomparable Rahsaan Roland Kirk—the Columbus native and jazz innovator’s last show in the city—and the crowd dancing to the refrain of "Volunteered Slavery."
Thirty-five years on, cooperative progressive values are imbedded in the principles of ComFest (on page 9). ComFest volunteers believe that, to the greatest extent possible, people should control the decisions and the tools that shape their lives. Within ComFest, the larger decisions are made by the group in open meetings. Smaller decisions are reviewed by the entire group. The entire process is guided by the bylaws of the not-for-profit organization created to ensure ComFest’s continued operation.
You might say, "So what?" It’s a fair question, especially in a culture and political system that tout freedom as the ultimate value. But the difference between what they say and how they operate challenges the very spirit that formed and fostered this incredible event.
They do everything possible to shackle us to things. The consumption-driven demands
of a capitalist system ignore the organic elements of life on this planet. The legal requirements that corporations maximize profits for investors do not consider the harm that occurs in the relentless drive to increase financial wealth. When every resource, human and natural, is treated as a tool in the service of material acquisition, the true value of each is diminished.
You say it’s money that you need
As if we’re only mouths to feed —The Arcade Fire, "Intervention"
Our economic and political systems, whatever advantages they offer us, sell freedom with a hidden price: an expectation that we become passive observers to the exercise of real power. The wealthy believe we should participate economically but not politically, that we should channel our energies—our ability to influence the forces that shape our lives—into the purchase of things that give us the illusion of control.
So we seek bigger houses/vehicles/ TVs and smaller computers/cell phones, lots of gadgets we can manipulate at will. And not surprisingly, our focus on diversions further isolates us, physically and psychologically, from others.
MTV, what have you done to me? —The Arcade Fire, "The Well and the Lighthouse"
We’re not unaware of our powerlessness. We vote to bring troops home from an unnecessary and disastrous war, but our leaders ignore us or waffle on decisive action. We agree that the health care system is broken, but our leaders cringe before the insurance cartel. We sit gridlocked in traffic and oil prices continue to climb, but our leaders keep their faces pressed to the cowboy boots of their petroleum pals and mumble that alternatives aren’t cost efficient. We complain about all of this to each other, but we flounder in our dissatisfaction.
You take what they give you
And you keep it inside —The Arcade Fire, "Intervention"
But rather than confronting those responsible, or uniting and channeling that frustration into political organizing and action that will call those responsible to act in our interests, we distract ourselves with entertainments and turn the anger on each other. To escape our sense of powerlessness, we numb ourselves with "reality" TV and the soulless envy created by celebrity culture. Told we are free, we pretend that our freedom to consume and to bury ourselves in bling and trinkets will make us feel better.
ComFest has survived in the face of cultural and political forces that every day gravitate against our collective welfare. In putting this annual party together, we reassert the belief that together we can produce decent jobs and fair wages, health care that cares for everyone, housing that is affordable, peaceful relationships with others, and food that doesn’t undermine our health. We believe that self-interest is best realized through what’s in everyone’s interests. And we believe that it’s valuable to celebrate struggles and successes.
Between our primitive survival instincts and a relentless drumbeat of advertising and empty political rhetoric, we don’t need any encouragement to think only of ourselves. What we need is recognition of our common humanity and the inescapable fact that we are all linked inextricably. Our shared effort produces a commonwealth.
We believe in things
We’re told we can not change
Why shouldn’t we?
Why shouldn’t we? —Mary Chapin Carpenter, "Why Shouldn’t We"
Ultimately, ComFest is as much an idea as it is a place and event, a way of seeing what can be when people decide to abandon fear, embrace hope, and work together. It’s a vital and vibrant idea, one that says today you can kick back, relax, soak up the sun and good vibes, and dream a little. Each of us contains seeds of change. Plant, them, nurture them, and bring their possibility to reality. Make something happen. And then come back here next year and celebrate it. That’s worth looking forward to.
—Steve Abbott
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