Do you know your neighbors? How often do you visit your neighbors? Do you live in a functioning, close community where neighbors are friends who do things together? Wouldn't you like to get to know your neighbors better? Would you like to save more money through economic networking that also provides funds for social services? Would you prefer living in a self-governing community with better security? How about organizing community activities; a block party, fund-raisers, a festival, sports, or form of regular club, community theater or activities committee? If you answered yes to any of these questions then you have a reason to want to organize a community alliance. Through a community alliance you and your neighbors can immediately form closer bonds by working together to improve your community, solve its problems and develop a better quality of life. The greatest initial benefit to be gained is the closer community bond itself. In modern society, many suburban neighborhoods are deserted during most of the day and even on the weekends as people go off to work and go elsewhere for their recreation. When people have free time, they often spend it away from home, the kids go hang out at the mall, dad goes to play golf and mom has her own activities. Homes become places where people store their stuff as they run in and out hurrying off to their various interests. I find suburban neighborhoods to be vacuous cultural deserts, devoid of meaningful life activities. Even when people are home, most of them are inside plugged into electronic entertainment. It seems that no one visits or does anything anymore, yea, people are busy, rushing about, but doing what? After making enough money to pay for the cost of living, what's the purpose of pursuing more money if that money and time is never translated into a quality of life that is satisfying. It's not that people are neglecting community life to spend more time with their families in their individual homes, because they're not doing that either, people are spending less time at home with their families. Community togetherness and family togetherness go hand in hand, where you have close, functioning communities, you have close, functioning families that together provides the individual with a more meaningful life. So, just what do families do when they're together, do they just sit around and look each other? Incredibly, many people today would be dumbfounded when faced with the possibility of actually having to spend time with their family. They don't know what to do, they are clueless when it comes to living purposefully in social roles rather than being consumers, workers or spectators.
   Modern life has become very boring. But, you protest, what about all of the activities and entertainment and excitement? You can get that anywhere; sports, movies, amusement parks, that's mostly just spectator entertainment, what's so boring is the lack of a meaningful way of life, a proliferation of dead communities that present a shell of a community but have little life inside. As I travel around the United States, one city looks like all of the others, small towns and suburbs running together until they're all one endless, meaningless, wasteland of development without purpose, with people rushing about going no where and never participating in any meaningful cultural activities that give purpose to life.
   In traditional societies, people interact on a daily basis, their lives are filled with customs and activities that are structured to give purpose to their activities. Go to Europe, and in most any city or small village you will find functioning, vibrant communities that are alive with activity. In the U.S. when I go to a new city, there's no place convenient to go to meet the locals and interact with their community. Most activities in which people in the U.S. participate today is in spectator entertainment, which is second hand experience, living vicariously through other people who create artificial entertainment experiences. About the only place where you will find people to meet in the U.S. is either at entertainment events, where everyone sits focused on a screen, stage or an athletic field, or at nightclubs and bars, those are certainly not places for building community. Other places where you will find a lot of people are at the numerous tourist theme parks that attempt to recreate life as it used to be or as people imagine it was, which is just more illusions. Families go through historic villages where they look at reenactors demonstrating how people once lived in functioning communities and performed activities that gave meaning to their lives. What a curiosity? But there are still places in the world where people do live like that. Despite the trampling hordes of tourists across Europe, there are many European cities and small villages that have places where you can go to mix with the locals and become accepted into their community. Locals mix with tourists at town squares (plazas, piazzas), pubs, and frequently celebrate festivals and the daily rituals of living. Europeans are more successful at living, they work enough to pay for the cost of living and then devote the rest of their time to actually living.
   But festivals in the U.S. are severely lacking in meaningful pursuits, most of those festivals are just outdoor flea markets, some have background music, a few have reenactors demonstrating skills, but rarely are there opportunities for participatory activities. Small towns organize these festivals as a way to bring consumers into town to get them to spend money.
   I think the best way to organize communities is to get people together doing things, organize a festival, a block party, a country fair, arts, sports, etc. This gets people together in organizations that can be applied to other issues, political, economic and social, and these are things that people enjoy doing, most people don't want to get involved in political activism, but they may want to volunteer at school or a neighborhood festival or sporting event.
   I enjoy attending historical re-enactments, Renaissance fairs, buckskinner rendezvous and other activities that bring people together from different places, but when the event is over, they all go back to their homes. For instance, we can use Victorian cultural activities to extend beyond a limited festival by choosing social leaders within the community and participating in other Victorian activities that foster its values year round.
   Civilization is driven by its cultural vision, the way of life that people want, if people are turned off by politics or they are not motivated to become activists in the cause of abstract ideas like individual sovereignty or justice, then they should be more motivated to work to create the cultural lifestyle they desire within their community, but to support that requires freedom and the sovereignty of individuals to form consensual governments. The nation-state is a cult of violence and superstition, yet hardly anyone in the modern world is committed to their national culture, most Americans have abandoned the true American culture, which is libertarianism, the values of independence, self-reliance, the ideas embodied in the Bill of Rights which has now been betrayed, and few modern Americans care anything about protecting or enhancing their local and regional cultures. I resent it when people identify pop culture garbage as the "American culture." Even Europeans are abandoning their national identities, they are more American which is to say more partakers of pop culture socialism rather than true Americanism.
   Communities must not allow the statist/corporate pop culture to poison their lives and harm their children, as is being done through television and the larger anti-family propaganda that is designed to destroy human beings as free thinking responsible agents. One of the prime benefits of living in private consensual communities is the ability of homeowners to agree to keep this enemy culture out of their community and protect their children from it, not to mention, respecting adults by not imposing the obscenity on them.
   "As sovereign creations we possess inherent rights to self-determination not only at the individual level, but at the level of the family and the community. The family and the community are essentially inseparable. The community is really an extended family", wrote Bill Collier.(1) "The family and the community preserve a distinct value system within the rules of interaction established. Without these rules of interaction it is difficult, if not impossible, to pass them on to our children. Quite simply, the family and the community create an environment which encourages practices based on a value system and each individual has the right to live within a family and community which reflects their own values."
   The purpose of Libercratic community alliances, and in particular the Valenturian civilization, is to build meaningful communities, organize society and develop purposeful cultural activities that create a more enriching and rewarding way of life.

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