I recently recommended a great book about the now deceased Occupy Movement, long may it live. Just as important, I think, as contemplating the successes and missteps of such past actions is envisioning the next ones. Rivera Sun has done that in The Dandelion Insurrection. Imagining the game in such a book can inform our studying of the warm-ups we’ve seen or been part of.
The Dandelion Insurrection is an updated, more accurate, less fantastical Brave New World or 1984. But it’s not a dystopian novel. It’s a novel about overcoming abuses that now exist or easily might in the next few years. The author says that much of what she imagined has already happened in the time she’s been writing the book.
The events of the book, however, — the insurrection — have not happened. I recommend experiencing them. It may give you chills or tears. There is not much suspension of disbelief required, quite the opposite. An ounce of belief that people can turn around a destructive course of events ought to open the door to this creative, strategic, and informed imagining of how we, ourselves, in the very near future might do so.
I don’t like spoiling fiction, but I recommend reading this book in groups and then discussing it. I’d like to be part of such a discussion. There are ways in which I think a people’s nonviolent insurrection are more likely than some of the details here. But I am not inclined to believe we’ll be able to control all of the details. The essential ingredients, I think, are here accurately assembled. Two of them are in the book’s subtitle: Love and Revolution.