The Senior Center's Budgeting Party

We started slow and old-growth yet steady. The Senior Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians and Independents hosted a Community Integrity budgeting party. Party favors were ballots with options for small, medium, large, and extra large service sectors beginning with agriculture and permaculture support and ending with zoning and long-term planning expenses; the whole A through Z list of community services we want for and with each other, sometimes less, sometimes more, yet always competing less for cooperative more. This Community Integrity Party looked and felt like an Old-Growth ReForesting Party. We began with separate caucuses to discern these diverse quantitative options as to their quality of cooperative root systemic investment. Education small would remove more holistic arts and therapies of music and dance troupes and bands and choreographed orchestrations, organic and regenerative harvesting and replanting therapeutic rhythms and harmonies, painting murals of hope and writing sonnets of creatively and re-creatively healing history. No one liked that, although some Old-Growth Republicans began to look wistful. Education medium was Business As Boringly Usual. Budgets to feed evolving minds and bodies competing with investments in more sewer lines feeding our rivers less toxins yet not feeding our top reforesting soil more fertility. Education large began with cooperatively owned and managed pre-schools and ended with post-doctoral studies in synergetic community as forestry enrichment for optimizing mutual health-wealth ethical and aesthetic designs. Education extra large suggested listening and learning would become our primary mission, non-violent service of and for our municipality, cooperative ownership and governance of regenerative, restoring Win-Win peace and justice annually reiterative Slow and Old-Growth ReEducation Parties, plantings, feeding symbiotic organic fertilizers to harvest health and wealth optimizing economic and political outcomes. Once the three caucuses were finished, we formed one party circle to compare reforesting notes, to look for harmonies and dissonance, to see what both could together teach us about further listening and learning who to nominate as Community Integrity candidates. We started our reforesting inside and out party slow and old-growth steady, study, then began raising young candidates to manage family and community integrity, living in and on our slow and old-growth reforesting Cooperative Therapeutic Educational Community veering away from Competitive Trauma AntiEducational DeForesting our planet.