On January 20th, out in the cold and rain, I was among over 10,000 angry citizens who stormed Washington DC to protest the presidential inauguration of George W. Bush Jr. There was no shortage of catchy phrases and sound bites that day, and there were as many signs and banners as there were protesters.

But in terms of getting some message across to those supporting Bush, to the general public, or to Bush himself, I think we failed miserably. At least in the short term. What we did, was get together and let out a whole lot of anger, sadness, and fear over the dire state of our government, world politics, the environment, social justice, human rights and a million other things that are, to put it mildly, not going very well here on Spaceship Earth.

We danced, we drummed, we chanted, we shared our thoughts on the present and our hope for the future. We conjured a whole vortex of energy and sent it out into the cosmos. We connected with each other; we found power in each other. We took another step closer to realizing the possibility of a new culture based on peace, cooperation, free-expression and lots of other hippie new-age bullshit, because for one day, on the streets of D.C., that's what we had.

And in the long run, all of us who were there will go out and tell those we're close to about the power of what we experienced, and they will tell others. And in that way, without the help of the mass-media, we will spread knowledge, and in that knowledge is power, the power of what we can do when we get together and say, we can do better.

There was a sea of issues addressed that day, but we all came together for one reason that I could see. We have decided that the dominant culture is problematic, unsustainable, and damaging, and we are here to create a new one.