From a festival that helps artists trade work for healthcare to a regional micro-currency, Kingston is building an inclusive society in the event of a post-capitalism scenario.
Kingston, New York is a diverse city of 23,000. It (1)____________ a rustic industrial waterfront, a colorful historic district and Revolutionary War-era stone buildings. A stranger might call it bucolic. The streets of uptown are (2)__________ with eateries and, of late, alternative shops.
The bookshop’s windows exclusively feature nonfiction on the end of the world as we know it. “I started out putting together a window of utopias,” says bookseller Jessica DuPont, “but somehow I ended up with the death (3)_______ of capitalism.”
I moved to Kingston from New York City just over a decade ago, on the heels of the 2008 recession. I was three years out of university, but my (4)_________career in media stalled with the economic (5)___________. Friends of mine – two painters, one in her 30s, the other in his 40s – owned a building with an available apartment on the second floor where I could afford to live and work.
My new neighbors – artists, musicians, shop owners, builders, gallerists, restaurateurs – treated me like family. Our community was diverse in age, but we all had our independent creative pursuits in a place with scant economic opportunity otherwise. Thus, many of us shared the same problem: a lack of access to healthcare. America’s healthcare system has long been in shambles: then and still today. Luckily, among our friends were doctors and dentists who valued the work we did as equal to their own. So, we came up with a plan. Drawing on the age-old system of barter, we figured out a way to trade – the art of medicine for the medicine of art.
In October 2010, we launched our first weekend-long festival of street art, live music and health-related events. We called it O+, like the blood type. The general public attended by donation. Licensed health professionals volunteered to (6)___________ our on-site pop-up clinic. Over the years, thousands of participating locals artists have received medical, dental and wellness services worth hundreds – and in some cases thousands – of dollars. The cause has always been (7)_______ by an understanding that artists need healthcare, and that art has health benefits
“The way you change a system nationally is you do thousands of local things, and eventually the system evolves,” says O+ executive director Joe Concra. We are sitting in the bar of an independent bookstores in kingston, all baristas are wearing O+ T-shirts. He hops up and darts across the store for a copy of David Fleming’s Surviving the Future (2016), a (8)___________ on sustainable communities “in the aftermath of the market economy” and opens to a chapter called Carnival. “Look,” he says. “We were bringing carnival to the revolution as a form to connect and celebrate as a community.”
O+ may have brought the carnival. Now, it’s far from alone in the revolution: Kingston’s anti-establishment healthcare network is just one example of a model that could supplant corporate America. Locals have launched a non-commercial radio station, Radio Kingston WKNY, with widely representative, hyper-local programming that broadcasts via power generators if the (9)___________ goes dark. A regional micro-currency called the Hudson Valley Current now exists to, according to co-founder David McCarthy, “create an ecosystem that includes everyone”.
Agricultural initiatives like Farm Hub work toward equitable, resilient food systems. A network of bike trails quietly connects local towns to local farms (for the day when there is no more gas for our cars). And organizations like RiseUp Kingston, Kingston Citizens, Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson, and the Kingston Tenants Union facilitate civic engagement, combat displacement, and advocate for policies to address an increasingly dire housing shortage.
Kingston is piecing together the infrastructure for a self-sufficient community – one that wants to survive the possibly (10)___________ systemic collapse we nervously joke about over our beers.
The first weekend in November at a local elementary school, the public is welcome at a conference called Surviving the future: Connection and community in unstable times. “Leading thinkers in the field of system change and transition” will discuss key themes for an inclusive, holistic, just transition away from capitalism to something new …whatever that might look like.
People here are just trying to buy/rent a house that doesn’t take 50% of their income, trying to stay in the places they’ve lived for decades and not be gentrified out of their neighborhoods. The climate crisis, potential civil unrest … How do we unify locally to provide for ourselves?
“When the shit hits the fan, no one’s coming to rescue us,” Buff says. We’ve got to figure it out ourselves, because this is our city. This is where we live. This is what we’ve got.”
EXERCISES
1. Put the words in the blank spaces
a. fledgling b. downturn c. staff d. fueled e. throes f. bustling g. treatise
h. boasts i. impending j. grid
2. Find in the text the synonims to the following words or expressions:
MOVE SWIFTLY IN SHORT SUPPLY RECENTLY
URGENT STOPPED
3. choose A, B, C from the following questions
1. what is "on the heels of" in paragraph 3?
a.- preceding
b.- at the beginning of
c.- at the same time
2. what is "in shambles" in paragraph 3?
a.- recovering
b.- very expensive
c.- chaotic 3. meaning of "drawing on" in paragraph 3?
a.- taking the inspiration from
b.- copying
c.- eliciting
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