When working for the Center for Urban Education (CUE) here in Portland, Oregon, I authored an economic development model based on public / private partnerships. I called it Project Renaissance.
The nonprofits (NGOs) would extend the role of the military, not by turning mercenary, but by field testing civilian prototypes, props (as in theater props, but also properties) used in various lifestyles. A lot of such beta testing already goes on.
The many campuses engaged in lifestyle demos would prove a vehicle for commercial success for those prototypes making a splash, as these lifestyle experiments would have their avid viewers, donors and candidate participants. Instead of wanting to be on a game show like Survivor, you would yearn to join a team in northern Canada testing large scale heated domes for their ability to sustain mosquito-free interiors. You rotate through, on tours of duty.
CUE started out as a subsidiary of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon (EMO), but thanks to the refugee resettlement programs consequent to wars in Asia, actively engaged in by those concerned about falling dominoes (the advance of Marxist ideologies), CUE had new funding sources for its role as a management hub.
Our core budget was sufficient to pull CUE out of the EMO nest and it flew on its own for a few years, before the refugee programs morphed into something else.
I continued thinking about refugees and refugee camps post the closure of CUE. I had been a computer skills trainer and programmer, and worked on the side with American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). My awareness of the refugees’ plight came through AFSC work as much as CUE work. With AFSC, I had visited Palestinian refugee camps in the 1970s.
So no wonder I started imagining the “new prototype lifestyles” as having something to do with refugees, including economic refugees, including military personnel forced by economic circumstances to surrender their civilian freedoms, in favor of a military socialist order.
