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, where
single-payer care was available, premiums and deductibles were
astronomical. 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 staff our on-site pop-up clinic. Over the
years, thousands of participating artists, like Lucius, Spiritualized,
and locals who played with the B-52’s and David Bowie, have received
medical, dental and wellness services worth hundreds – and in some cases
thousands – of dollars. Some artists say the care they received even saved them.
“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, whose building I lived in when we first got O+ off the
ground, and who volunteered full-time for years until grants and donors
made it possible to pay modest salaries to three full-time and seven
part-time employees. “Every time I walk into the clinic, I think: ‘Oh
yeah, it is possible to build a new system.’ I refuse to believe we
can’t. So, we keep doing it.”
O+ may have brought the carnival. Now, it’s far from alone in the
revolution: Kingston’s anti-capitalist, 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 grid 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.
From my vantage in the deep south, it looks as though, one mission at
a time, Kingston is piecing together the infrastructure for a
self-sufficient community – one that wants to survive the possibly
impending systemic collapse we nervously joke about over beers at Rough
Draft.
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