RE: The Freedom Movement Spends a Quarter Billion Every Year On Weekend Hangouts... Is It Helping?
IT'S A TRAP!!! ...though only one of so many...
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a dude in Hungary, whom I met a few year previous at the international rainbow gathering in New Zealand in 2009. The topic was the Copenhagen climate conference about a year later. You know, the usual complaints about all these folks flying around the world to this massive conference, on behalf of governments worldwide, to talk about climate change, without much hope of signing agreements, which most of them wouldn't keep anyway. Still, it's considered an event to be supported, because... just consider the alternatives!
Anyhow, the point of our discussion was that things are not much different with hippies (like ourselves), from Japan to Finland, from South Africa to California, and even Australia (which is just around the block from NZ, but still...) flying to New Zealand merely because there is a rainbow gathering, and how much the world needs some good love and compassion, and all that jazz... and how in the end it has done little good, though beautiful and exciting it may have been.
So looking at your numbers, I imagine the difference to both, the NZ gathering (where you didn't have to fork over $$ for lodging and stuff, but they did need to be airlifted out as the first seedcamp was washed away by floods) and on the other hand, conferences like the one in Kyoto, Copenhagen, Rio, and Paris are way (probably WAAAAY) out of proportion to Anarchopulco.
A 3-D printer has about the cost of a used car. Still, it's much more common to see a family sacrificing almost everything to keep their vehicle running, not even considering what a 3-D printer could do for them for the same price. I think this could be a great analogy to the conferences, and ... well, how NOT to spend your money if you want to make a difference.
Oh ya, things like those climate conferences are going to be of a scale at least ten times anything the freedom movement is doing, because those are organized & funded by governments & globalists to promote their world domination plans... and they print the money.
I think one of the great things about how the original, BIG Rainbow Gathering ("Nationals") comes together is that it's always in the continental US, and there is a disproportionately small number of people who fly to it, it's mostly hitch-hikers, buses, and carpools from across the continent.
As always, it seems like the biggest limiting factor is that most simply don't know there are alternatives, or what those alternatives are. That's where we come in :-)
I agree. Lots of time it's the lack of information of the roads available, or even the knowledge on how to create your own road.
Tying it back to the conferences, it seems to be the same: of course people tend to emulate what the big-boys have showed them. And with the rainbow it's not any different. My first experience was a small regional gathering in Canada, which gave mme an idea of what the big one must be like. Years later I attended a gathering in Germany (THE international one), and a few years following the one in NZ I mentioned. Both were quite amazing, to be honest, but in certain ways I still feel I haven't been to a "real one" if I haven't attended a national one in the States. ...though I'm sure, a lot of it is in my mind, as a sum of all I've heard about it.