A place for radicals

I was driving around Berkeley this morning, since Palmer woke up ridiculously early and I wanted to get him out of the house a bit. 

I'm used to the electric car dealerships, the tarot card reading places, the organic markets, the fair trade clothing stores, and the specialty shops with wooden toys. But it was when I drove past the pet food store with a huge sign on the window declaring "We Have Raw Food" that I found myself second guessing the wisdom of incorporating marketing and radicalism. I mean, part of the BARF movement is precisely to make us rethink the need to buy specialty prepared food for our pets. And yet here it has been co-opted into a marketing angle for this food store. 

Indeed, I am hard pressed now to think of a single socially conscious anti-establishment trend that some shop or other in Berkeley has not managed to turn into a marketing niche. It is truly amazing how insidious the reach of capitalism is. 

This does not change my mind that Berkeley is among the best places in the United States to live. But it does make me worry about the future of radical thinking. 

Where can someone go, who really wants to do something not because it is part of a trend or because they have read somewhere it is the right thing to do, but because it is an idea, no matter how radical, that answers the difficult, the challenging, the unexpressed, in modern life?

Reykjavik? Umm, maybe not. But somewhere anyhow where it is not the norm.