Fare Thee Well – Why some activists leave NH.
It’s the end of an era. I’m sad to announce that Russell and Kat Kanning have moved out of New Hampshire. Songwriter and poet Richard Onley also just recently left. OTN’s Sam Dodson is leaving soon. Of course, they aren’t the only activists to have come and gone over the years, but they are well-known for their valuable contributions to the NH liberty movement.
News like this in tandem with the Free State Project‘s cancellation of the popular Liberty Forum event can certainly be a downer, even if you didn’t know all four activists personally, as I did. Does this signal the doom of the NH liberty movement and the failure of the Free State Project? Well, only the latter in that the FSP failed to put their event together, but that’s an indictment of the FSP’s bureaucratic and ineffective board, not of the concept of moving together for liberty. That’s the idea behind the FSP, and the early movers have proven that it is working.
There were unprecedented successes in just the last year-or-so in both politics (Knife ban repealed, 12 FSP participants and dozens more liberty-friendly granite staters elected to State Rep seats) and civil disobedience (Hundreds openly smoking cannabis without incident at events organized by liberty activists). More importantly, people are moving in greater numbers than ever before. More families and couples are coming these days as opposed to the initial influx of single, unattached males. For instance, a new couple in Keene are buying duplexes in town and families have moved into Dublin and the Peterborough area. What matters most is not who leaves, but who is coming to be part of the next wave of activism, and who stays. It’s a movement full of individuals with different stories. Many will come, and some will go. But why do they go? Here are some common reasons. (more…)
