Seattle Weekly's George Howland does the whole soup-to-nuts rundown on the commited anarchists residing at the Emma Goldman Finishing School collective in Seattle's Beacon Hill neighborhood. I'm glad to hear their vegan-only food supply is only partially harvested from dumpsters. But when it comes to having children and a place to call one's own, well, it seems the rhetoric meets the road.

If you live at Emma's...you cannot own a car, but for four hours of labor a week, you can join Emma's car co-op with three vehicles, all equally decrepit....Even after 10 years and countless hours of labor, Emma's house looks like a dump. Three of the sides are covered with a hideous green asbestos siding that needs a paint job (one member reportedly moved out when the group refused to paint the house). The back of the house has prettier wood siding, but it's painted different colors as if someone had started a paint job but never bothered to finish it. The most prominent feature of the front yard is a Plexiglas cover for a pickup truck that lays molding next to the stairs. The stairs themselves are rotten enough that their replacement seems like a safety concern....there currently are no children in the house....Kristen Walsh...was a member for three years (but she) and her husband, Brandon Faloona...moved out before the birth of their son, Azure. They now own their own home.....Says Walsh, "Ultimately, I do believe property is theft, yet I want some security for myself and my child."

Original member ("housing activist" Bob) Kubiniec, who left five years ago after five years of residence, now has three children and a stepdaughter. "You want to be generous with your kids. That austere an arrangement would interfere with that. I'm not comfortable making my children suffer for my deviant political beliefs," says Kubiniec.

Gee. That last punchy phrase might also be an apt description, sadly, of sending your children to Seattle public schools these days. Myself, I'm a stubborn city-dwelling coot; my wife, too. Even with the added and difficult expense of private schools, like that guy with the black eye in the old Tareyton cigarette commercial on TV and in print, we'd "rather fight than switch." The more people who live here that are even remotely like those profiled by Howland in The Weekly, the greater the need for a middle-class cultural revolution in The Great Emerald City. These hairy-minded folk - who think meat is murder, Bush is the anti-Christ, and property is "theft" - are just plain scary. Not because their views are outright anywhere near the majority, or because most Seattle-ites live in places like the Emma Goldman Finishing School (they don't, of course). But because the underpinning socialist gospels of managed outcomes, moral relativism, "critical theory" and deconstructionism are never far from the surface of the city's political consciousness, Seattle's costly governance, our exceedingly lame and PC MSM "straight news" reportage, our increasingly far-fetched K-20 public classroom curricula, and our polarizing "progressive" activism. The Good News: we DON'T have to take it anymore.