"Trapped between faith and fear, progressive liberalism is adrift in the current of modernity which eats away at faith and builds fear, moving toward an end which is only that: Finis. Lacking an articulate alternative, lacking, too, the communal basis of alienation, ours is a vague search for something which is missing. What is it? The counter-culture has always been just that. A negation bound up with what it rejects; the underside of liberalism. Its notions of human communion are tied to the immediate realization of something very like the old liberal utopia -- total private liberty and gratification of desire. That old utopia is wholly blind to the nature of communion, rooted in self-loathing and fear of the other; hostility to the ego, a desire to blot it out; fraternity as alliance of embattlement again. The possibility of citizenship has been eclipsed, and, having been eclipsed, it waits to bloom anew. It awaits a new polity, and in the dismal swamp heart of the "inner" city something stirs. Still we hide our bones for fear of being born because birth's first lesson is loneliness. To build a new city among these multitudes of strangers we must learn to recognize our fellow citizens when chance shall throw us together, and find the means for affirming our mutual "patriotism." We are obliged to set an example, to be the preachers and poets and tellers of tales of the great dismal city of refuge. We must steer clear of the Jeffersonian fraternal ideal which, in the name of unity, blows up such a cloud of sentiment as to obscure a dark and violent city. We must avoid charity as the plague it is, with its ethic of condescension. We must remember that war is no medicine for loneliness. Try love-laughter-song-dance, the tonics, before resort to narcotics and final solutions. In the lonely crowds of the urban wilderness there is mingled a saving remnant, a band of brothers and sisters, mostly unknown to each other, whose lavish hearts still accommodate the possibility of The Other America -- who are holding the pass, so to speak, until we are ready, each in his or her own time, to go back over all the rough, dark places, to try, and finally, to fathom our old love -- America. We must make the pilgrimage of Huck Finn, back to the beginning, divesting ourselves of false romance, disciplining our imagination in the school of nature, seeking fraternity with the strong victim, one to one, with the strength of personal character and devotion such that both of us are stretched toward our full stature. Then we shall find ourselves in the Great Dismal City of Refuge, candidates for citizenship. If we have learned well to recognize ignorance and dependence in ourselves and the world at large, and if we have learned to draw on the inexhaustible well of humor within which laughs aside our fears and pretensions, cheering us in our search for a true humanity, then we shall be the shining citizens of the Great Dismal City of Refuge, brothers and sisters in the global swamp-rat communion."

James Koehnline
The Legend of the Great Dismal Maroons
(A Secret History of "The Other America")