We can't envision any path from our present morass to a better, freer, fairer society being a smooth, easy road. We can say that working to provide better products and services to one's family and community will be better than asking one's representatives in the public sphere to do it for us.

While working for a candidate and taking the ultimate action of voting for him or her once every 2 years may seem like the best thing to do to some, we hope they won't overlook doing positive things for the progress of the freedom of their family during the other 719 days in between.

We look forward to the day when you can look at the bottom of your coffee mug and it says "Made in the Free Market by Free Men." That day will come from those of us who try to make coffee mugs, rather than ask others to dictate who can make them and charge what tariff on them based on where they are made.

Thoreau said there were the "tax-payers" and the "tax-eaters." We note that a lot of the public and publicly-sanctioned processes are corrupted by money and power. A lot of these processes or services are just not working very well for people at all. But there are a lot of people who are choosing a different path, a "road less travelled."

Bifurcated just means "forked into two" and we're noticing that many people are choosing another path than the publicly-sanctioned ways. Some think they have "given up" and are "doing nothing" for their freedom, but we think rather that they are "doing everything" for their freedom by choosing an alternative to corrupted practices.

We didn't say it will be easier to forge your own way, but can you imagine the rewards to the home-schooler parents who have struggled and sacrificed to educate their kids, while still having to pay for the public school system that they are not using, when their kid wins the spelling bee or scores a 1600 on his SAT exam?

Some say "Hey, this country is a democratic republic, right?" But, that's not true. The country is you and me and all our neighbors and what we all do creates our community.

Indirect action is asking your representatives in government (which is a democratic republic nominally) to do something for you. At the Alternatives Expo, we're generally talking about direct action - the things you can do yourself! When you do things for yourself and act peacefully with your fellows in community, you may not often have to ask the public officials to do anything for you.

Hey, thanks for asking. At least you're here at the web site. The Alternatives Expo is a place that encourages you to look at some of the aternatives to mainstream ways. We develop events to educate people to available alternatives, promote commerce between people who believe in dealing with each other fairly.

When you look around you, everyone seems to be discontent with "the way things are." People with kids are scared to let them go to the public schools and turn to home-schooling; they find their doctors aren't curing them, but drugging them up and they turn to natural health practitioners; they find the courts are too expensive and slow and they turn to mediation and arbitration. The list goes on and on - we'll develop an ongoing list of known alternatives and local resources as we go along.

We're not really trying to start a new movement here - we're just acknowledging a movement that doesn't even know it's a movement, and it is getting legs!

Well, some people that believe that a lot of the systems we deal with every day are corrupted and we've got to turn to some workable alternatives ARE libertarians, but that's not the point. If you think something's not working right and you're looking for a solution, it doesn't matter what your political beliefs are.