I draw inspiration and guidance from Václav Havel, the Czech playwright.  When he and other cultural dissidents in the 1970s faced a totalizing, repressive system impervious to change – in his case, the totalitarian Czech government – Havel had a counter-intuitive response.  He called for the development of a "parallel polis." A parallel polis is a community-created safe space in which people can mutually support each other, directly produce what they need, and build a kind of shadow society – outside of the machinery of the dominant political system.