I’ve been thinking a lot about people who do things for free. My friends run clubs after school. One friend takes her kids on archeology trips to the San Juan River. Another organizes writers to come into his class to talk to his co-convening high school/community college students. The people at the Coconino Coalition for Children and Youth (CCC&Y) who work to stop the preschool-to-prison pipeline and they who attend the Teaching Academy and they who are starting a new literary and climate science magazine called Carbon Copy and the people who run the Northern Arizona Playwriting Showcase (NAPS) and my friends who organize the Northern Arizona Book Festival (NABF). Free, free, free. Everything is free—the labor and the events themselves. No one pays. No one gets paid. The book fest, which will run Sept. 14-16, is brought to you by people who want you to have access to as many kinds of writing as possible. So come, because it’s free and because it’s awesome (the two are not mutually exclusive).

“Free” is a crazy economy that I hope predicts the dream of the Universal Basic Income where each of us gets to work at what we’re best at. Maybe we each have to take a turn digging ditches because I don’t think that is anyone’s dream job but there is something to be said for manual labor and, yes, we did finally shovel the ton of dirt that we did not indeed need for the patio off of our driveway. My job is one I would mostly do (maybe not EVERY meeting) even if I weren’t paid. That must freak people like the Koch brothers out. What if we all had that opportunity? To do work we loved. We wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between working and volunteering and having a life. As the Artificial Intelligence revolution displaces people from jobs, we shouldn't despair. We should think, finally, I get to host my own fundraising event or start my own magazine. I have to get really cynical to believe that the Koch brothers and you, Ducey, have a plan to starve public education so much that it would fail and that those who could afford to jump ship and attend charters and privates would do so and the rest would be left to take part in the preschool-to-prison pipeline and all the cheap labor that prisons provide. But listen, Governor Ducey, we on these committees full of acronyms and abbreviations—we are doing work for free. We’re going to make sure people still have access to education even as you disembowel it. We’re going to make sure people still volunteer. We’re going to make sure people vote. We’re going to do it all for free and your PAC people will be so confused that they will wonder why their money didn’t buy the election.