It is time, my cohousing compadres, to plan for total global domination.

We shall train an army of children to storm the streets on tricycles, tear up pavement and leave greenspace in their wake. We’ll crush the fearful isolated suburbanites with a brutal onslaughts of holiday cookies, smiling neighbors, and spontaneous music jam sessions. Entire sprawling neighborhoods will get buried under tiny-home urban infill, lush organic gardens, and cooperative agreements. We will subvert the corporate HOAs and zoning boards with conversation and consensus.

This war will not be easy and we have started out vastly outnumbered. Our rugged individualist opponents will fight tooth and nail for their manifest right to loneliness, vast expanses of lawn and not knowing the name of the humans who live closest to them. Their spirit will be crushed with kindness and community.

Failing that, they will live to see their children defect from their home plasma TV to join the giggling masses of pals scampering around the adjoining community. These children lost to the post-war-suburban-building philosophies will be gone for good; as adults they just won’t understand why their parents thought it so important to separate us by age, income, race and family.

Cohousing is not for everyone. But it is for most people, even though most haven’t realized it yet. Having lived in or visited communities across the country I see that our pioneering compadres have established a beachhead, fortresses from which we can go on the offense. Every time our opponents strike with accusations of naïve idealism we can parry with a pleasant walk through common space, an invitation to a community dinner, or an example of the obvious benefits of cooperation.

We are in the early stages of a long and complicated war. But we can win because our weapons are superior: Cooperation simply works better than competition for most things on a neighborhood scale.

People tend to like people, when they talk to them. Genetically, even the most solitary Homo Sapiens are pack animals.

Unite, Cohousers. You have nothing to lose but your sprawl!