The Progress of Pilgrimage: Getting Oriented....

The Progress of Pilgrimage: Getting Oriented....

This link takes you to the comment mentioned in the post below titled "Compass Point."  Sorry that I don't know how to get it in the proper place.

Free spaces

Back from ten days in southern California including several in a part of the west San Fernando Valley developed about the time I was born.  Walks around the neighborhood gave me opportunity to see how the classic suburb has developed: the landscaping in some yards is out-of-control, way beyond what anyone anticipated; most houses are altered so that the original similarity is hidden behind new garages, changed roof lines, expanded pavement, distinctive plantings, and the like.  The basic grid pattern, interrupted by a few curves, is there, but it provides a big structure that one follows to other neighborhoods.  Inside this one, there is something closer to cozy.

I know that the ideal of the fifties was a sort of free life that included a single family house, a car, a citrus tree in the yard, etc.  We'll read more about this is later chapters of Jim Cullen's American Dream: A Short History of An Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford, 2004).  It is a dream that is easy to deride as trivial or shallow.  What I saw reminded me that over time people put down roots and make a place their own.  Also that over time cracks can appear.  In fact, since I was near Northridge, many of these houses were rebuilt following a major earthquake about 20 years ago. 

Another foundation of the Southern California suburb was the automobile.  (Foreshadowing Am Con 201 and the model-T Ford.)  Nonetheless, I spent a great day taking the growing LA public transit system from the West Valley to Union Station downtown and then to Venice Beach.  Yeah, it took all day and I got to see lots of people.  And I was not caught in a traffic jam as I was the next day when my brother and I drove to SanDiego, down the 5 at about 30 miles an hour.

Of interest to us: a 60+ woman on the Orange Line rapid transit bus.  She told me that she would never have known about this great system if she had not had had her driver's license revoked.  Then she mentioned that she is interested in learning more about how government works.  "All those John Birch folks," she said, "understand all of that."  I pointed her toward the League of Women Voters.

so . . . freedom to belong in a space and make it your own; freedom of movement; and freedom to participate.  How do these line up with Foner's categories?

DeAne

compass point

My friend Marty Stortz, who writes a blog titled the Progress of Pilgrimage, has recently moved to Minneapolis.  In today's post she evokes the image of orientation.  That has to do with using a compass.  Moving through space, wilderness, or even campus using compass rather than a map requires a different sort of attention to landscape and landmarks.  Perhaps navigating by compass allows us to explore and discover in ways that we don't when following map-quest generated directions.


This pondering takes me back to my first and second posts and to the purpose for these blogs.  Surely their purposes include to identify the cardinal directions that orient us and to record landmarks along the way. The course theme, "Freedoms," is a sort of "true North" that helps us make our way through the readings and conversations.  Whatever we encounter we will observe with one eye focused on Freedom; but, we won't forget its twin, that is equality. Today I won't spin this analogy out too far.


If I were keeping an old style common place book, I would pick up my best fountain pen to carefully copy out this bit of Mary Oliver's poem "Sometimes" in my most legible hand writing because these four lines are like a trail marker for a life of learning.  Here I must content myself with purple "ink."

4. 

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

[I must look for the complete citation at home.]

The Words or the Music of the Revolution

From Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation. (Vintage, 2000)

"With the American Revolution, as with all revolutions, different factions came together in common cause to overthrow the reigning regime, then discovered in the aftermath of their triumph that they had fundamentally different and politically incompatible notions of what they intended. . . . Taking sides in this debate [between the "twin goals" of individual freedom and equality (p. 16)] is like choosing between the words and the music of the American Revolution." p. 15

Ellis rightly identifies both the reality that in the service of a common goal, such as independence from England, persons with overlapping or even divergent values can form a strategic alliance and the way in which in the USA the tension inherent in such an alliance has been "not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity." (p. 16) Knowing this allows us to pay attention to the ways it surfaces in the conversations we have among our selves and with others.

Freedom and equality: which is promoted? Which is threatened? Which value under girds polices and actions? Is it possible to have both? Is it necessary? The image of music and words seems to prefer both, but one can have instrumental music or poetry without the melody.

For example, and to the point of our interest in "Tea party" as a dense fact, which value is dominant in debates over taxes? Surely those who want lower taxes could be arguing for freedom from taxation. Does it follow, and is it so, that those who are willing to raise taxes are in favor of everyone paying an equal share? Or, is their position based on commitment to offering equal services for education, health care, transportation, and the like?

Corporate Politics

Target and Best Buy have donated funds to a PAC that supports a candidate they regard as "pro jobs" but who also advocates social policies in conflict with the corporations' own HR practices. Some shoppers have protested with a boycott; it is a time honored American practice going back at least to the Revolution and boycotts on tea and abolitionist boycotts of slave produced sugar and cotton.

And yet . . . Target gives money, lots of it, to lots of other causes: local schools, arts programing, etc. The Daytons, the family whose Daytons Department Store was the "parent" to Target, were among those who set the bar for charitable and civic giving by Minnesota companies. They made such giving at, I think, 5% an expected standard among reputable businesses.

On the other hand, Target has had some bad press about some of its labor practices. Not as bad as Walmart, but of concern to my friends who know about such things.

All this leads to two points to ponder:
1) corporations are as complex as human beings in their policies and values, but their reason for existence is, finally, to make money;
2) so, why are these two corporations taking stands that may well diminish their income and beyond the obvious matter of which retail outlet has the item I want at price I'm willing to pay, what values come into my decision about where to spend my money?

Here's MPR Midmorning from August 2 when this was the topic of discussion: here

And a thoughtful comment from Religion Dispatches that includes a bit more about the Target and one woman's response: HERE