Daily Archives: July 21, 2015

Beyond the Boundaries, Politics, US History

Bless Them All

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Summer                                                           Recovery Moon

I’d not even begun to read Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ new book, Between the World and Me, when I came across Cornel West‘s (picture) defense of his review of the book. I met Cornel at a Liberation Theology conference in Detroit. This was the late 70’s when all things seemed possible if we could just get organized. He was a young academic star on the rise.

Now he’s professor emeritus from Princeton in Philosophy and still teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York. West’s critique of Coates’ work lies in Coates’ unwillingness to connect his observations to the struggle for black liberation. West is an unreconstructed black and 1960’s activist who sees all things through the prism of praxis, saying must be connected to doing. Me, too, but he’s been far more faithful to the dream.

What interested me even more than Cornel’s critique of Coates was his critique of Obama as the first black president. He used it too as an example of a place Coates was not willing to go with his analysis. I don’t recall all of it but he called Obama out on drones, the closing(non) of Gitmo, the national surveillance state, and his support of the occupation of Palestine.

Some of us follow our thought where it goes and in so doing allow our actions to be guided by the most fiery, the most pure of our ideas. West is such a man. So was King and Malcolm X. I admire all 3. They stand as bright sentinels on the margins of our culture, illuminating the path of that broad arc toward justice. Often such people can seem irrelevant, too willing to forego gains for the sake of a further dream. And that’s a fair argument, but it discounts the larger ecology of the work.

We need pathfinders, ones who can see the way forward and cast light upon it. Others can make the day-to-day compromises that actually move society forward. Without our Wests and Kings and Malcolms, our Freidans and Steinhems and Stantons, the path ahead would remain hidden, tailing off in the dark edges of the future. Bless them all.

 

Minnesota, Mountains, The West

The Mountain Difference

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Summer                                                       Recovery Moon

The last few nights the clouds at sunset have been what seem to my eye a color of red peculiar to the west. They remind me of Riders of the Purple Sage or High Noon if it had been made in color. The sun goes down behind Black Mountain from our vantage point, so just beyond it the old west could still be banging saloon doors, its streets filled with dust as the cowboys ride in after payday.

I’m no geographical determinist, but to say that living on a mountain is different from living on the flat lands of the Midwest is only common sense. In Minnesota the variation in the landscape came from beautiful rivers, forests of deciduous trees sprinkled with conifers, lakes and ponds, wetlands and the changes going north wrought on all of these. It was not big sky country, but on the way home to Andover the dome of the sky was large and largely visible.

In the Front Range the variation in landscape follows an altitude gradient, different trees and different plants, wildflowers appear as we drive up from Denver the 3,600 feet that separates Shadow Mountain from the start of the high plains. The sky, once in the mountains, is visible in fragments determined by the height and shape of the mountains. The trees are mostly conifers and firs, green throughout the year, though the aspen grows well even at our 8,800 feet. Along the creeks willows and dogwood grow, deer and elk browse.

The changes are more subtle here and require some to time to absorb though the mountains, in their bulky looming make themselves known like the slow-moving, light blinking semi-trailers that crawl slowly up the highways into them. You have to move around them. In the fall there is no blaze of color, jack frost running from tree to tree calling out magenta, dark red, yellow, subtle browns. In the mountains there is green, the conifers and firs, and gold, the leaves of the aspen finished with their summer’s work.