• Tag Archives USA

  • The Normal Extraordinary

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                       Waning Harvest Moon

    Just back from the grocery store.  Kate went along, a nice treat.

    On so many levels the grocery store speaks to privilege.  We have food, fresh food, all year round.  Kate and I can buy food all year round.  The U.S. has fields of grain, feeder lots with cattle and pigs, chickens and turkeys, fruit grows in many places, nuts, too.  Vegetables grow within miles of every major metro area and within them, too.

    As citizens of a powerful country, albeit one in economic struggles, we have so many things available to us, things we consider normal, that are extraordinary in most of the world.

    It’s not to early to start thanks giving.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden General Great Work Our Land and Home US History 📎and tagged

  • The Times They Are A Changin’ (Still)

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                             Waning Moon of the Cold Month

    Temps have come up.  Near freezing on Thursday.  Break out the beer cooler, the barbecue and the hot dogs.  Time for a picnic Minnesota style.

    Every once in a while I find myself driving in a part of the Cities I don’t know well.  Tonight was one of those times.  I needed to get the Urban League building at 2100 Plymouth.  Looked straightforward on the map, but, as usual, I wanted to try something, so I got off at the Olson Highway exit.  Hmm.  A bridge too far.  I had to wend my back north through side streets.  Finally found it and made it to the meeting.

    Senate District 58, Linda Higgins.  The Sierra Club’s first in-district meeting with members and legislators.  A good turnout and a lot of good dialogue, back and forth on environmental issues, peace and justice and taxes.  Back in the car, back home.

    How about that news that GM sold more cars in China last year than in the US?  Whoa.  Things change.  Our time at the top of the heap alone has come to an end.  I’m not with the dystopians who see us limping toward the next century, a much larger and sadder equivalent of Britain after the fall of empire.  Neither am I nervous about China.  Nothing in their 5,000 year history suggests to me that they will do anything more than shore up their borders and try to make as much money as possible while living interesting lives.

    My own feeling?  The world will be better served with two different, but equal powers.  Will we stay there with China for the long haul?  I don’t know.  I don’t care.  How we live our lives here has become interwoven with China as an economic power, yes; but, will the superbowl or the world series cease?  No.  High school proms and McDonalds?  No.  Car trips and love of our national parks?  No.  Our wobbly, creeky democracy?  No.

    Will the US change over the next 50 to 100 years.  Of course.  More Latinos.  Greater ethnic diversity.  More people in cities.  Sure. Will this makes us less American?  Nope. Will it change what it means to be an American?  Maybe.  But are we the same Americans as those in the first 13 states?  I don’t think so.  Different than Civil War America?  In substantive ways, yes.  So, it stands to reason that American will have a different flavor in 2111.  Not only am I ok with that, I celebrate it and hope my grandchildren and their grandchildren help make it special.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Asia Politics US History World History 📎and tagged

  • I Love the Midwest

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc      Waxing Moon of Winds

    Finished the Asmat tour and a visual thinking strategies (VTS) tour for 3rd graders.  I give them tomorrow morning.

    Put together the legislative update for the Sierra Club blog and a morning entry for the Star-Trib.  Soon, it will be nap time.

    This afternoon and over the weekend I’ll dig back into the American Identity piece for the 15th. It’s been fallow since Monday, but it has not disappeared from my consciousness.  I’m leaning now toward a definite geographic hook, an addition to the more usual psycho-political work I’ve read in Huntington and some of the other essays.  I’m not sure yet whether I consider it an equivalent to those notions or whether it is a more important category.

    Here’s what I mean.  The notion of a nation is abstract, in the instance of a nation as geographically large as the USA, it can become even more abstract.  My hunch is that, as all politics are local, so are all experiences of national identity.  In other words, my experience of my land, my hometown, my home state or region is, both of necessity and emotional depth, the basic ingredient of my affection for my native land.

    That is not to say that This land is my land, from California to the New York Island doesn’t also inform my national identity.  I feel the Rockies and hollers of Appalachia, the rain forests of Washington State and the glaciers of Montana have a place in my sense of national identity, some of them in spite of my never having visited them.  They recede in importance for me, however, when I compare them to acre after acre of corn and wheat.  They do not have the emotional resonance for me the Great Lakes have, especially Huron, Michigan and Superior.  My life has been lived in the towns and cities of the Midwest and I love the Midwest.  When I think of my US identity, I think first of the Midwest.

    More on this to come.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Faith and Spirituality Great Work Our Land and Home Politics 📎and tagged