Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
enough
by Scott Douglas
in eulogy to Steve Orel
8-07-2007 at Temple Emanuel, Birmingham Alabama
WHEN WILL THERE BE ENOUGH?
ENOUGH BREAD!?
ENOUGH LAND!?
ENOUGH JUSTICE!?
ENOUGH PEACE!?
ONCE THERE WAS ENOUGH FOR ALL TO SHARE
BUT ENOUGH FOR ALL TO SHARE
WAS JUST TOO MUCH FOR SOME TO BEAR!
WHEN, AGAIN, WILL THERE BE ENOUGH?
NOW SOME HAVE TOO MUCH AND MORE,
WHILE MOST DON’T EVEN HAVE ENOUGH.
THERE IS MORE TODAY THAN YESTERDAY,
AND, TODAY, EVEN FEWER HAVE ENOUGH
PEOPLE WITH THREE HOUSES
SAY THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE;
WHILE PEOPLE WITH NO HOUSES DISAPPEAR IN SILENCE
PEOPLE WITH THREE CARS
SAY THERE IS TOO MUCH CONGESTION;
WHILE PEOPLE WITH NO TRANSPORTATION DISAPPEAR IN SILENCE
PEOPLE OF A DUAL JUSTICE
SAY THERE IS TOO MUCH CRIME
WHILE PEOPLE RECEIVING NO JUSTICE DISAPPEAR IN SILENCE
WHEN, AGAIN, WILL THERE BE ENOUGH?
ENOUGH BREAD!?
ENOUGH LAND!?
ENOUGH JUSTICE!?
ENOUGH PEACE!?
THERE WILL BE ENOUGH…
WHEN THE SILENCED REAPPEAR WITH THEIR OWN VOICES.
THEN, THERE WILL BE ENOUGH!
THERE WILL BE ENOUGH WHEN THE REGAINED VOICES
RELOCATE POWER
TO DWELL IN COMMUNITY.
THEN, THERE WILL BE ENOUGH.
THERE WILL BE ENOUGH
WHEN HUMILITY IS WEALTH,
GREED IS POVERTY,
AND CRIME --CRIME-- IS HARM TO THE SPIRIT
OF SHARED COMMUNITY
THEN, THERE WILL BE ENOUGH.
THERE WILL BE ENOUGH
WHEN THE TEMPLE OF
THE GOD OF SCARCITY (THE GOD OF GREED)
IS ABANDONED;
AND THERE EMERGE
RENEWED AND FAITHFUL PEOPLES
FORGED IN THE CRUCIBLE OF STRUGGLE
FOR
ENOUGH BREAD
ENOUGH LAND
ENOUGH JUSTICE
ENOUGH PEACE
AND THEY WILL BE HUMBLE & YET
POWERFUL PEOPLES
BECAUSE THEY WILL REMEMBER;
AND BECAUSE THEY WILL HAVE ENOUGH.
SDIII
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Steve Orel
His work as an educator, organizer and agitator, lives.
http://journals.aol.com/gjo2/further-travails-of-the-orels/entries/2007/07/07/723-a.m.-he-is-gone.../1405
Letter to the Editor
The Bush-Cheney administration has sacrificed the lives and limbs of thousands of young Americans in the Iraq war. It has spent billions of dollars of our tax money for a war it said would benefit the people in that country.
Former Gov. Don Siegelman has gone to prison, supposedly because a wealthy businessman gave money to support a lottery the governor thought would benefit the schoolchildren of Alabama. I have bought an occasional Florida lottery ticket myself, but know a small fraction of the costs of the current war could do a lot more to further education in all 50 states.
Siegelman didn't take taxpayers' money or hurt anyone, but was shackled and jailed. It doesn't seem fair. Moreover, it endangers our precious freedom and democracy. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth put it plainly and clearly as our former governor was being taken away: "It's just politics."
Let's join this great American in his call to fight this injustice.
Gary Mansbach
Southside
Sunday, April 08, 2007
been a while...rambling resurrection
Susan has been pretty busy with her business - tax stuff especially.
I got some CDs - Two are new but old (traditional)-
One is Ry Cooder's My Name is Buddy -- Buddy is a 1930's "red cat". Odos and I liked the song titled Three Cords and the Truth about people like Joe Hill, Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger being set up or framed up for "doing the right thing".. He got a kick about the photo of Buddy behind bars. As we ride around on Saturday Odos and I usually fight over who the DJ of the CD player is, but he did enjoy listening to Ry Cooder. Three Cords and the Truth is a real catchy tune too!
I took Odos with me to the JCC yesterday afternoon. I needed a little workout and shower. I figured Odos wouldn't mind shooting some baskets in the meantime.
Gov. Don Seigleman arrived at the same time for a workout with his son and held the door open for us. I told Odos that the former governor was also facing jail for no good reason.
While he probably doesn't yet understand what a politically motivated frame up is, Odos has a little understanding about getting in trouble for things he didn't do, weren't wrong or just not that bad.
The album makes me think of Jim Cannon, a "real life" red and a contemporary of "Buddy"..
(Jim was a founding leader of the communist movement in the US who I lived with and helped take care of for his last year - 1973-74 in Los Angeles). Like the fictional Buddy, a red cat till he died. Not sure if this album would have been a little too "loud" for Jim or not, but know he would have asked me to sing a little bit of it for him. I think Jim was proudest of the work he did heading up the International Labor Defense (ILD) - An injury to one is an injury to all!
Also from 1974 I listed to an album by David Bromberg (with the help of the Grateful Dead and others called Wanted:Dead or Alive - great stuff a lot of which I don't remember hearing before. The one time I got to see Bromberg in the Village on of my trips home from Alabama a couple of guys in the audience mistakenly thought I was him before the show.
This morning I just listened to his latest album, Try Me One More Time. Mostly old traditional stuff, just Bromberg, his still great singing and accomplished acoustic guitar work . Some very pretty stuff. Susan will like it. She had to do some tax work after church this afternoon but maybe she can listen while she works.
Speaking of frame up victims, David G. left word on our answering machine yesterday that he ran into Dana yesterday.... Susan spoke with her and hopefully we'll have time to get together soon. I don't remember how long Dana spent in a Louisiana prison accused of two murders she didn't do. We were glad to able to send Dana some $ on our paydays while she was locked up.
She has had to deal with day to day stuff since like the rest of us..
HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Odos... He will be 9 years old April 29. All that skateboarding makes me nervous though.
Our thoughts this Passover/Easter are with Steve Orel, Glenda Jo and Justin.
Please see their blog :
http://journals.aol.com/gjo2/further-travails-of-the-orels/
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
two old guys talking
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060829_tom_hayden_alarcon/
By Tom Hayden
Veteran social activist Tom Hayden interviews Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon.
“Let’s try to imagine what Karl Marx would be doing today.”
It was Sunday, May 21st, and my host posing the question was Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly. It was Alarcon’s 69th birthday, and I was having difficulty understanding why he had pressed me to fly down for a visit. The purpose was nothing more than “two old guys talking,” according to his daughter Maggie, a thirty-something single mom and formidable interpreter of Cuba to many North Americans.
Looking back today, I don’t know whether or not Alarcon already knew that his longtime comrade Fidel was diagnosed as needing serious surgery. The question would become a “state secret,” at Castro’s wish. Alarcon is third in line to succeed Fidel after Raul Castro, although it is more likely Alarcon will blend into a collective transitional team.
The prospect of three days’ conversation with Ricardo Alarcon reflecting on his long revolutionary experience was too important to put off, and our interviews may be of greater value during the current rampant and reckless speculation over Fidel’s status. Few individuals alive have the range of Alarcon’s experience, from being a Havana student leader during the Cuban Revolution to Cuba’s United Nations ambassador (1965-78 and 1990-92) to foreign minister (1992-93) and National Assembly president since 1993. And so we sat at a seaside restaurant on his birthday with daughter Maggie and his advisor, Miguel Alvarez. A Venezuelan cargo ship passed just offshore.
“I think Marx would be asking what are we doing about all the millions today who are protesting for peace and justice,” said Alarcon in answer to his question. In a recent essay on “Marx After Marxism” he argued that Marxists should begin to see the world anew. Scoffing at neoconservatives who embrace the end of Marxism (and the end of history itself), Alarcon also emphasizes the need for “self-critical reflection on our side as well.” In effect, he is proposing a return to the original spirit of Marx before the 20th-century revolutions in his name. That original Marx organized an early transnational labor movement, with the central demand the eight-hour day, and wrote more theoretical works on 19th-century capitalism. According to Alarcon, that earlier Marx never meant a science-based, inevitable march to socialism based on some objective truth revealed through communist parties. That Marx was a practical revolutionary who himself famously declared “with all naturalness,” Alarcon points out, “I am not a Marxist.”
For Alarcon and the Cubans, history always has been contingent, subject to human will and unexpected developments, rather than an unfolding of the inevitable. After Cuba’s decades of dependency on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, which caused a degree of “subordination” to Soviet interests and “reinforced dogmatism,” Alarcon calls for active exploration of new trends in global capitalism and its oppositional movements. “Old dogmatists are incapable of appreciating new possibilities in the revolutionary movement,” he says.
All the talk of the United States becoming a sole superpower “falls to pieces with its bogging down in Iraq” and the derailment of its neo-liberal agenda for Latin America, Alarcon believes.
He identifies new obstacles facing capitalist growth. Every 25 years a population equivalent to the whole planet’s numbers in Marx’s time is born. Alarcon believes climate changes are irreversible, forests are being transformed into deserts, cities becoming uninhabitable and, as a result, an environmental challenge to capitalism has arisen which requires rethinking of Marxist political economy.
Alarcon revises the Marxist (and Leninist) conceptions of the 19th-century proletariat accordingly. Today there are growing numbers of those from different stations of life “who do not conform, are unsatisfied and rebel.” “For the first time, anti-capitalist malaise is manifested, simultaneously and everywhere, in advanced countries and those left behind, and is not limited to the proletariat and other exploited sectors.” And so “a diverse group, multicolored, in which there is no shortage of contradictions and paradoxes, grows in front of the dominant system.”
“It is not yet the rainbow that announces the end of the storm,” Alarcon says, warning that the diverse movements lack a common theory, are marked by spontaneity more often than organization, and need to develop further without either sectarian factionalism or becoming carried away.
He pauses, points an index finger for emphasis, and tells me “the most important task for the Latin American left” is to reelect President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil. Having met with leftists highly critical of fiscal moderation in power, Alarcon says that “notwithstanding his faults, if Lula is defeated, all of Latin America will be worse off.” This advice may not sit well with some radical advocates of Latin American revolution, but Alarcon takes a longer view. The recent nationalist electoral wave in Latin America—Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay, Chile, and a near-success in Mexico—inevitably brings dilemmas of governance to the forefront. But for Alarcon and Cuba, the overall changes in Latin America further a benign result, the full integration of Cuba into Latin America after decades of Cold War antagonisms. The permanent embargo by the United States makes the Cubans especially wary of any reversals in the continental process, as the defeat of Lula in the Oct. 1 election would represent.
Alarcon is pragmatic. He believes in the Cuban philosophy that “the duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution,” that it must be a “heroic creation.” But he is aware, perhaps painfully, that revolutions cannot be “imprinted or copied” and that the “mandates” of mass movements like those that have elected Lula must be respected. “There is no alternative in Brazil. The guys who were mad at me for saying this went to meet with the landless movement representatives in Brazil, and they told them the same thing.”
Continuing at a dinner conversation, Alarcon opined that there should be “many forms of socialism,” depending on the needs of different countries and movements. Even the social-democratic parties, the historical rivals of the European communist parties, have an important role to play today, he said. “I hope they go through the same sort of introspection we have,” Alarcon said, referring to the tendency of the moderate socialist parties to cut social programs and “tail” after U.S. military and economic policies. “I would go further,” he said. “I don’t believe that capitalism cannot be reformed. The Great Society in your country is an example.”
Alarcon seems to be hinting at a role for revolutionaries in shaping a clear alternative to global neo-liberalism, one pushed in the streets by social movements and eventually resulting in a reform of capitalism like the New Deal on a global basis. Differing with some earlier views of Third World liberation, he sees a crucial role for activists and movements inside the North American colossus itself. Whereas earlier Marxists argued that unionized workers were a “privileged aristocracy” benefiting from the exploitation of the Third World, he says, “they are not any longer an aristocracy. If you go to North American workers and tell them they are an aristocracy, they will say you are crazy.” He points to the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization, in which labor called for “workers of the world to unite.” Marx, he says, would be “very interested in North American workers losing jobs to India” and what that means for workers’ movements.
His point is that “the Third World [now] penetrates the First, as dramatically illustrated by the current immigration controversies, rooted as they are in the historic patterns of capitalism needing cheap labor and resources and impoverished workers needing jobs. The Empire harvests its own internal opposition from the May Day 2006 immigrant marches inside the U.S. to the growth of Islamic rage inside the ghettos of east London or housing projects on the edge of Paris.
“To free the immigrants from their exploitation becomes essential to the emancipation of the workers in the developed countries,” those who are undermined by cheap immigrant labor. “One must help these two [groups of workers] to converge,” both to avoid an upsurge of racism and forge the basis of majority coalitions favoring reforms like a global living wage as the alternative to neo-liberalism’s notorious “race to the bottom.”
What is interesting about these words of a top Cuban leader, spoken freely and without reserve, is how far they diverge from the stereotypes of Cuba as a gray, thought-controlled Marxist dictatorship. Cuba is not a free society by measurements like multiple parties, but Cuba’s people, from Alarcon to the neighborhoods, are more conversant about trends in the United States than Americans are about Cuba. The ever-tightening U.S. embargo has boomeranged into a dangerous narrowing of American thinking, demonstrated in recent weeks by one hallucination after another. For example, Sen. Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican, was seen on television several weeks ago opining that Fidel was already dead. The streets of Miami filled with cheering Cuban exiles with no way to influence the island. According to the Los Angeles Times, the “most obvious interest [in Castro’s passing] comes from the gambling and tourist industries,” which were run off the island in 1960 [July 6, 2006]. One Florida-based developer’s master plan envisions “moving out all Cubans currently living in Havana” and replacing them with Miami exiles. The U.S. government is constantly updating its official “transition plan” to restore both free markets and the Miami exiles, with the emphasis on “disruption of an orderly succession strategy,” according to the Congressional Research Service [Aug. 23, 2005]. Eighty million U.S. dollars was recently budgeted to support Cuba’s opposition groups. “There are no plans to reach out,” declared White House spokesman Tony Snow after Fidel was hospitalized [Miami Herald, Aug. 2, 2006].
The notion of opening a dialogue with an accomplished diplomat like Ricardo Alarcon is completely out of the question. The Helms-Burton Act forbids any negotiation or loosening of the embargo if Raul Castro remains in power after Fidel.
Voices of realism like the head of the Organization of American States (OAS), Jose Miguel Insulza, say “there’s no transition, and it’s not your country” to prepare a transition for [Reuters, May 23, 2006]. “It just drives the Bush people crazy,” says one former diplomat, referring to the fact that Cuba hasn’t collapsed in accord with neoconservative wishful thinking.
The fact is that Cubans will not rise up to welcome a mass influx of mostly white, revenge-oriented exiles from Miami backed by U.S. arms. The neocon analogy with the so-called “captive nations” of Eastern Europe doesn’t fit. Despite all the Cuban people’s legitimate criticisms of their government, it remains their government and they will not trade it for a U.S.-installed one. However they complain, Cubans have become more socialist in everyday life than many of them realize, as seen in their common acts of solidarity, their response to the Elian Gonzales showdown, their educational achievements, their healthcare and their social safety nets. They hardly lack for world support and, in Venezuela, have found a solid source of oil and a continental opportunity for their legions of doctors and teachers. [“In the 60s, we only had a revolutionary ideology to export, but now we have valuable human capital,” one Cuban intellectual told me.]
A persistent interest of mine is why Cuba seems to be the only country in the world without street gangs. There certainly is a black market in contraband goods, but nothing like the pandilleras found everywhere else in the Americas. Part of the reason is an extraordinary network of 28,000 social workers who persistently act on the belief that “some morality remains in everyone,” as opposed to the “super-predator” theories popular among the neoconservatives.
It seems evident that the Cuban people want reform of their socialist state if and when Fidel passes on, and obviously not the “regime change” anticipated by the Miami Cubans and their Washington, D.C., patrons. They want a peaceful process controlled by Cubans, not by foreign powers. Who wouldn’t? The question is whether the United States government has an interest in normalizing relations with a better, more democratic, more open but still socialist Cuba. Sadly, it is doubtful, because such a Cuba would be a triumphant example to Latin America and the world. And so the United States, along with Miami’s Cubans—the armed and aggressive state within a state on American soil—hold out against the 182 nations of the world who condemn the embargo at the United Nations. In fact, our government is holding out against the desires of many of its own capitalists who hunger to invest in Cuba; even The Wall Street Journal has editorialized for repeal of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act [WSJ, Aug. 2, 2006]. A walk through Old Havana reveals some 20 new hotels and 65 restaurants, none with American investors.
Meanwhile, Ricardo Alarcon waits. He has negotiated with the United States before, in secret, during the Clinton era. He managed the Elian Gonzales crisis with aplomb. He is overseeing the case of the Cuban Five—men imprisoned in the U.S. for surveilling Miami-based exiles trying to bomb and sabotage Cuba. Alarcon is an experienced man of this world, one who could facilitate a normalization deal with the United States if ever one was on offer.
Instead, he sits for hours with the likes of me discussing the state of the revolution which he helped start over 50 years ago. He takes care of an invalid wife. He plays with his grandchild, Ricardito. He goes to dinner with a never-ending stream of visitors. He patiently answers reporters. He runs the domestic affairs of the National Assembly. He flies to international conferences.
He even finds time to read “The Port Huron Statement” line for line in English, with an updated foreword titled “The Way We Were” (in Spanish, he says, “como eramos”). He also reads a book of mine on religion and the environment, “The Lost Gospel of the Earth.” He did so, apparently, to prepare himself for a documentary interview for Cuba’s historical archives. When the morning of the interview arrives, he is perfectly ready to ask questions comparing Vietnam with Iraq, Chicago 1968 versus Seattle 1999, or issues of environmental spirituality, without stumbling once in English. When the interview is complete, our several days together have ended as well. “Sorry, but I have to go back to government business,” he apologizes, and with a hasta luego returns to his daily rounds. I miss him as he drives off. Maybe he knew of Fidel’s diagnosis that day, maybe not.
I flew back to Los Angeles that afternoon, carrying the strange feeling that America has embargoed itself from a Cuba that it refuses to recognize. In the weeks following Fidel’s surgery, according to friends who spent 10 days on the island, Cuba remains quiet, stable and alert. A transition definitely seems underway, but U.S. officials may be the last to know of it.
Tom Hayden is a member of The Nation’s editorial board and a visiting professor at the Claremont Colleges. He has visited Cuba three times, as well as many other Latin American countries. His recent books include “The Port Huron Statement,” “Conspiracy in the Streets,” “Street Wars” and “The Zapatista Reader.”
AP / Jorge Rey
Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon gestures during a 2005 interview in Havana.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Friday, November 17, 2006
Milton Friedman, monetarist
"Don't mourn, Organize" for Jobs, health care and PEACE.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Ruby Mansbach was honored at a Christmas Party for St. Peter's Orphanage on 12/6/1986 at Biase's Restaurant on Bloomfield Ave. in Newark, NJ. The wine was good and especially the potatoes mashed with onions. Tweny years ago. Lots of friendly old guys who took too many punches in the head. I would NOT make a political issue of it. But when you see the damage done...Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Ruby Mansbach
"...anywhere I've been, I always stayed until they asked me to leave. That's the way I've lived my life. Ladies and gentlemen, I think that's been a GOOD way to live my life! "
Kiki DuRaine (Mansbach)
Olympia, Wash.
EVER since the Census Bureau released figures last month showing that married-couple households are now a minority, my phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people asking: “How can we save marriage? How can we make Americans understand that marriage is the most significant emotional connection they will ever make, the one place to find social support and personal fulfillment?”
I think these are the wrong questions — indeed, such questions would have been almost unimaginable through most of history. It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this change, many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.
A study released this year showed just how dependent we’ve become on marriage. Three sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University found that from 1985 to 2004 Americans reported a marked decline in the number of people with whom they discussed meaningful matters. People reported fewer close relationships with co-workers, extended family members, neighbors and friends. The only close relationship where more people said they discussed important matters in 2004 than in 1985 was marriage.
In fact, the number of people who depended totally on a spouse for important conversations, with no other person to turn to, almost doubled, to 9.4 percent from 5 percent. Not surprisingly, the number of people saying they didn’t have anyone in whom they confided nearly tripled.
The solution to this isolation is not to ramp up our emotional dependence on marriage. Until 100 years ago, most societies agreed that it was dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion.
St. Paul complained that married men were more concerned with pleasing their wives than pleasing God. In John Adams’s view, a “passion for the public good” was “superior to all private passions.” In both England and America, moralists bewailed “excessive” married love, which encouraged “men and women to be always taken up with each other.”
From medieval days until the early 19th century, diaries and letters more often used the word love to refer to neighbors, cousins and fellow church members than to spouses. When honeymoons first gained favor in the 19th century, couples often took along relatives or friends for company. Victorian novels and diaries were as passionate about brother-sister relationships and same-sex friendships as about marital ties.
The Victorian refusal to acknowledge strong sexual desires among respectable men and women gave people a wider outlet for intense emotions, including physical touch, than we see today. Men wrote matter-of-factly about retiring to bed with a male roommate, “and in each other’s arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep.” Upright Victorian matrons thought nothing of kicking their husbands out of bed when a female friend came to visit. They spent the night kissing, hugging and pouring out their innermost thoughts.
By the early 20th century, though, the sea change in the culture wrought by the industrial economy had loosened social obligations to neighbors and kin, giving rise to the idea that individuals could meet their deepest needs only through romantic love, culminating in marriage. Under the influence of Freudianism, society began to view intense same-sex ties with suspicion and people were urged to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with a spouse for time and affection.
The insistence that marriage and parenthood could satisfy all an individual’s needs reached a peak in the cult of “togetherness” among middle-class suburban Americans in the 1950s. Women were told that marriage and motherhood offered them complete fulfillment. Men were encouraged to let their wives take care of their social lives.
But many men and women found these prescriptions stifling. Women who entered the work force in the 1960s joyfully rediscovered social contacts and friendships outside the home.
“It was so stimulating to have real conversations with other people,” a woman who lived through this period told me, “to go out after work with friends from the office or to have people over other than my husband’s boss or our parents.”
And women’s lead in overturning the cult of 1950s marriage inspired many men to rediscover what earlier generations of men had taken for granted — that men need deep emotional connections with other men, not just their wives. Researchers soon found that men and women with confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally and physically healthier than people who relied on just one other individual for emotional intimacy and support.
So why do we seem to be slipping back in this regard? It is not because most people have voluntarily embraced nuclear-family isolation. Indeed, the spread of “virtual” communities on the Internet speaks to a deep hunger to reach out to others.
Instead, it’s the expansion of the post-industrial economy that seems to be driving us back to a new dependence on marriage. According to the researchers Kathleen Gerson and Jerry Jacobs, 60 percent of American married couples have both partners in the work force, up from 36 percent in 1970, and the average two-earner couple now works 82 hours a week.
This is probably why the time Americans spend socializing with others off the job has declined by almost 25 percent since 1965. Their free hours are spent with spouses, and as a study by Suzanne Bianchi of the University of Maryland released last month showed, with their children — mothers and fathers today spend even more time with their youngsters than parents did 40 years ago.
As Americans lose the wider face-to-face ties that build social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy and deep communication, and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down. In some cases we even cause the breakdown by loading the relationship with too many expectations. Marriage is generally based on more equality and deeper friendship than in the past, but even so, it is hard for it to compensate for the way that work has devoured time once spent cultivating friendships.
The solution is not to revive the failed marital experiment of the 1950s, as so many commentators noting the decline in married-couple households seem to want. Nor is it to lower our expectations that we’ll find fulfillment and friendship in marriage.
Instead, we should raise our expectations for, and commitment to, other relationships, especially since so many people now live so much of their lives outside marriage. Paradoxically, we can strengthen our marriages the most by not expecting them to be our sole refuge from the pressures of the modern work force. Instead we need to restructure both work and social life so we can reach out and build ties with others, including people who are single or divorced. That indeed would be a return to marital tradition — not the 1950s model, but the pre-20th-century model that has a much more enduring pedi- gree.
Friday, November 10, 2006
TONIGHT'S THE KIND OF NIGHT
Written by Melanie Safka Schekeryk
Tonight's the kind of night
Where all things come together
Tonight's the kind of night
Where nothing need be said
Tonight's the kind of night
Where all the lamps are burning
And nobody wants to go to bed
Some will have crackers and
Some will have pudding
Soup and crispies and home made bread
And no one will go hungry
And lovers will be faithful
We'll sip a little cup and
Then we'll sip another and we'll sing
Come all ye faithful tonight, sing out
Merry Christmas, oh yeah!
Ave Maria we'll try, one more time
Merry Christmas
Mommy's and Daddy's are loving all their children
And from a distant room
We can hear then giggling
One of them is dreaming
The world a little brighter
And everyone is listening
To the song in their head, and they sing
Come all ye faithful tonight, sing out
Merry Christmas, oh yeah!
Ave Maria we'll try, one more time
Merry Christmas
Tonight's the kind of night
The world won't hold us down here
From planet to planet
From star to star
We'll shire our little light
That everyone can follow
Tonight's the kind of night
Where all the lamps are burning
And no one will go hungry
And lovers will be faithful
Tonight's the kind of night
Where all things come together
Tonight I make a promise
That I will sing forever
Tonight the kisses fly from all out little fingers
And nobody wants to go to bed
Come all ye faithful tonight, sing out
Merry Christmas, oh yeah!
Ave Maria we'll try, one more time
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas, oh yeah!
Ave Maria we'll try, one more time
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas
Dear comarade Baraka
who who who you ask
Sure isn't anyone
Who survived that day
It's the system that caught more breaks than us
A blues man in Bama called it
systematic train
All together
Now
Let's replace it with something
World class
I'm from New Jersey too
You're still poet laureate in my book!
gm 11/10/06
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Too many cars on the lot
Too much bad food in my belly
Not enough hours in the day
Free market madness can’t buy us time
Kidnap Gorbachev
Boycott Sal’s
Wasn’t the answer
Malcom found answers for us
Maybe a rhyme
Surely a reason
To open a folder and label it
Poetry in motion
What in your background qualifies you?
Only all of us are capable
To be the shining beacon
People in motion for peace
And beauty
Let’s roll.
11/08/2006 gm