One of the things I'm looking forward to most about being back in Three Rivers full time soon is being able to park our car most of the time in favor of walking and biking. As a small, rural city, one of the things Three Rivers has going for it is that for much of the year, it's quite possible to get around without a vehicle. Of course, it's nice to carpool for occasional trips to local farms and nature preserves or the Amish grocery store or the restaurant selection in Kalamazoo, but for daily necessities, two wheels or two legs will suffice for getting around. I was reminded by this Walkonomics piece that our friend Andrew linked to that walking is good not just for our bodies and our environment, but for business as well. Here's hoping that we in Three Rivers can work together to use our existing resources to enhance the city as an attractive, sustainable community.

P.S. The city code permits raising chickens on residential property within certain reasonable parameters, so all you urban homesteaders out there should come on over.

Just over a year ago, when I posted on neighborliness and my hopes for being rooted in a place, Rob and I didn't know how soon we'd be moving back to Three Rivers. In fact, it was exactly five months later that we moved out of our house in Grand Rapids and then another two months before we spent our first night in our apartment above World Fare. Over the past school year, we've commuted back and forth for work in Grand Rapids, but next week will mark the first time we'll be able to live in our new home full time--until next school year, anyway.

This morning, I spent some time composing a reply to a comment on another post on this infrequently tended blog, which caused me to reflect again on the notion of neighborliness, particularly in the context of virtual vs. face-to-face relationships. I find myself less and less willing to get worked up debating abstract ideas, especially online, and more inclined to spend my energy on the complications of face-to-face relationships in a place. Ideologies and dogmas inevitably break down when we attempt to know each other and ourselves fully in all of our inconsistencies. And ideally, when we're working side by side toward a common goal or eating and laughing together around a table, our differences become qualities that decorate our unique selves, rather than walls that cut us off from each other. We may still passionately disagree, but we can do so in the context of that time we showed up at the city commission meeting to represent the same side of a local issue or that time we sat on the park bench together, swapping stories about our junior high experiences while our kids played together on the playground.

I don't want to dismiss the ways in which internet technology can contribute to deep and complicated knowing of other individuals and communities, but I'm skeptical about that knowing being the rule, not just an exception. As I and the technology grow older together, these issues become muddier, not clearer for me. I'm the editor of an online magazine. I contribute to several blogs and other virtual publications. But I also help run a non-profit store in downtown Three Rivers, and I turned compost on Saturday outside a 27,000 square foot building that my husband and I are hoping to make something of for the benefit of the neighborhood. Bricks and mortar, flesh and blood collide in my life daily with megabytes and megapixels, cyberspace and server space.

What is the common thread running through it all--or are these really two different worlds with different ethics?

Are the virtual versions of ourselves inevitably going to be incomplete caricatures?

To what degree should people's variously (un)generous readings of our virtual selves constrain what we post online for all to judge?

By way of example: by posting my concerns and questions here, I may be projecting to un-careful or unknown readers a singular opinion for both myself and my husband, but we would answer (and even ask) these questions quite differently at this point in time. If we were to commence a heated debate via the comments, what would people assume about our marriage? Would those assumptions be true? Would a public record of our disagreement have positive value in the virtual public square or would it have negative value in terms of distraction, abstraction and confusion?

And what in the world does neighborliness have to do with all this?

Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it.

While this article by Tim Wise for the San Francisco Sentinel beats its main point almost to death, it's an important point that needs to be made...and heard. 75 white boys with guns protesting the current administration isn't too scary to me, but affirmative responses to their behavior in mainstream media outlets is troubling indeed.

Trust is the prime constituent of the social atmosphere. It is as urgent not to damage that atmosphere by contributing to the erosion of trust as it is to prevent and attempt to reverse damage to our natural atmosphere. Both forms of damage are cumulative; both are hard to reverse.

To be sure, a measure of distrust is indispensable in most human interaction. Pure trust is no more conducive to survival in the social environment than is pure oxygen in Earth's atmosphere.

But too high a level of distrust stifles cooperation as much as the lack of oxygen threatens life.

Sissela Bok
Common Values (1995)

I just came across this extended interview with Tony Benn from Michael Moore's Sicko. This observation seems particularly noteworthy:

The task of representation is to change the system to meet the needs of the people. But with the power of global capital ... now, instead of being represented, people are being managed. People are being changed to fit them into the system instead of the system being changed to meet people's needs. And that's a huge transformation.

The rest is also well worth watching; Benn seems like a pretty delightful fellow with deep convictions.

Cornel West's advice to President Obama: "Don't just be the friendly face of the American empire."

I wish the Promised Land didn't still look so far away ...

I just stumbled on this wonderful site, via the River Country Journal. It makes me very proud of our fair city and all of its natural beauty, diversity and rich history.

The 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 is this month and it bears remembering. Led primarily by students and intellectuals, the protests centered around hope for democratic and economic reforms.

After weeks of protests and government crackdowns around the country, tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to emphatically quash the protests and reassert government authority. On June 5, as the tanks were rolling into position, one anonymous man found himself face to face with authoritarianism and, for a brief moment, stood his ground. Several photographers captured the remarkable moment, which became an icon of popular resistance against totalitarian power.

Though it has never been confirmed, it is widely assumed that the Tank Man of Tiananmen was eventually executed. His legacy, though, has spread around the world, inspiring thousands to stand up in the face of oppressive regimes from positions of relative powerlessness--a remarkably Christ-like gesture.

Unfortunately, government censorship in China has prohibited public conversation about the Tiananmen events (and continues to do so). Indeed, most Chinese college students have never even seen the image above and don't know the significance of the next few days.

I don't like watching beautiful buildings fall into decay. Cities like Gary and Detroit, to name a few, are filled with amazing architecture from better days gone by, buildings that are now crumbling in the wake of suburbanization and economic downturn. I recently discovered Forgotten Detroit (via David Koyzis), a web site dedicated to documenting theaters, train stations, hotels and other formerly beautiful spaces that are disintegrating throughout the city.

For example, below is the exterior and the waiting room of Michigan Central Depot, a stunning and imposing train station that hasn't been used since the late 80s.

I recognize that these kinds of buildings are expensive to renovate and that it's most often cheaper to simply build a new structure entirely. And I know that a lot of people think that folks like me are too sentimental about old buildings.

But when we continually tear down historic buildings, we slowly erase tangible links to our past. We begin to forget our stories--and they become less real to us--when we can no longer see them. And it is in our stories that we find identity, so we are, in a sense, losing our identity.

In their place, we build other identity-forming structures that aren't nearly so beautiful and that tell a remarkably different story about what it means to be human.

In the long run, we save a bit of money initially by building new buildings (as these cheaply built buildings will probably cost us more), but we lose our history and identity as people along the way--which just doesn't seem like a good deal to me.