NCLB and Race to the Top treat public schools as though they were shoe stores.

Diane Ravitch in the Saturday Evening Post: American Schools in Crisis

What the federal efforts of the past decade or more ignore is that the root cause of low academic achievement is poverty, not “bad” teachers. Children who are homeless, in ill health, or living in squalid quarters are more likely to miss school and less likely to have home support for their schoolwork. The most important educators in children’s lives are their families. What families provide in the way of encouragement, experiences, expectations, and security has a decisive effect on a child’s life chances. The most consistent predictor of test scores is family income. Children who grow up in economically secure homes are more likely to arrive in school ready to learn than those who lack the basic necessities of life.

[...]

The promise of Race to the Top is that billions more will be spent on more tests, and districts will reduce the time available for subjects (like the arts and foreign languages) that aren’t tested. Piece by piece, our entire public education system is being redesigned in the service of increasing scores on standardized tests of basic skills. That’s not good policy, and it won’t improve education. Twelve years of rewarding children for picking the right answer on multiple-choice tests is bad education. It will penalize the creativity, innovativeness, and imaginativeness that has made this country great.

and

The law treats public schools as though they were shoe stores: Make a profit or else. If you don’t, you might be fired, you might get new management, or you might be closed down.

and the most essential message is the most basic, the most easily overlooked in the jumble:

It is worth remembering that the reason we first established public education was to advance the common good of the community. It began in small towns, where communities agreed that all the children should be educated for the good of all and the sake of the future. Public schools have a civic mission: They are expected to prepare young people to become citizens and to share in the responsibility of maintaining our society. As political forces tear them apart, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and for profit, it diminishes our commonwealth. That is a price we must not pay.

But she knows the truth that in fact she could have been either or both.

On stage, her hand doesn’t shake when she pours the cup of chocolate, nor does she hesitate when passing along the vilest gossip about her closest friends. The actress’s next-door neighbors, who may not have had the chance to see her perform, might say that the person they know could never have been, under any circumstances, either elegant or cruel. But she knows the truth that in fact she could have been either or both, and when she plays her part, she’s simply showing the audience what she might have been, if she’d in fact been an aristocrat in a chocolate house in the eighteenth century.

We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there’s a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he’s playing himself in his daily life, he’s playing a part, he’s performing, just as he’s performing when he plays a part on stage. He knows that when he’s on stage performing, he’s in a sense deceiving his friends in the audience less than he does in daily life, not more, because on stage he’s disclosing the parts of himself that in daily life he struggles to hide. He knows, in fact, that the role of himself is actually a rather small part, and that when he plays that part he must make an enormous effort to conceal the whole universe of possibilities that exists inside him.

. . .

Around 400,000 babies are born on earth each day. Some are born irreparably damaged, casualties of the conditions in which their mothers lived -- malnutrition, polluted water, mysterious chemicals that sneak into the body and warp the genes. But the much more tragic and more horrible truth is that most of these babies are born healthy. There’s nothing wrong with them. Every one of them is ready to develop into a person whose intelligence, insight, aesthetic taste, and love of other people could help to make the world a better place. Every one of them is ready to become a person who wakes up happily in the morning because they know they’re going to spend the day doing work they find fascinating, work that they love. They’re born with all the genetic gifts they could possibly need. Wiggling beside their mothers, they have no idea what’s going to be done to them.

Even those of us who were selected out from the general group have our role and our costume. I happen to play a semi-prosperous fortunate bohemian, not doing too badly, nor too magnificently. And as I walk out onto the street on a sunny day, dressed in my fortunate bohemian costume, I pass, for example, the burly cop on the beat, I pass the weedy professor in his rumpled jacket, distractedly ruminating as he shambles along, I see couples in elegant suits briskly rushing to their meetings, I see the art student and the law student, and in the background, sometimes looming up as they come a bit closer, those not particularly selected out -- the drug-store cashier in her oddly matched pink shirt and green slacks, the wacky street hustler with his crazy dialect and his crazy gestures, the wisecracking truck drivers with their round bellies and leering grins, the grim-faced domestic worker who’s slipped out from her employer’s house and now races into a shop to do an errand, and I see nothing, I think nothing, I have no reaction to what I’m seeing, because I believe it all.

I simply believe it. I believe the costumes. I believe the characters. And then for one instant, as the woman runs into the shop, I suddenly see what’s happening, the way a drowning man might have one last vivid glimpse of the glittering shore, and I feel like screaming out, “Stop! Stop! This isn’t real! It’s all a fantasy! It’s all a play! The people in these costumes are not what you think! The accents are fake, the expressions are fake -- Don’t you see? It’s all --” One instant -- and then it’s gone. My mind goes blank for a moment, and then I’m back to where I was. The domestic worker runs out of the shop and hurries back toward her job, and once again I see her only as the character she plays. I see a person who works as a servant. And surely that person could never have lived, for example, the life I’ve lived, or been like me -- she’s not intelligent enough. She had to be a servant. She was born that way. The hustler surely had to be a hustler, it’s all he could do, the cashier could never have worn beautiful clothes, she could never have been someone who sought out what was beautiful, she could only ever have worn that pink shirt and those green slacks.

So, just as Thomas Jefferson lived in illusion, because he couldn’t face the truth about the slaves that he owned, I, too, put to use every second of my life, like my beating heart, this capacity to fantasize which we’ve all been granted as our dubious birthright. My belief in the performance unfolding before me allows me not to remember those dreadful moments when all of those babies were permanently maimed, and I was spared. The world hurled the infant who became the domestic worker to the bottom of a pit and crippled her for life, and I saw it happen, but I can’t remember it now. And so it seems quite wonderful to me that the world today treats the domestic worker and me with scrupulous equality.It seems wonderfully right. If I steal a car, I go to jail, and if she steals a car, she goes to jail. If I drive on the highway, I pay a toll, and if she drives on the highway, she pays a toll. We compete on an equal basis for the things we want. If I apply for a job, I take the test, and if she applies for the job, she takes the test. And I go through my life thinking it’s all quite fair.

If we look at reality for more than an instant, if we look at the human beings passing us on the street, it’s not bearable. It’s not bearable to watch while the talents and the abilities of infants and children are crushed and destroyed. These happen to be things that I just can’t think about. And most of the time, the factory workers and domestic workers and cashiers and truck drivers can’t think about them either. Their performances as these characters are consistent and convincing, because they actually believe about themselves just what I believe about them -- that what they are now is all that they could ever have been, they could never have been anything other than what they are. Of course, that’s what we all have to believe, so that we can bear our lives and live in peace together. But it’s the peace of death.

Actors understand the infinite vastness hiding inside each human being, the characters not played, the characteristics not revealed. Schoolteachers can see every day that, given the chance, the sullen pupil in the back row can sing, dance, juggle, do mathematics, paint, and think. If the play we’re watching is an illusion, if the baby who now wears the costume of the hustler in fact had the capacity to become a biologist or a doctor, a circus performer or a poet or a scholar of ancient Greek, then the division of labor, as now practiced, is inherently immoral, and we must somehow learn a different way to share out all the work that needs to be done. The costumes are wrong. They have to be discarded. We have to start out naked again and go from there.

Wallace Shawn's Why I Call Myself a Socialist: Is the World Really a Stage?

What does it mean to be human? What do we really want?

Why should we want to reinvent capitalism? Rather than reinvent it, we should remind ourselves why capitalism is so pernicious. We could start by stating the obvious (which, apparently, needs restating): the nature and logic of capitalism are incorrigibly avaricious.

[...] Capitalism stands condemned most profoundly not by its maldistribution of wealth or its ecological despoliation but by its systematic cultivation of people inclined toward injustice and predation. And I think we on the left need to start dismissing as utterly irrelevant the standard apologetic riposte: the material prosperity and technological achievement generated by capitalist enterprise. No amount of goods can compensate for the damage wrought on human nature by the deliberate nurturance of our vilest qualities. The desecration of the values we claim to hold most dear is the primary reason we should want to abolish, not reinvent, capitalism.

[...] Any effort to end the tyranny of Mammon must be leavened by other concerns. What does it mean to be human? What do we really want? These are moral, even religious questions—the kind of questions we often dismiss as politically unserious, or relegate to the hallowed oblivion of “private life.” But they’re also political questions, for the answers determine the ends as well as the means of production. The ancient moral and metaphysical concerns may turn out to be not redoubts for reaction but wellsprings of radical hope.

"The End of Capitalism and the Wellsprings of Radical Hope," Eugene McCarraher for The Nation

The morality at play in the Manning persecution is mangled beyond belief. It's perfectly conventional wisdom that the war in Iraq was an act of profoundly unjust destruction, yet normal, psychologically healthy people are expected to passively accept that there should be no consequences for those responsible (a well-intentioned policy mistake), while one of the very few people to risk his life and liberty to stop it and similar acts is demonized as a mentally ill criminal.

Glenn Greenwald for Salon

To live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

HOWARD ZINN.

Bread lines of the spirit.

The public library is indeed an institution that has not kept up with the times. But given what has happened to our times, why do you see that as unhealthy? In an age of greed and selfishness, the public library stands as an enduring monument to the values of cooperation and sharing. In an age where global corporations stride the earth, the public library remains firmly rooted in the local community. In an age of widespread cynicism and distrust of government, the 100 percent tax supported public library has virtually unanimous and enthusiastic support.

... Libraries are much more than bookstores. About 30 percent of the people who visit libraries do not borrow books. For a greater number of people than we might care to believe, the library serves as a warm and dry sanctuary, a place they can sit without fear of being bothered. For others, it is a refuge from loneliness, a place full of hustle and bustle, where they can attend a concert, or hear a lecture or read a magazine free of charge.

...

All things public are under attack. The Fort Worth [library] rebranding [to remove the word ‘public’] is an indication of how effective this attack has been. The city explained that it was dropping the word "public" because of its "potentially negative connotation." The Founding Fathers would be disconsolate. John Adams wrote in 1776, "There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest… established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superior to all private passions." Thomas Jefferson agreed, "I profess… that to be false pride which postpones the public good to any private or personal considerations."

All Hail the Public Library!

What You Can Do to Make a Better World

Personal Life

1. Challenge the prevailing myth that all problems have private, individualized solutions.

2. Notice how many of life’s pleasures exist outside the marketplace— gardening, fishing, conversing, playing music, playing ball, making love, enjoying nature and more.

3. Take time to enjoy what the commons offers. (As the radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire once declared, “We are bigger than our schedules.”)

4. Introduce the children in your life to the commons. Let them see you enjoying it, and working with others to sustain it.

5. Keep in mind that security and satisfaction are more easily acquired from friends than money.

6. Become a mentor — officially or informally — to people of all ages around you. (And be prepared to learn as much as you teach.)

7. Think about living cooperatively with housemates.

8. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

9. Have some fun. The best reason for restoring the commons is that it enriches our lives.

Community Life

10. Offer a smile or greeting to people you pass. The commons begins with connecting — even in brief, spontaneous ways.

11. Walk, bike, or take transit whenever you can. It’s good for the environment, but also for you. You meet very few people behind the wheel of your car.

12. Treat commons spaces as if you own them (which, actually, you do). Keep an eye on the place. Tidy things up. Report problems or repair things yourself. Initiate improvement campaigns.

13. Pull together a potluck. Throw a block party. Form a community choir, slow food club, Friday night poker game, May Day festival, or any other excuse for socializing.

14. Get out of the house and spend some time on the stoop, the front yard, the street — anywhere you can be a part of the river of life that flows past you.

15. Create or designate a “town square” for your neighborhood where folks naturally want to gather — a park, playground, vacant lot, community center, coffee shop or even a street corner.

16. Lobby for more public benches, water fountains, plazas, parks, sidewalks, bike trails, playgrounds, and other crucial commons infrastructure.

17.Conduct an inventory of local commons. Publicize your findings, and offer suggestions for celebrating and improving these community assets.

18. Organize your neighbors to prevent crime and to defuse the fear of crime, which often dampens a community’s spirits even more than crime itself.

19. Remember streets belong to people, not just automobiles. Drive cautiously and push for traffic calming and other improvements that remind motorists they are not kings of the road.

Money & the Economy

20. Buy from local, independent businesses whenever possible. (For more information see American Independent Business Alliance and the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies: www.livingeconomies.org.)

21. Before buying something at a chain store or online from a distant vendor, see if you can find it or order it from a local merchant. That way, some of your money stays in the community.

22. Investigate how many things you now pay for could be acquired in more cooperative ways — checking out DVDs at the library, quitting the health club and forming a morning jogging club, etc.

23. Form a neighborhood exchange to share everything from lawn mowers to childcare to vehicles.

24. Barter. Trade your skill in baking pies with someone who will fix your computer.

25. Look into creating a Time Dollars system or locally-based currency.

26. Organize a Common Security Club. You are not on your own when it comes to economic woes.

27. Watch where your money goes. How do the stores, companies and financial institutions you use harm or help the commons?

28. Purchase fair trade, organic and locally made goods from small producers as much as you can.

Social Change

29. Join campaigns opposing cutbacks in public assets like transit, schools, libraries, parks, social services, police and fire protection, arts programs and more.

30. Support activists around the globe working for debt relief, environmental protection, human rights, worker rights, sustainable development, and indigenous people.

31. Take every opportunity to talk with elected officials, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, professional societies, and business leaders about the importance of protecting the commons.

32. Protest the private patenting of products created with research paid for by taxpayers. Demand that publicly-funded research data be available to everyone on the Internet.

33. Write letters to the editor about the commons, post on local websites, call into talk radio, tell your friends.

34. Learn from everywhere. What can Copenhagen teach us about bicycles? India about wellness? Africa about community solidarity? Indigenous nations about the commons itself? What bright ideas could be borrowed from a nearby neighborhood or town?

Environment

35. Pick up litter that is not yours.

36. Avoid bottled water whenever you can. Tap water is generally safer. If you still have concerns about the local water supply — get a filter and pressure local officials to clean it up.

37. Become a guerrilla gardener, planting flowers and vegetables on neglected land in your neighborhood.

38. Organize a community garden or local farmer’s market.

39. Roll up your sleeves to restore a creek, wetland, woods, grasslands, or beautify a vacant lot.

40. Remember that everything that goes down your drain, on your lawn, in your garbage, or into your storm sewer eventually winds up in our water or air.

41. Seek new ways to use less energy and create less waste at home and work.

42. Form a study group to explore what can be done to promote sustainability in your community.

43. Purchase goods — from beer to clothing to hardware — produced close to home whenever possible. Shipping, trucking and flying goods long distances stresses the environment.

Information & Culture

44. Patronize and support your public library.

45. Demand that that schoolchildren should not become a captive audience for marketing campaigns.

46.Contribute your knowledge to on-line commons such as wikipedia, open education projects and open access journals. Form your own online community to explore commons issues.

47. Use Creative Commons licenses for your own writing, music, videos and other creative pursuits.

48. Conceive a public art project for your community.

Commons Consciousness

49. Think yourself as a commoner and share your enthusiasm. Raise the subject in conversation, art, professional circles, and organizations with which you are involved.

50. Launch a commons discussion group or bookclub with your neighbors and colleagues, or at your church, synagogue, or temple.

51. Spread some hope around. Explain how commons-based solutions can remedy today’s pressing problems

JAY WALLJASPER. Reprinted from New. Clear. Vision.

We seem to have no trouble in spending money for the production of organized violence designed to kill people...

The war on the social state is in high gear and is most evident in a range of polices designed to punish unions, abrogate the bargaining rights of workers, cut social protections and disinvest in higher education as a site of critical learning while reorganizing it according to the interests and values of a market-driven culture.

[ ... ]

As the rich and powerful rewrite the script of politics, they are largely assisted by a number of Republican governors are not only breaking the backs of labor unions but are also firing police officers and fire fighters, curtailing benefits for the unemployed, denying poor people access to health services and “cutting medical, rehabilitative, home care or other services needed by low-income people who are elderly or have disabilities or are significantly increasing the cost of these services.” As social problems are privatized and public spaces commodified, there has been an increased emphasis on individual solutions to socially produced problems, while at the same time market relations and the commanding institutions of capital are divorced from matters of politics, ethics and responsibility. How else to explain the lack of massive protests over the recent revelations that mega-corporations such as General Electric and the Bank of America paid no taxes in spite of accruing massive financial profits. The commodification of thought and the depoliticization of everyday life have created both a culture of illiteracy and cruelty in which notions of the public good, community and the obligations of citizenship are replaced by the overburdened demands of individual responsibility and an utterly privatized ideal of freedom.


Henry Giroux. Militarized Conservatism and the End(s) of Higher Education.

Why, in fact, should economists be the only ones empowered to define what a society's wealth is? It is certainly useful to know what a society produces, but it's a bit stunted: GDP tells us nothing about our social health, no more than it informs us about the attacks on the environment and the explosion of inequality. With so many blind spots, it will become difficult to avoid catastrophe. (From And if we were to change ...everything.)

At stake here is a notion of democracy that refuses to be reduced to the dictates of a market society.

From "Morning in America" to Nightmare on Main Street, Henry Giroux for Truth Out

Ronald Reagan's infamous "it's morning in America" slogan, used as part of his 1984 presidential campaign, paved the way for a set of market-driven policies that historians faithful to the human record will be compelled to rename twilight in America to signal a historical crisis fueled less by a spirited hope for the future than by a shocking refusal to be held accountable to and for it. The policies that informed Reagan's neoliberal agenda have given way to the intense assault now being waged by his more extremist governmental descendants on all vestiges of the democratic state. This brutal evisceration includes a rejection and devaluing of the welfare state, unions, public values, young people, public and higher education; and other political, social and economic institutions and forces in American life that provide a counterweight against the political power of mega-corporations, the rich and the powerful.

In order to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful corporations, the formative cultures, social formations and institutions necessary for a viable democracy are under a wide-ranging assault. The intensity and barbarism of such an attack is evident in the current right-wing attempts to dismantle crucial social safety nets, collective bargaining rights, unions and the regulatory constraints on powerful corporations. This conservative assault is not just about the enactment of reactionary government policies; it is also about the proliferation of a war at home, the collateral damage of which is harsh and brutalizing, especially for young people, the unemployed, the elderly, the poor, and a number of other individuals and groups now bearing the burden of the worst economic recession since the 1920s. But there is more at stake than an increase in the hard currency of human suffering; there are also disturbing signs that American society is moving toward an authoritarian state largely controlled by corporations and a financial elite.

As the public spaces for cultivating democratic values, critical citizens and compassionate social relations disappear, American society gives rise to an army of anti-public intellectuals, a powerful center-right media and cultural apparatus and a system of public and higher education, all of which largely function to undermine dialogue, dissent and critical thinking in American life. As politics is rewritten as a script to serve the rich and powerful, the democratic elements of social life are emptied out, along with an ongoing and well-financed conservative campaign to further sabotage those public spheres which enable a culture of questioning and modes of collective struggle to develop.

Politics has now become an extension of war, and the call to austerity a metaphor for a politics of disposability. With the collapse of the social state, those citizens viewed as disposable are now subject to a form of necropolitics in which the social contract, however inadequate, is viewed as a drain on government resources, and any notion of social protection is viewed as a pathological form of dependence. Complaints by right-wing politicians and conservative pundits about the growing federal deficit and their call for a harsh politics of austerity are both hypocritical and disingenuous: Hypocritical, given their support for massive tax breaks for the rich that will cost $850 billion for the next two years - more than the entire 2009 government bailout - and disingenuous, given their blatantly transparent goal of implementing a market-based agenda that imposes the burdens of decreased government services and benefits on the backs of the poor, young people, the unemployed, the working class and middle-class individuals and families. In this transparent scenario, austerity measures apply to the poor, but not to the rich, who continue to thrive under polices that produce government bailouts, support deficit producing wars, tax breaks for the wealthy and deregulation policies that benefit powerful corporations. The conservative and right-wing politicians and policy wonks calling for shared sacrifices made in the name of balancing budgets have no interest in promoting justice, equality and the public good. Their policies maximize self-interest; support a culture of organized irresponsibility; and expand the pathologies of inequality, military spending and poverty. Clearly, there is much more at stake in the current war against democracy than the right-wing ideological assertion that shared sacrifices have to be made in the name of balancing budgets. In a socio-economic climate marked by deep economic and social inequalities, the call for shared sacrifices and responsibilities translates in the hallowing out of social services, public spheres and educational resources that are vital to a democracy. Austerity in this script translates into an agenda that combines punishing policies with the elimination of the formative cultures and safety nets that make a decent life and political culture possible.

. . .

Democracy has become a ritual controlled by a small number of extremely wealthy individuals and corporate power mongers. And, yet, as the corporate and right-wing political stranglehold is tightened around the necks of the elderly, workers, young people and those marginalized by class and race, coalitions and the seeds of new social movements are taking shape in states across America and beginning to fight back. Workers, the elderly and young people are demonstrating in large numbers in Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, Montana, Tennessee, and other states against the assaults being waged on unions, public servants and the social state in the name of concentrated corporate and political power.(5)

Public service workers, young people, educators, and others who now occupy the liminal space of political resistance are once again struggling to make official power visible, especially in terms of the toll it takes on those who are viewed as excess, unworthy of government supports and often excluded from the benefits of a good life. At the same time, protesters organizing in Wisconsin and other cities are making clear the necessity to recognize that power is not entirely subsumed within a politics of domination, and that there is a growing and increasingly collective resistance to the assaults being waged on those marginalized by class, race, age and ethnicity. What is being learned from these struggles is that if democracy is to be reclaimed as a radical idea - "the idea that people can control the functioning of society [and that] people should make decisions about all the issues that affect them" - it is crucial for progressives and others to struggle to create those formative cultures that enable people to translate private injustices into social and systemic problems. At stake here is a notion of democracy that refuses to be reduced to the dictates of a market society. Such a view is crucial for those emergent social movements and struggles that suggest that democracy is once again being viewed as the "sharing of an existence that makes the political possible."

The current upsurge in collective resistance against the corporate state will succeed if it speaks to and connects with a broader crisis of public values, the eclipse of a democratic public spheres and the disappearance the social state. If the principles of democracy are not to be turned against themselves in order to further the savage assaults waged on the American people by advocates of casino capitalism, it is crucial that emerging social movements emphasize what the late Tony Judt called the raising of social questions through a language that stresses the importance of public goods, shared responsibilities and a language that connects private troubles with social considerations. Hopefully, what we will see from those fighting the nightmare in America is both a narrative of critique and possibility, one that attempts to recast the public conversation about memory as a condition for learning, higher education as a crucial public good, academics as public intellectuals, critical agency as a basis for social responsibility and democracy as the radical frame through which meaningful political struggle becomes possible once again. We don't need delusional appeals to Reagan's invocation of "morning in America" from those politicians who have become lackeys for the rich and corporate elite. On the contrary, we need justice in America, and that demands more than crowd-pleasing slogans. And that requires the kind of struggles that we see in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states where the very principles, social relations and institutions that make for a viable democracy are under siege.

The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.

Meatless Mondays on The Center for a Livable Future:

Meatless Monday has the potential to not only improve the populations’ health, but could also reduce unsustainable levels of demand for meat products, particularly industrially-produced meat, which use huge amounts of valuable natural resources and pose significant public health and environmental risks.



And Blackie.

When I was twelve years old, my family ate dinner a friend’s home and midway through the meal, our host commented on our hamburgers – “They’re pretty tough! Blackie was all muscle and he loved to run around in the fields.” And my preteen self was silently mortified—we were eating an animal with a name! Try as I might, I couldn’t force myself to finish my hamburger and hid the last few bites of meat under my napkin. And now—wouldn’t it be something to eat a cow or a pig or a chicken that lived such a full life, been the recipient of such attentive care that it bore a name of its own, that its keeper remembered it fondly and particularly? I've been reading about industrial farm animal production and may never eat anything again, just to be safe...

What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential.

Our Economy of Kindness from Mother Jones.

Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system. Its achievements are often hard to see or grasp. How can you add up the foreclosures and evictions that don't happen, the forests that aren't leveled, the species that don't go extinct, the discriminations that don't occur?

The official economic arrangements and the laws that enforce them ensure that hungry and homeless people will be plentiful amid plenty. The shadow system provides soup kitchens, food pantries, and giveaways, takes in the unemployed, evicted, and foreclosed upon, defends the indigent, tutors the poorly schooled, comforts the neglected, provides loans, gifts, donations, and a thousand other forms of practical solidarity, as well as emotional support. In the meantime, others seek to reform or transform the system from the inside and out, and in this way, inch by inch, inroads have been made on many fronts over the past half century.

The terrible things done, often in our name and thanks in part to the complicity of our silence or ignorance, matter. They are what wells up daily in the news and attracts our attention. In estimating the true make-up of the world, however, gauging the depth and breadth of this other force is no less important. What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential, even if deeper in the shadows, than market forces and much more interesting than selfishness.

Most of the real work on this planet is not done for profit: it's done at home, for each other, for affection, out of idealism, and it starts with the heroic effort to sustain each helpless human being for all those years before fending for yourself becomes feasible. Years ago, when my friends started having babies I finally began to grasp just what kind of labor goes into sustaining one baby from birth just to toddlerhood.

The possibilities of the life of the body in this world.

"Life is not very interesting," we seem to have decided. "Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast." We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to "recreate" ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation — for what? … And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world.



WENDELL BERRY. The Pleasures of Eating.

Isolation is a difficult trick for a pedestrian.

I went to church in San Francisco on Sunday, the big stone church on Nob Hill, whose name is an old slang term for a rich person, where a gaggle of railroad tycoons built their palaces high above the squalid tenements of the poor back in the Gilded Age, and there with considerable pomp we baptized a dozen infants into the fellowship of faith and we renounced the evil powers of this world, which all in all is a good day's work.

The term "evil powers" is one you hear only in the church, or in Marvel comic books, or Republican speeches, and it isn't something I renounce every day. I am a romantic democrat, raised on William Saroyan and Pete Seeger and Preston Sturges, and we have faith in the decency of the little guy, and we believe you can depend on the kindness of strangers. But it ain't necessarily so.

Evil lurks in the heart of man, and anonymity tends to bring it out. Internet flamers would never say the jagged things they do if they had to sign their names. Road rage is anonymous; there is no equivalent pedestrian rage or bicyclist rage. (Have you ever yelled vile profanities at a fellow motorist -- a spontaneous outburst -- and then found that you're holding a cellphone in your hand and a female colleague is on the other end? I have and it is excruciating.) War requires very well-brought-up people to do vicious things that they are able to do efficiently because the recipients of their viciousness are unknown to them. The bombardier never sees the quiet shady street of brick houses that he is about to incinerate.

I want to believe in the kindness of strangers. I believe that if voters actually knew gay couples, they would not vote to ban gay marriage. This particular cruelty is the result of social separation, which breeds contempt. I know something about that, having spent time in grad school. When I was 24 I was an insufferable snob, thanks to lofty isolation from the ordinary tumult of life, and what cured me eventually was entering the field of light frothy entertainment. When you strive to amuse a crowd of strangers, you have to drop your pants, and a man without pants gives up the right to look down on anybody.

We liberals can be as rigidly humorless as anybody else: You learn that, writing a newspaper column. Hardshell Baptists have nothing on us when it comes to self-righteousness. Mostly we look down on Republicans and the iconic small-town values that they have exploited so successfully, and yet, deep down, we share those values. We admire personal enterprise, we are wary of the power and blindness of big bureaucracies, and we do not admire self-pity. When I hear long tales of woe -- Poor Me, my benighted life -- my inner Republican thinks, "That was you who poured all that alcohol down your gullet. You. Nobody else. And why didn't you work a little harder in school? Duh. Your mama tried to tell you and you sneered at her. You did it to yourself, pal. You got on the train to Nowheresville and guess what? You arrived."

The center of civility in our society is not the small town but the big city, where you learn to thread your way through heavy traffic and subdue your aggressiveness and extend kindness to strangers. Small-town Republicans are leery of big cities and the anonymity they bestow, but there is no better place to learn the delicate ballet of social skill. Isolation is a difficult trick for a pedestrian, even with music pouring into your ears.

And here, this morning, in a city famous for eccentricity, we strangers in a cathedral embrace other people's children and promise to fight the good fight in their behalf, a ceremony that never fails to bring tears to my eyes. We renounce evil powers. I renounce isolation and separation and the splendid anonymity of the Internet and the doink-doink-doink of the clicker propelling me through six Web sites in five minutes. I vow to put my feet on the ground and walk through town and make small talk with clerks and call my mother on the phone and put money in the busker's hat. We welcome the infants into our herd and though some of them sob bitter tears at the prospect, they are now in our hearts and in our prayers and we will not easily let them go.


GARRISON KEILLOR.