Sorting Out Big Issues Of Summer
“Our communal and civic open spaces, courts, workplaces, Congress, Academe, the media are no longer places where issues are settled … but battlegrounds on which our most pressing conflicts will never be resolved.”
- Jon Katz, in Wired
September always triggers in me a split personality. Half desires another month of summer and half is ready to clean up everything for the winter.
Many of us share the September ambivalence of kids who loved long summer evenings in Spokane playing “black wolf,” but still wanted the new pencil box and the adventure of a new class.
Black wolf has given way to lazy conversations on the deck or evenings puttering in the garden.
Now my class is the community and my pencil box is full of issues and opinions. I’ll clean up my mailbag before I pick the last berries.
Seattle Commons: Many Seattlites have written to ask if I support the huge park proposed for the downtown. . On rare occasions citizens are asked to vote on the future of their city. I don’t know if Paris voted on the Champs Elysees or if New Yorkers were asked about Central Park, but the vision that created these places for the next generations made their cities great.
They softened the harshness of noise, speed and cement. Anyone who votes against The Commons for personal “I’d have to move my business,” or money reasons, “Not one dime for the community - they get enough already,” has seceded from any sense of the common good. Communities require gathering places, places to play, places to feel good and to be reminded that grass and trees still have value. Chances to provide these places are gifts to the future.
Baseball stadium: While we’re talking about civic projects the stadium issue deserves a place. Yes, sports fans should have a wonderful open-air facility to gather, enjoy and cheer. But, unlike a park, a stadium like this has an entrance fee.
I cannot understand the logic of building the facility if most of the ticket money goes to a private business. I feel the same way about the profits from concessions in national parks where the government (that’s us) gets so little of the money when we hold the deed to the land. I want a better deal than the one being offered.
Citadel: Shannon Faulkner should have jogged all summer. Pioneers are always held to high standards, face difficult circumstances and have to hold it together in dangerous territory. But the Citadel is a bigger problem than male or female. It is, by all accounts, a “Lord of the Flies” boys club where humiliation, degradation and violence are accepted as “normal” hazing rituals.
The Marines gave up these forms of abuse ages ago because it produced sadistic officers who killed trainees.
The state should not pay for traditional forms of torture under the guise of leadership training because it will end up with too many men who cannot function in a world of equality and communication and whose loyalty is to a lodge, not a community.
O.J.: This month’s issue of Wired has an essay by Jon Katz. One quote sums up what we are facing. “Vietnam discredited the military. Watergate discredited the presidency. The Thomas-Hill hearings discredited Congress. Now the O.J. Simpson trial is discrediting the courts - and even more so, the media. Can our public institutions resolve society’s most pressing problems?” We create civic dramas to generate change. Yes, I think O.J. is guilty and he should be convicted, but I couldn’t believe it when the Simi Valley jury exonerated the L.A. police in the Rodney King beating. Racism plays both ways and it’s always tragic. Let’s use the pain of the O.J. circus to clean up our institutions.
Now, I’m heading for the garden and one last weekend of real summer. May I suggest that you do the same. Listen to the shouts and squeals of the kids or the easy chat of the adults on a perfect evening, and imagine a better world.
xxxx
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jennifer James The Spokesman-Review