Shepherd’s Centers is a network of fifty-seven affiliate chapters across the country that offers some 165,000 people “services such as transportation, handy helpers, friendly visits, grocery shopping, and respite care to help older adults remain living in their own homes and communities.”
Attendees of Socialism 2023, a four-day conference in Chicago over Labor Day weekend, wanted freedom from the existing system but admitted its dominion (the “dom” in “freedom”) and the movement’s current lack of large-scale agency in it.
Whatever you might think about advertising as an engine of the market economy, it is often juxtaposed with death in the media, nowhere more than online, and it is a symptom. It is a relief to lie in my bed at night and read the print issue, which I got as if by the publisher’s afterthought in a discount deal for my online subscription.
Gathering food locally at a local pace with local technology may not be quite as convenient in some cases, but it roots us more firmly in our own lives. This, I think, is the subconscious delight of visiting a local apple orchard in fall.
It takes self-assurance to throw yourself or your plans away in the belief there is no wrong path, only other opportunities to exercise mastery. It is not a game without risk.
For better and worse, travel has an emotional component. We see better when we do it, until fatigue and familiarity roll in like fog.
Being a socialist in the United States requires walking a narrow path between admission of defeat and ideological hope.
Chris Bruneau, who is no naïf, understands his odds with different eventualities. He also knows that as a junior congressperson, he would be expected to toe the party line, but he is trying to present himself, at least in conversation, as something closer to what used to be a centrist.
I entered the town of Gettysburg from the west, through battlefields marked with picket fences, cannon, and statues. The town was crawling with tourists.
Since it is not far from there, mere seconds in flight time, to the crash site, one is made conscious of how low the aircraft was at that point, of how little time was left, and of the terror of the people onboard.
In the American South racial violence and disenfranchisement made job openings in Northern factories short on labor seem like the possibility of escape to “the promised land.” But the expense of public transport, the dangers and inconveniences of segregated waiting rooms and modes of travel, and the problems of finding food to eat when restaurants and stores often refused to serve Black travelers, made the self-guided and -paced car vital. It represented freedom.
I had been thinking about how long I had wanted to see the Connecticut coast, where my Griswold ancestors—the middle portion of an unbroken line of fathers and sons going back to the year 1200—first arrived in the Americas, but I was not planning to visit on this trip. It felt like a missed opportunity, but the drive was already long, and, besides, I knew my end of the story.