Morning Thoughts: October 10, 2017

When my sainted mother used to get really, really tired of us kids, she’d say, “I think I’ll just go live in the woods by myself.” Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it just puzzled us. How would she get back from out in the woods every day in time to cook our breakfast? There were sure to be problems in logistics, and we told her so. That didn't help.

The threat didn’t seem to upset our dad. He would just say, “Ya’ll would be satisfied then, wouldn’t you?"

I’m beginning to understand dear old mom a little better these days. If the world gets any more complicated, I may consider a little cabin somewhere out in the middle of nowhere.

Somewhere I don’t have to deal with the fact that, although I haven’t applied for a loan in nearly 15 years and don't expect to ever do so again, I find that something called my “credit score” has been hacked, and it’s probably going to end up costing me money.

Somewhere I don’t have to deal with a charge-card company that doesn’t list “replace a worn-out card with a new one” as a choice on its “press a number” phone service system.”

Somewhere I’m not required to think up ever increasingly complicated passwords only to find my account locked when I miss a word or symbol.

Somewhere I can eat supper without receiving 15 robo-calls.

Somewhere cell phones only allow you to phone someone and talk to them.

Somewhere the purchase of a new car doesn’t come with an offer to attend a Saturday seminar to learn how to operate it.

Somewhere there are grocery stores that offer a variety of goods instead of 400 different types of toothpaste and 300 types of toilet paper.

Somewhere both hyperbole and gratuitous exaggeration are outlawed.

Somewhere Halloween is pretty much just one night for kids and not a month-long decorating contest for adults.

Somewhere a teenager can be jailed for something called "Walking under the influence of a hand-held device" if there is collision involving injuries.

And finally …

Somewhere folks don’t elect goofballs to public office.

Don't get me started.

Growing Up Southern: August 20, 2017

There are stories in the Arkansas Delta that would make a person cry to think about. Here is one. My late father-in-law related it to me, as he did so many others.

It concerns what is known as a “shotgun shack.” Most folks agree they called them that because they consisted of three rooms, one leading to the next, with no hallways. A shot fired through the front door would go straight through and out the back door. Some scholars assign the source of the name to an African word. That seem a bit of a stretch to me.

It really doesn’t matter. The truth is that they housed the poorest segments of the rural South, sharecroppers and others who couldn’t afford better. They dotted the cotton fields when I was a young boy. With no shade about them and with uninsulated tine roofs, one can only imagine their discomfort. Only a few remain today.

A solitary man occupied the one in question. My father-in-law, Julius Cole never furnished much information about him. He was, as so many occupants of this type housing were, an African-American who worked picking and chopping cotton in season, and doing odd jobs at other times. Seems to have minded his own business and interacted with others as little as possible.

He died, and the shotgun shack that had been his home, sat unoccupied. Eventually, so it seems, some folks entered it and were amazed at what they saw, utterly amazed and astounded. Word spread, and soon everyone in the neighborhood had come to see.

Drawing covered the walls, elaborate and detailed drawings of churches and other buildings. A veteran of the 79^th Infantry Division in the European Theater in World War Two, Julius always described the drawings as “like the building we saw in France and Italy.” The man in question had obviously produced them.

What an amazing story. There is a concept in economics called “location quotient” that postulates a given geographic area will account for a quotient of goods produced. Some social scholars have expanded that to include individuals of specific talent or genius.

It doesn’t account for those whose talent and genius were lost to poverty, prejudice, or deprivation of opportunity.

Who can imagine what must have passed through the mind of this remarkable man on lonely nights filled with the sounds of Delta insects just beyond the thin walls of his home? What motivates a man to produce beauty he thinks will never be seen, by the light of a kerosene lamp in the middle of nowhere? Did he ever wonder what might have been, or curse his fate for denying what should have been?

We read about people born to wealth and who build upon that wealth and, somehow, we assign them great talents and abilities. What name could we assign to smothered talent and deprived ability? All we can do is wonder what about the insensitivity of fate. Oh, and in weaker moments we might find ourselves abhorring the smirking faces of those born into unlimited opportunity, who blame the poor for their failures.

A made up a short story once using this legend as a source of inspiration. I called it, The Last Cotton Boll and one may click here to open a copy of it. I dedicate it to all those whose talents lie buried with them in their graves.

  

High living, Arkansas syle.
 One of the few remaining to remind.

On Urban Planning

            Sometime back, a very precious friend and college in the planning profession asked me if I’d ever considered preparing a reading list for those entering the field. I hadn’t, but the thought has trailed along behind me like a lost puppy since.

I haven’t prepared the list, but I have thought of how I would approach it. See, I wouldn’t start with the works of the arrogant urban designers who are currently in vogue. Oh, they design some beautiful urban spaces, for rich folks. And, they have good ideas, for a capitalist society. But they haven’t even picked at the problems that have confronted our settlements since the days when trade and commerce forced people out of their tribal habits. This created the need to live among strangers, interestingly enough coinciding in our western world with the advent of many world religions.

No, I would start with two works. They aren’t easy ones. Both create sores on your soul and then pick at the scabs. But, if one feels as I do, that a role of urban and regional planning is to do for the “least of those among us,” they are essential. Reading them would be approaching the dialectics of planning. To study planning, one would first study anti-planning. Only then could we proceed bravely through the minefields of thought toward some compromise.

The two books are, in order of publication, “How the Other Half Lives,” by Jacob Riis, and “Night Comes to the Cumberlands” by Harry Monroe Caudill. They represent the farther poles of human settlement. In fact, the second is about rural, not urban settlements. Both, however, shine a startling light on a layer of society that, while it nurtures us in many ways, we prefer it remain hidden from view, much like the slums of third-world countries lie hidden by the vast walls surrounding the tourist resorts. But the light shone by these two books is like a door that never closes completely; a partial and heart-rendering image remains.

Jacob Riis took his camera around the slums of New York in the late 1800s and later published them, along with an extensive narrative descriptions, in a magazine article. The result, ultimately, was the publication of the full book. Suffice it to say, it touched the conscious of a country the way that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “The Jungle” did. One reads of the young boy working in a sweatshop who, when asked how long he had worked there, answered “Since I wuz.” We read of the hospital that received 508 deserted babies in one year from streets, doorstops, gutters, and church steps, babies whom the mothers couldn’t care for, and how, of that figure, 333, or over 65 percent, died. We read of poor immigrant women working in conditions such as the one that resulted in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the death of 148 workers.

We stop, dry our eyes, contemplate the image of a trans-vaginal probe, and continue.

Caudill’s work deals with Appalachia and how the coal mining industry wreaked havoc on both the earth and society. As we momentarily experience relief at escaping the stifling confines of the urban ghetto, we suddenly find ourselves going to work with the miner who must lie flat on his coal car to traverse the tiny space that leads him to a long day of working in the black dusty earth, a day broken by a lunch that might consist of two halves of a biscuit separated by a layer of lard.

Have we learned anything over the years? Much. Have we unlearned anything? Stay tuned. We know now how better to hide our unwanted from view. The automobile allows us to move farther away and to create our sanctuaries in homogeneous communities where most of the urban planning takes place today. After all, it is much easier to plan, no, wait, we don’t call it that anymore. It’s called “place-making” now and it involves all sorts of visual treats for the residents of the chosen spaces. Anyway, it's easier to plan pretty places there. As for the modern descendants of the Riis and Caudill’s subjects, those in the forgotten settlements, don’t worry, the gangs have simply changed colors and drugs have replaced the rum that made life bearable for a short period before destroying it. The sweatshops are now in foreign countries or in the homes of undocumented immigrants. Regardless, we have cheap clothes.

Our professional magazines are full of color photos of the happy folks in the chosen communities. All is well. Or is it? In the forgotten communities and hinterlands, is an anger brewing like one of those science-fiction movies from the 1950s, a monster that will only need a catalyst like an atomic bomb, or perhaps a massive flood to unleash itself? Are we nearing the moment predicted by David Simon (creator of “The Wire”) when the bricks will start flying? It they do, we should remember that they will, like the New Testament rain, fall on the just and the unjust.

We are left to ponder the future as always. We might also ponder the words with which Riis left us at the end of his work when he quoted a portion of the immortal poem “The Parable,” by James Russell Lowell:

—Think ye that building shall endure

Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?

 

 

Photo by Riis of waifs sleeping in the streets

 

 

See also: www.wattensawpress.com