False-Ps & L'il Smokies

The media would have it that the current political season is some sort of Survivor: USA. A scramble, a horserace, a who's up who's down, who's naughty who's nice sort of game that we can all sit back and watch. Except we can't afford to sit back and watch. Not this time.

Because if there are to be survivors, hey, they be us.

You'll find Bests and Worsts of 2007 all over the Internet and the media. So we'll save you that here. Instead, this note of challenge: Beware the Falsies--the false p's: False Press, False Pundits, False Prophets and Preachers, False Propagandists, False Pollsters, False Politicians, False Presidents.

Seek out truth. Question. Educate yourself. End 2007 in the best way--with renewed resolve for 2008:

Demand better. Be better.

Oh, and as for cocktail wienies--anybody can make 'em. Just glop a cup of grape jelly and a jar of chili sauce in a pan, add Hillshire Farm L'il Smokies and heat thru. The Beltway crowd thinks they know-it-all about cocktail wienies...let's show 'em how wrong they are....

One Life

Blogger Steve Gilliard was a stranger to me. I knew of him through the words of others. His story informs why so many of us blog, each with our disparate voices. His personal story we know in the narrowest of slices, and yet his words and his ideals will live on. As does his challenge for those who follow the blogging path.

Sunday morning update: Read Steve's words for yourself about the power of the Fighting Liberal.

The Great Equalizer

We are growing libraries in Prairie Country these days. Elsewhere, there are conversations about closings and consolidations, but not here. Small town libraries are banding together to share books and husband wisely their resources. Park Rapids, Minnesota is just beginning to think about how to increase their library space.

Fargo is in the midst of a significant improvement with the opening already of a brand new storefront library on the north side of the city. And a new neighborhood library on the southside replaces a storefront library that burst at its seams in its short life.

Downtown, the existing library has been demolished and a new two-story library is going up in its place. A stolid red brick building, with massive glass walls, overlooking the Red River of the North.

Some of us liked the first design better than the final one now under construction. Vivid, visionary, it would have exemplified the role of libraries in stretching minds, giving them room to imagine exciting things. But we are a pragmatic people in Prairie Country, and the money wasn’t there for visionary, so stolid will do.

Libraries are part of the fabric and foundation of cultures. The library at Alexandria. The Hittites room, a library of sorts in telling what it is that a culture values, even if the culture itself has not survived. We hunt for cave paintings and scrolls and stand in awe of the paper chase for knowledge that libraries, great and small, have hoarded and shared and shed light on.

We seem to value hockey arenas and football dorms more around here, but that’s a transitory thing. Next year, it’ll be soccer fields. Or some other controlled exercise in war-making. Which is not such a bad thing. Better to be fighting battles on ball fields than bloody fields. Seems a tad more civilized, most of the time. Until a player or parent reverts to barbarian rants.

Libraries are the great civilizers…and equalizers. Anyone can walk or wheel through the doors, pick up a book and sit down and read. No admission required. No gatekeepers. No uniforms to buy or restriction other than the desire to learn…or the grudging chore to fulfill a teacher’s assignment…which has the potential in the library to open the doors toward lifelong paths.

Libraries have been part of the fabric and foundation of my life. Yours, too? The first was an iconic Carnegie library on the shores of Lake Bemidji. At first the giant-to-a-child statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe seemed the draw downtown, but it was the library that brought me back again and again. To discover Laura Ingalls Wilder and Bobbsey Twins and Betsy, Tacy and Tib and…. Because we lived just a few blocks away, I was allowed to go on my own. An adult adventure in more innocent times. A seed planted.

I was in the magazine room of the school library, a student volunteer sorting and filing stacks when the announcement came over the p.a. system…President Kennedy has been shot.

The Carnegie Library in Fargo was torn down for a parking lot. But not before I moved from the children’s section to the main stacks and read my way through all the Shakespeare paperbacks and wrote about the Lafayette Escadrille for a school paper and rode the bus home every week with a fresh stack of books.

Libraries are valued by people in every walk of life. Mausoleums called libraries are built for Presidents, where they can tell their story or keep it from being fully told. Private libraries are standard in law offices and hospitals and churches and even homes. Collections of all sizes, all topics. A repository of knowledge, and a stimulator of ideas.

Because of libraries, we have the opportunity to read the banned, the controversial, the disagreeable, the charming, the world-expanding, the latest, the oldest, the most sobering and the most frivolous.

Celebrate your local library, visit it often in the year to come and support it. Share books you no longer use. Contribute to a building fund. Make it a regular part of your life. And share your thoughts about libraries here if you like, or think about it on your way…and come back soon. Thanks for stopping by.

Postcard from Prairie Country: Bag It!

Instead of just tossing your empty Christmas gift bags this year, fill them. With those "I don't use them anymore, but they're too good to throw away..." items that will help your local charity thrift stores replenish for the New Year.
Merry Christmas from Prairie.

Of Penguins and Prayer Flags

Years ago, the Sunshine household made a dramatic change in how we celebrate Christmas. Tradition was cast aside by loss, and we decided to create a new tradition. Some twenty-five years later, that tradition is still going strong.

We each pick a country at Thanksgiving time and then draw to select which one we’ll dish up on Christmas Eve. Year in, year out, through joyous times and turbulent ones, we’ve always gathered together on Christmas Eve to share an adventure.

In the process, we’ve learned more about our neighbors in the world, and are the richer for it in treasure money cannot buy.

Some dishes became family stand-bys…we still serve up Greek lemon chicken to welcome family home, as we did the first year that took us to Greece through food and study. Some things become stand-bys, too. The plastic penguin-embellished igloo that replaced the peace dove that was handmade with trellises and twinkle lights and hung high against the side of the house…until the war outlasted it. But the penguin soldiers on.

These days, our wanderlust is tempered by disability, and we travel more via the Internet than the Interstates. But the tradition continues. Burnished by the spirit of inclusiveness we brought to that first new style family dinner.

This year we’re “traveling” to Bhutan, and prayer flags dance on the wind in front of our house amid the snow-covered trees and lawns. A bit of the Himalayas, of the world beyond our doorstep, but not beyond our hearts.

There’s been a lot of hunkering down these days, but there is, too, the promise of new days with fresh opportunities to live in deed the values we profess in words.

If I could reach out and put in your hands two gifts for these times, they would be the gift of thinking—not just hearing what you want to hear to re-affirm your status quos, of opening your heart to new voices and new births of opportunity. And the gift of peace—and quiet…so that you can ponder in your heart and make wise choices and act upon them to help make a better world. Mustard seeds, grains of sand, stars in the universe—each on its own is miniscule, but together we can move mountains and minds and hearts.

Don’t fear change, embrace it. Like that long ago young couple, set out on a new path. Who knows where it may lead….

Merry Christmas, from Prairie

Migrant Mother

Christmas time brings an image of the iconic Mother. Mary the Virgin, great with child, betrothed, not yet wed, on a trek to be counted.

But another mother has long haunted me. To me, she is the face of the Great Depression, and the face of America. You’ve likely seen her picture, too, captured by the lens of photographer Dorothea Lange. That picture is an iconic image of Mother, too, a product of the Farm Security Administration’s documentary project in those years. Still available, to those who will see, via the Library of Congress' Prints & Photographs Reading Room.

Lange captured more than one image during the time she spent with Florence Owens Thompson and her seven children near Nipomo California in 1936. There is a common thread to all those black and white pictures, freezing out the distraction and din of color and telling a plain unfettered story.

Mothers struggle in all kinds of ways, and in this season of squander and spoils in some quarters, we must make an extra effort to reach out to and honor those struggles.

The mother who, having raised her children, now finds she is raising her grandchildren. The first time mother who worries over her newborn and the medical tests which have so much power to determine the course of future days.

The mothers buffeted by the wilderness winds of subprime mortgages and a vampire economy determined to suck the lifeblood from workers while dancin’ with pearls on and stuffing each other’s pockets with graft.

Mothers worrying about educating, feeding, housing, caregiving for the wee ones they have nurtured into the world.

Mothers who, having lived long and vibrant lives, begin the slow and slipping pathway into life’s next stage.

We live in Depression-era times, we live in Dickensian times. We give power to Gentlemanly C’s who have no command of history nor will to learn from it. Who never learned to value every mother as they would value their own.

A brooding note for this holiday time, perhaps. But before Ebenezer could shout “Merry Christmas” and bring a turkey to the table of Tiny Tim’s Mom, first he had to experience with his spirit guide the true mirror of the values of his life.

There’s still time. Time to make a difference, to reach out, to help. To live the best of the values Mothers instilled in childhood. Do unto others…. I’ll be taking blankets to a local homeless shelter this morning, because they gave blankets to the children and need blankets for the grown-ups, too. Because there’s still time before Christmas…and the need goes on.

Because 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson’s family sold their tent to buy food. Because there was no room in the inn. Because a homeless man came to Fargo from Chicago and froze to death in a bus stop kiosk.

Because they continue to come, in waves past the inn to the manger, past the memory of Ellis Island, as my grandparents did. Immigrants, migrants. Mothers, children. On the move toward the hope of a better life.

On the Road Again

Heading down the Interstate this morning, meeting up with writing friends for a long overdue reunion lunch. There’ll be much talk of life and juicy womanhood for we are all of a seasoned number of years and we know each other long and well.

There’ll be talk of writing too. I’ve been thinking about that quite a lot lately. The WGA writers’ strike matters for every writer, not just WGA writers. Matters for readers and viewers, too. We note who supports it. And who scabs.

Books matter. Despite the latest electronic reader, or maybe because of it, I can think of few better moments than settling deep in a cushy chair, tucked under a lap quilt this time of year, a cup of chai nearby, and the spaniels curled at my feet. In my hands, a book.

I remember missing the school bus as a kid because my nose was buried deep in a Nancy Drew suspense.

Books I read as a student resonate anew for me living through these years of the 21^st Century. The book that most profoundly affected me and stayed in my heart was To Kill a Mockingbird. If we thought we’d left those times behind, we have only to look at a headline like the story I read last night in the NYTimes: “With Regrets, New Orleans is Left Behind.” Then a Mockingbird. Now, a city. It’s a sin to kill a city.

The writer I grew up with and visited America through the eyes of was John Steinbeck. The first time I walked the sidewalks of Monterey, tears shimmered and shuddered down my cheeks. Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl.

The pearls of value are not necklace strands, but the precious words of our youth, of our studies. Yet the times contextualize those words and lift them from the page to dance and haunt us. Just days ago, homeless man travels from Chicago and is found dead of hypothermia in a bus stop kiosk in Fargo. There was no room in the inns and shelters that night. The new shelter won’t be open until late January.

Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. Would they hold up in the re-reading?

Life’s too busy these days to know, but I have faith they would...too well. Meanwhile, there’s new stories to read. There’s a highway to travel. And if time permits, a slight detour into Sauk Centre. Every kid who went to school in Minnesota knows of Sinclair Lewis. And there is homage to be paid at the corner of Main Street and Sinclair Lewis Avenue. A timeworn hotel with the whispers of ghosts and a strong cup of coffee for the weary traveler who needs to push on.

For he wrote presciently in 1935 It Can’t Happen Here. And now we know It Can Happen Here. And yesterday, Senator Chris Dodd led the way and showed It Can Be Stopped.