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Showing posts with the label Freedom

Independent Women?

      During breakfast today I was reading an excerpt from a play in The New York Times Magazine (I know, I was a day behind and read Saturday's edition yesterday) entitled Rust .  The play, written by a professor at Grand Valley State University, here in Michigan, is a nonfiction drama about the closing of a GM plant in Wyoming, MI.  The play itself sounds interesting and I enjoyed the excerpt, but what caught my eye was something a character said.  The character is "Academic" and plays a historian and guide to the playwright, also a character.  He is explaining the rise of the automobile factories and the effect of the car on American culture.  He says, "Women became independent, they go from producers of food and clothing to consumers of food and clothing."  This was meant as an earnest, praiseworthy point.     I would counter with "How far we've fallen."  To say that a woman (or a man) is independent because she has m...

Worth Quoting

From Wendell Berry's 1993 Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community : On the problem of current economic system--  But we must begin by giving up any idea that we can bring about these healings without fundamental changes in the way we think and live.  We face a choice that is starkly simple: we must change or be changed.  If we fail to change for the better, then we will be changed for the worse.  We cannot blunder our way into health by the same sad and foolish hopes by which we have blundered into disease.  We must see that the standardless aims of industrial communism and industrial capitalism equally have failed.  The aims of productivity, profitability, efficiency, limitless growth, limitless wealth, limitless power, limitless mechanization and automation can enrich and empower the few (for a while), but they will sooner or later ruin us all.  The gross national product and the corporate bottom line are utterly meaningless as measures of the prosper...