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Trapped in Gated Communities
My fellow citizens it is time to free the oppressed! There is trouble right here in River City, yes here in our own community people are treated like prisoners in their own homes. The gates swing closed behind them and they reside encircled by steel and stone. These are people who have not been charged with any offense they have committed no crime. They have been lured to their fate by slick talking sales people and the lure of a fabled "resort" lifestyle. Every day gated communities claim more victims. It is only after they are entrapped, after they have laid down their hard earned money dreaming of cocktails and barbeque that the truth is revealed. The gate slowly swings closed behind them, family and friends are shut out and in many places the sound of children are forbidden. Oh could Hell be any worse? It is heartbreaking to walk or ride by these great impoundments and see the poor wretches peering out through the bars watching those of us who are free to move unencumbered by fence or gate. They remind me of the cows on the farm when I was growing up that lined up at the gate of the fenced pasture waiting for the gate to swing open. Are these people doomed to silently suffer with no chance of release? No! There is hope. By joining together we can help our oppressed neighbors and friends. We can make their plight known and we can bring hope and relief to those struggling to regain their freedom. We will be organizing direct action events to breech the walls with packages of forbidden foods, banned newspapers and magazines and recordings of the laughter of children and the camaraderie of families. We only hope it is not too late for some. But we need to do more. We need to make authorizes aware of these forgotten members of the community. These individuals without public streets, cutoff from neighbors and wasting away on patios, tennis courts and golf courses. People without rights or representation who live at the mercy of some anonymous Developer or worse left to fend for themselves within some bureaucratic rule bound "Owners Association". Oh the horror. Together we can bring hope to these poor people, infuse their lives with new meaning. We can all strive for the day when the gates will swing open - forever - never to close again, never to divide us anymore. We can envision a day when we are all reunited and freedom for all will prevail.
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Crystal Bridges
How the Rich Spend Your Money A Case Study Crystal Bridges is a museum of American art in Bentonville Arkansas that opened in 2011. It is surprising and intriguing on a number of levels. First, location, location, location. Surprise one is Bentonville, Arkansas. Not where you would expect to find a world class art museum. You might sooner think Chicago, LA, Seattle, New York; larger metropolitan areas with a reputation for art, culture and money. The reason for Bentonville is that last item - money. Bentonville's claim to fame, if that is the right word, is that it is the home of Walmart, the world's largest corporation, and that is the source of the money, as we will discuss. The driving force in the creation of both the art collection and the museum to display it is Alice Walton, one of the four heirs to the Walmart fortune. Forbes estimates Ms. Walton's fortune at $35 Billion. Location surprise two is that Crystal Bridges is built in a hole; well actually a ravine with a creek running through it. You approach it from the top and descend four floors by elevator or stairs to the entry courtyard; a challenging location used magnificently by the architect Moshe Safdie, to create an architectural gem. The museum consists of a series of connected buildings/galleries that are built over and around the stream and ponds such that they seem to float on the water. Together they create 220,000 square feet of space amidst acres of beautiful grounds. There were other surprises. We had visited the museum a few months after it opened and returned this year because they had added a Frank Lloyd Wright house that they had dismantled in New Jersey and completely reconstructed and refurbished at Crystal Bridges. After walking through the museum again as we were waiting for our tour of the FLW house to begin, I approached the information desk and asked an obvious question - how much did it cost to build Crystal Bridges? The woman I directed the question to looked very uncomfortable, started looking around a bit frantically and finally waved over a museum guide. They conferred. Finally the guide turned to me and said "that information is not available. The cost is never disclosed." Interesting. Well, in the internet age there are no secrets, right? So I went digging. Not as simple as I expected but facts did emerge thanks to some folks who has researched the tax filings for the not for profits involved. If you read articles in the press about Crystal Bridges you will be told that Alice Walton purchased the art and built the museum. Well, with $35 billion she certainly is capable of that and more. But the tax filings show something different. First, they give a hint at the cost - at least $1.6 billion dollars. Of that about $1.3 billion came from the Walton Family Foundation. Ms. Walton is the chair of the Crystal Bridges Board and sits on the board of the Walton Family Foundation, so it seems the foundation is just a mechanism to funnel tax deductible contributions. But then the filings indicate that Ms. Walton's total contributions to both charities has been just $2.6 million – yes, million, not billion. That is a lot of money, but hardly a drop in the bucket for her or as it relates to the cost of the museum. So where did the money come from? Well, it seems likely it came from Walmart. And if that seems nice think about where Walmart gets its money. I would suggest that Crystal Bridges was paid for by you and me and many other regular folks – Walmart customers, taxpayers (those contributions by Walmart are tax deductible and if they pay less everyone else pays more), their underpaid employees who are on food stamps and lack health care, and their suppliers who they pay as little as possible which means that most of their suppliers' employees are underpaid or are working in sweatshop conditions. And speaking of tax avoidance, Ms. Walton got her hometown to provide a tax incentive for Crystal Bridges that has cost the local taxpayers (many of whom are Walmart employees, remember) $17 million so far. Isn't it great to be a philanthropist? Especially with other peoples money. Books
Books are obsolete. Passé. Nobody reads anymore. Even ebook sales have declined. Someone somehow determined that 80% of US families did not read a book last year. Should we believe such a statistic? Well maybe. It's all about screens, video, mobile, snippets and snatches of gossip or information or entertainment, its YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and they all blend together and they are less than the sum of their parts. Boundaries have evaporated. Attention spans are measured in seconds. A recent study by Microsoft claims that the average adult attention span is now just 8 seconds - less than a goldfish. Yes, a goldfish. We are all becoming guppies. And yet in the spring warmth of a March desert weekend 140,000 people gather to see, hear and commune with nearly 500 authors in a veritable orgy of literary indulgence. For two days people crowd into rooms for readings and discussions. They stand in lines often by the hundreds, sometimes to be turned away as every seat is occupied. People swap stories of favorite authors and beloved books. Conversations are convivial, literate, devoid of sound bite simplicity or angry vitriol. The population of Tucson where this all takes place is just over 500,000 and if the city is average that means that 20% are readers or about 100,000 people. If every one of those readers came to the festival then 40,000 visitors were in town for the event. So books are a great tourist attraction and something locals turn out for in large numbers. Pretty impressive for a dying medium. Seeing an author whose work you have found engrossing is rather like first meeting a person you have talked to on the phone many times. You can not but have developed an image of them and the reality can be disappointing, even disconcerting. One of my favorite non fiction books is The Worst Hard Times by Timothy Egan; a wondrous melding of gripping personal stories with the grand sweep of historical events all set in the dust bowl catastrophe. In person Egan seemed the perfect embodiment of his stories. A self described lapsed Irishman from Montana, he proved to be a great story teller - insightful, thought-provoking and funny. These events are great opportunities for new discoveries. On going to see Jared Diamond, author of such landmark book as Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, I discovered Felipe Fernández-Armesto; a man with Spanish name, a British accent, Roy Orbison glasses and a comedian's delivery, but with an intellectual's mindset. Someone to add to the reading list. So do books matter? Is reading important as something more than entertainment for the graying segment of the population? Well, we hear a lot about the economic one percent but perhaps what is more significant is the literate twenty percent; the people who read, who think, who grapple with the issues that confront and shape our world and define our humanity. So enough of this, go read a book. The name A Still Small Voice 4U is derived from the Bob Franke song A Still Small Voice. We are often led to believe that it is the important people, the rich and powerful, the politicians, the celebrities that define our world but it is the small voice that over time and through persistence creates real change. These voices usually go unnoticed, but do not underestimate their importance.
My favorite example of this is Pete Seeger and the modern folk music movement. In the 1950’s Pete was a member of the Weavers who had big hit records with songs like Goodnight Irene and Tzena, Tzena, Tzena. These were essentially pop songs and although not from the tin pan alley tradition they were hardly subversive. Then along comes J Edgar and little Joe McCarthy who decided that anyone who might be a communism/socialist sympathizer was dangerous or evil or controlled by foreign governments. This despite the fact that millions of Americans had joined communist or socialist organizations when capitalism failed in the Great Depression. So as part of the campaign to make America safe for rich capitalist they dragged Pete and many others before the House Un-American Activities Committee, perhaps the most un-American organization of its time. Pete refused to take the Fifth instead giving the Committee a lesson in the Constitution (which they obviously had never read) by explaining that he was exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. Well free speech is not free and they tried to put Pete in jail. Most importantly they blacklisted him, banning him and the Weavers from radio, TV and major concert venues. So Pete, needing to scrape together a living, took to the road traveling the country playing wherever he could find a place – summer camps, school auditoriums, college campuses, union halls and people’s homes – spreading the music and message that would become the modern folk movement. Popularizing songs like This Land is Your Land, Woody’s anthem that many people today think of as a patriotic ditty. In reality was and is a rallying cry against the rich and powerful (check out the verse about private property) and for the common person – this land is yours and mine. Subversive for sure. So thanks in part to J Edgar and little Joe we got protest music and songs that were integral to the civil rights, anti-war, feminist and environmental movements. So turn off those talking heads on TV, ignore the hate radio and don’t expect politicians to do anything of use. Real change will come from the small voices in church basements, living rooms, coffee houses and other places where people get together and talk or sing, discuss books and help each other. Be one of those small voices. |
R CookeOne Small Voice |