Life is a street, not a highway

My daughters and I just watched a movie whose soundtrack featured the Tom Cochrane song “Life is a Highway”.  What an odious, and sadly telling, metaphor.
The complete lyrics aren’t of interest to me, just that metaphor.  What does it mean that life is (or should be) a highway?  What are the salient characteristics of highways?
Highways [...]

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The perils and the seduction of self-sorting

I’ve just finished a book that leaves me troubled over the future of civic engagement in the United States — and puzzled over whether it’s even worth worrying about.
Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort: How the Clustering of Like-minded America is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008) has one central thesis: since the [...]

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…and the benefits of easy community-forming

A couple of days ago, I voiced a little suspicion about the many new “social software” devices and applications that make forming connections so easy.  Today I want to amend that.
I’m reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2008), an exploration of the ways new technology allows [...]

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The danger of easy community-forming

It finally got cold enough in Fairbanks — three degrees Fahrenheit this morning — that I decided to forego riding my bike to work and to take the bus instead. Truth be told, I don’t mind the cold or the dark so much as all the damned dressing and undressing. Lazy, I guess.
Riding [...]

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Freedom, coercion, and community: The people’s thing, part 2

This post continues thoughts begun in “The people’s thing?” about three weeks ago.
(If you’re wondering where my fuller report is on the Vision Fairbanks public hearing before the FNSB Assembly, it’s coming.  This is now a little more timely.  And it’s what I feel like writing about today.)
As I said in “The people’s thing?”, there [...]

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The people’s thing?

What chance does Fairbanks stand of being — or being part of — a republic? Can we be a community?
In high school, I learned that the United States was not a “democracy”, as many people think, but a “democratic republic”. Certainly the CIA World Factbook describes us as a “Constitution-based federal republic”.
The [...]

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Quotations for the day

As you may know, I’ve been reading Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. (In fact, I’ve been reading it for months. Now that I’ve started biking to and from work rather than riding the bus, it’s [...]

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What’s going on in your neighborhood? How would you find out?

One of the drawbacks of newspapers, except in the smallest of towns, is that their coverage of neighborhood events — things of concern primarily or only to those in your neighborhood — is necessarily limited. Newspapers have to cover things that interest a large part of their readership. While some of the events [...]

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On the benefits of neighborhoods

Many members of my religious body love to talk about the spiritual uplift they get from nature. (In this context, nature means something like “the outdoors”, places where they do not see the touch of humanity.) Among people for whom care of the earth is a religious calling, such a sentiment is common. [...]

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“Rugged individualism” versus community

Last night, I attended a meeting at the Downtown Association that made me sad for the future of Fairbanks and even made me wonder if this is any place for someone with a love of community.
Executive director Emma Wilson summarized the results of a marketing survey commissioned by the Fairbanks Convention and Visitors Bureau. If [...]

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