My dad found this for me. Absolutely gorgeous. Reminds me of N. D. Wilson’s “Letters From the Tilt-a-Whirl”, so I’m going to repost my review of that, as well.
My church’s homeschooling co-op kicked off yesterday, the first of a weekly meeting. The co-op is for kids 3rd grade and under, and Renata (6) and Joffre (4) are in the same classes, which is fun. The Great State of South Carolina (less great because it is only Great by the magnanimity of the Fed) requires science for everyone, so that’s often offered by co-ops. The kids are taking Science, Art, and Latin.
First day was definitely a zoo, but the kids had a blast. Renata drew a picture of herself with “Mrs. Cossner”. Good times.
The hope is that Holy Trinity’s co-op will soon (i.e. in a few years) lead to the foundation of a school. Voila the first baby steps toward a great goal.
A lot of folks in my Reformed “I Heart Classical Education” circles are fond of pointing out that education or “paideia” is supposed to be the complete raising of a human; it’s more than just imparting information. And that’s oh so right…in Portuguese and Spanish a badly behaved kid is called “mal educado”, and good manners are good education…it’s a leading up and a leading out, not just teaching math and science.
Anyhoo, very excited about the prospect of growing this co-op and eventually getting a school rocking. We’ll keep you updated!
Kimberly made these banners for Renata’s birthday party this Saturday. Mama makes a bunch of things with her clever hands. Even if it doesn’t teach the kids to make physical things (which I expect it to), this sort of thing will certainly teach them how to craft with care…be it sonnets or a basketball move. Well done, mama.
Late Sunday afternoon we happy few headed up to Saluda, NC, to confirm that The Purple Onion Cafe was in fact closed. We enjoyed climbing through pastoral rolling hills heading up to Landrum, SC, then swinging through Tryon, NC, and into the wet green climbing scenery of those first few valleys. To my eye the best part of first hitting those li’l mountains is the lush lawns on the flat spaces where homes and barns are laid out. I’m not a huge fan of lawns, but a rural lawn surrounded by hills is pretty great.
Anyway, that’s just to set the scene for my question, which really is just a rhetorical one. We hung out at the Saluda playground, met this great couple and their kid, just having a good time. George had to go potty, so we sent him off to the bushes, and of course he pulled his pants down to his ankles to do it. When do boys stop pulling their pants all the way down to pee?
A poem by Jorge Luis Borges, then a comment on the total otherness of our world, having to do with space.
The Streets
The streets of Buenos Aires
are my very soul.
Not the grasping streets,
uncomfortable with jostling and noise,
but the unhungry neighborhood streets,
out of habit almost invisible,
made forever out of shade and shadow
and those further out
empty of gentle trees
from where austere little houses hardly venture,
overwhelmed by immortal distances,
losing themselves in the deep vision
of sky and plain.
For the solitary man they are a promise
because thousands of singular souls people them,
unique before God and in time
and without doubt precious.
To the West, the North, and the South
these streets have unfolded–and they too are my own country;
in these lines that I trace
may their flags fly.
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I put that line between the poem and these comments because it’s a fantastic poem, and a lot of wonderful stuff could be said about it, but I’m going to get tangential here. The poem deserves to be separated from the following text, so that The Streets can stand alone.
You could set the poem in places besides Buenos Aires, and still have it work to one degree or another. Certain neighborhoods in New York or Boston, or in the hills of San Francisco. But you can’t see it happening in most of the unfolded streets of America because of how they’re built (he said, ignoring chicken v. egg debates).
I’m not talking about sprawl. The bane of suburbia is not sprawl; that is, it’s not the raw space that it covers.
You’ve heard me complain about the centerlessness of so much of America as it’s built up. But that’s only a secondary problem. I even believe that it’s being counteracted, with the surge in urban renewal/community development and gentrification, as well as the new emphasis on building “town square” shopping centers between or in “neighborhoods,” instead of out on some eight-lane boulevard. The lack of community center isn’t really why Borges’ The Streets can’t be placed in America.
It’s not the built-in isolation of so many of these “communities” either (sorry about all the quotation marks…no, I’m not really sorry). It’s not the one-entrance only into the development (safer that way). It’s not all the cul-de-sacs. It’s not the travesty that is the sidewalkless street.
You want to know what the problem is? It’s the yard. The front yard, to be specific. Did anybody read the poem and picture houses with front yards? You probably didn’t even picture grass on the sides of the homes, separating one lot from the other. I don’t have a problem with backyards, I don’t have a problem with side yards. I have a problem with front yards. The only way you could more clearly tell your neighbors and passers-by that they’re not welcome is to build a tall fence around it. It’s work to have to get through a yard.
It’s one of the reasons I’m glad about the house we plan on closing on next week. The yard’s on the side. There are six feet between the front steps and the street.
The only effective way to combat the front yard effect if you are burdened with one is to have a front porch, and to use it. That way you can call out to your neighbor as he walks by the gentle trees with his dog.
It is American dogma that you ain’t a man unless you own land. It’s deep in our culture. We need to have yards. They symbolize independence. Then again, according to American dogma, we need to be independent, self-sufficient, and captains of our own destinies. We shouldn’t rely on anyone, or even feel obligated to carry the load for others. So…I’m not so sure the roots of the front yard are healthy. The yard doesn’t just symbolize independence, it symbolizes isolation. I think it is a more Christian thing to desire a strong connection to the street.
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P.S. I’m not saying we should build homes like Argentinians. After all, modern soullessness is modern soullessness. It can even be soulless without the front yard. I’m just saying that maybe the Christian architect should cast it aside (especially that aesthetic abomination, the treeless yard) as ugly. Uhg-lay.
Huh. Well, if this is for real, health insurance co-ops could be the way “health care reform” ends up going as the White House is realizing there’s too much opposition to the government’s current plan.
“Co-ops are very prevalent in our society,” Conrad said. “They’ve been a very successful business model.”
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday that the “bottom line” for the president is “choice and competition in the insurance market.”
“The president has thus far sided with the notion that that can best be done through a public option,” Gibbs said.
I just love how the government monopoly would be called an option. You could either choose the government, or choose the businesses who have been regulated to the point of irrelevance or indistinction in relation to the government!
Even though this looks like a face-saving move (“We’re going to lose. Let’s at least propose a plan-B with a word that will make all our far-left friends happy”), I think this is a much more palatable idea.
As proposed by Conrad, the co-ops would receive federal startup money, but then would operate independently of the government. They would have to maintain the same financial reserves that private companies are required to keep to handle unexpectedly high claims.
The co-op thing could work well, if people listen to what this guy has to say at the Wall Street Journal. Turns out John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, has been offering what I think is an innovative and efficient health care plan (involving a co-opy tool, the health care savings plan) for all employees working 30 hours or more a week.
From the FOXNews article documenting the reaction to Mackey’s op-ed,
Whole Foods pays 100 percent of the premiums, but not the deductibles, for all employees who work 30 hours or more per week, or about 89 percent of its workers, and gives each employee $1,800 per year in “health-care dollars” that can be used for health and wellness expenses, according to the article.
Among the recommendations he made: equalizing tax laws for health insurance benefits; repealing all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines; repealing government mandates regarding who they must cover; and enacting tort reform and Medicare reform.
Mackey argued that health care is not a right, noting that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution guarantees it.
Oh, I can only imagine the froth of foamy rage on the lips of so many Whole Foods shoppers as they read a seller of organic earth-friendly foods saying that health care is not a political right! Although Christians like myself and Alton Brown shop there, he and I are just ignorant Southerners. And although Whole Foods is a Southern company, Californians talk about the place like they own it. I just love this! (Although I will grant that Austin, where Whole Foods began, and which is a very cool town, is like a pocket of California in Texas.)
So we’ve got a word (“co-op”) that granola types love, but that in the health care field is used almost exclusively by Christians; and we’ve got a retail operation that is the pride of granola types, but all along has been operating in a way that pisses them off. Oh, how I love the irony.
Supporting co-ops as they start up is a great idea…but it will only be different from what we have now if we can have open competition between all providers of some sort of “medical insurance”. The real problem here is that we have a system that drives prices ever upward, and therefore forces people either to participate in the system or go begging to the government. Until that is somehow dealt with, the oppression of the poor won’t stop. Health care co-ops were part of the solution. Can they be such if they simply become part of a maze of government bureaucracy?
