Our small town held a celebration/ribbon cutting for our newly reconstructed Second Street. The project provides widened sidewalks, new landscaping, and people friendly paths and gathering places.
The mayor spoke. Our city planner spoke. The officials and community leaders who birthed and shepherded the project were honored. The designers and construction crew received awards. The merchants who endured the five-month construction and frequent closing of the street were applauded. Local restaurants provided free food to the neighbors who chatted and celebrated.
Our town of a few square blocks is crammed with a city hall, library, grocery store, liquor stores, post office, three churches, restaurants, book shops, artist studios, medical offices, non profits, a public school, plus residences (single home and multiple), along with other stores and services. It reminds citizens and the tourists who flock here of small town America a century or so ago.
In fact, we are not an early twentieth century village. Current trends wash our shores, too. A business near our town was recently awarded one of the pot shops now allowed by Washington State’s new marijuana laws. We also are considering whether to replace one of our most historic buildings with a modern structure or let it stand, perhaps calling for expensive restoration.
I may agree or not with some of those trends, but that is not the issue here. The issue is how to live successfully in this age, not one of a century ago. If we live in harmony with our neighbors, some of whom we agree with and some of whom we don’t, then we will not only muddle through but enjoy the experience.
It takes a community.
“Back then marriage was two families coming together in a kind of joyous celebration, at least in our case. Nowadays a couple of kids meet at a party and set up housekeeping together. Maybe we didn’t prepare our daughter for that kind of world.”
Give weapons to the moderate forces in Syria? How do we keep the weapons from falling into the hands of the region’s extremists, as may be happening now in Iraq. Once provided, weapons cannot be recalled like peanut butter jars from a factory that we discover has sprouted salmonella.
You may see the term “Tiananmen Square” frequently in the news this next week. A quarter century ago, a movement in that square in Beijing, China, for more democracy, was crushed by authorities in June, 1989. Hundreds of students are estimated to have been killed, perhaps more.
Spring, 1989, had seen the movement in China smothered by the military. However, in November of that same year, the barrier between East and West Germany in Berlin—”the Wall”—fell.
How about our democratic allies? What kind of people do these countries appoint as ambassadors TO the United States? According to a recent study of ambassadors from NATO countries (May 2014 issue of The Foreign Service Journal), not a single one serving at the time was politically appointed.
The characters in Tender Shadows differ in background and purpose and choices. They mirror society in the early twenty-first century. They include the digitally adept and the digitally challenged, the athletic and those who struggle to keep off extra pounds, the confident and the searchers.
Flying in a small plane over one of Saudi Arabia’s deserts in 1991, I read of the first attempt of the old Russian guard to bring back Soviet Russia after Gorbachev’s pivot toward the West. Boris Yeltsin, showing courage he lacked later in bringing true democracy to his country, stared them down and won the day. Russia appeared once more set on the road to what we call Western liberalism.
When circumstances beyond our control and not of our making place us in bad, even horrible situations, we can remember the lessons of Viktor Frankl. Imprisoned in a German concentration camp, at the mercy of those who hated his race, Frankl continued to develop his inner thoughts and ideas. After release from the camp, Frankl expressed those ideas in a book read by millions, Man’s Search for Meaning.
The Nazis came to power in Germany in a society of educated, middle class citizens. An unsuccessful war and economic problems led a significant proportion of the population to look for simple solutions like blaming Jews. Instead they might have examined issues like the world wide recession and its effects on Germany. They might have found a way to deal with the heavy debt placed on the country by the treaty that ended World War I. Instead, they allowed themselves to be caught in the hyper nationalism championed by the Nazis.