Culture

Trick or Treat, Baby

Halloween Part II Halloween as well.  Another reason is that my neighborhood is generally considered “safe,” despite the random assortment of lowlifes and hoodlums that back in the `70s we would’ve referred to as “hustlers, pimps, and pushers.”  So part of it is just circumstantial.  But a lot of it is that most of the neighborhoods and suburbs where some of these kids are coming from, be they modest and urban or well-to-do and tree-lined, aren’t pulling it off; the black kids are the obvious munchkin migrants, but there are plenty of white kids visiting too.  In other words, my neighborhood is a magnet for these kids because it’s one of the few places around the area where trick or treating is still a viable and thriving activity.  How many times are you going to watch your kid pound on a door and get no response before you realize this place just ain’t happenin’?

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Little Tax Collectors

Halloween Part I think.  But more and more, that’s only what Halloween was.  Why is what I just described a very real thing where I live, but not something that happens in a lot of other places?  Why are children flocking to my neighborhood to trick or treat instead of raiding their own neighbors for sweet treasures?  Why do many children trick or treat by car instead of walking from house to house?  And what does trick or treating (or the lack thereof) say about community (or the lack thereof)? I wouldn’t go so far as to call my Baltimore neighborhood a full-on community.  With a population approaching 20,000, most people here are strangers to each other.  And there is also an obvious lack of binding social institutions that connect people in meaningful ways.

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Gardens Recur

Jane relates: Downtown stores are locally owned. Book stores, coffee shops, hubs where folks gather and exchange information. (Starbucks moved into a space downtown last year.  Missoula did not support it and so, at the end of this month, they were forced to close their doors.) The majority of citizens care about keeping the ‘local flavor’ in tact. Why? Because we are family. There is a bike trail system throughout, and a place called “free bikes” if you don’t have one. People who are just moving to Missoula learn very quickly that a bicycle is the preferred form of transportation.  Less dependence on fuel. Less pollution. Less stress. Easy pace. In Missoula people care about quality of life, about creating a place where children learn the

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Q:6 For Columbus Day

Q: You are an expert on Native American history and culture, particularly the Lakotas of the Northern Plains.  Are there any correlations between the disintegration of Indigenous American communities and community at large? Reinhardt: Many of the Europeans who came to, conquered, and settled the Americas in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries brought with them some very heavy cultural baggage. as in they believed Indian religions to be the work of the Devil Himself.  And on more secular issues, they simply considered anything that Indians did differently to be a sign of savagery and inferiority.  No matter that in certain areas, such as agronomy and astronomy, Native Americans were light years ahead of Europeans.  For example, when Europeans were still arguing about whether the Sun circled the Earth or the Earth circled the Sun, Indians of Central America were intricately charting the movements of heavenly bodies, and they had developed a combination lunar/solar calendar that was more accurate than the Gregorian calendar that Europeans developed and the rest of the world now uses.  For many Europeans, the ethnocentric bias was so strong that it was blinding. As Europeans and their descendants competed with Indians for control of the Western hemisphere, that competition reinforced such biases.  And so in many cases, and always in what was to become the United States, it wasn’t enough to take Indians’ lands and destroy their governments.  Beyond that, cultural genocide had also become a goal by the mid- to late-19th century, and it remained a central part of federal Indian policies until the 1930s. 

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The End of a Tether

In this article, author Malcolm Gladwell makes the point that online social networking facilitate them, Gladwell might be splitting hairs.   Of course the protesters at Greensboro did not have computers or cell phones to help generate national interest.  But their efforts certainly benefited from coverage in newspapers, radio, television, and of course word of mouth from good `ole rotary telephones.  People may not have been able to tweet, but they could certainly pick up the phone and dial, as annoyingly laborious as that might seem to people today.  In other words, social movements and communications technology are not the same thing, and though they might overlap and at times serve each other’s purpose, it’s important not to confuse them. At the end of the day Facebook, Twitter, blogs both micro and macro, IM’s and text

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