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Kiko Denzer's avatar

I just spent two months working with a 20 year old who had abandoned his smart phone because it was impinging on his time and his ability to focus. Within himself, he seemed to have found something larger, something that he couldn't access thru the phone or with his peers. He continues to seek that larger thing, by himself, and with others — when they're not on their phones, or otherwise consumed by all that would distract them from the larger thing inside themselves — which is why he loves singing in a choir, because the goal is a harmony that none can acheive by themselves, and that is bigger, even, than the group.

Harmony contains both "good" and "evil" — tho we may never understand the boundaries that separate one from the other. How can we define what we cannot see or know? We can’t get to that place of harmony by ourselves. Neither can a group of us force anyone to go there. It's a mystery.

Here’s a lovely line from Richard Wagamese’s lovely movie (from his book), Indian Horse:

"Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. It is the foundation of humility and humility is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel it. We honor it by letting it be that way forever."

It seems to me we can’t unravel good from evil. But we can seek to live in the mystery, cultivate humility, learn to make compost, love the humus that results, and go deeper into the mysteries of life, death, and fertility.

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BeardTree's avatar

I am a fan of Distributism, the approach that power, ownership, social and government structures is to be “distributed” into small, local units and the consolidation of these things is to be guarded against. G.K. Chesterton quipped “The problem with capitalism is not there are too many capitalists, but there are too few”. Of course individual smaller units can go wrong, but the damage is limited and the answer doesn’t lie in erecting superstructures to make a perfect world where nothing goes wrong.

I was raised in the last days of an intact small town, small business, family based agrarian Midwestern culture in rural Wisconsin. Order was maintained through shared expectations of honesty, responsibility and civility and working things out privately with very little need for legal intervention. There was a interconnected matrix of friendships, families, business relationships, broad based involvement in township and village self government, school boards, volunteer fire departments. You knew those in those positions or knew someone who did. There was also an array of private organizations, churches, clubs, volunteer service opportunities. It was a diverse stable ecosystem with many small components. My mother volunteered for Meals on Wheels for shut ins and was in the same Homemaker’s Club for 50 years. Neighbors helped each other out in crisis. It wasn’t utopian perfection, human conflicts, problems, and unhappiness occurred, but it was safe, crime was unheard of, no locked doors anywhere in homes and cars. My parents in their retirement would winter in Texas and their house would sit there on the farm unlocked for two months with my brother coming by occasionally to check on things.

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