Day: March 27, 2016

This morning, music at the Round House, Delaney Hill, a sophomore at Cambridge High School sang. Her mother, Mandy Meyer-Hill, a massage therapist, came to listen and to sit with her towards the end of her performance. I thought the photograph captured some of the feel of community the Round House brings. I wanted to share it with the many good people who have been supporting the Round House gofundme campaign to help Scott and Lisa Carrino buy the building, which is now up for sale.

The Round House gives students and adults a chance to perform their songs and music, something no food franchise would ever do. This evening, the gofundme project passed $20,000 in just a few days. Most of the contributions are for $5 and $10 which is especially meaningful to Scott and Lisa. The Carrinos are seeking $75,000 to help the buy the cafe building, a beautiful and well-located old bank in the center of town.

It is difficult to explain to people that this blog is a community, a new kind of community. We do support one another, we do pay attention. Thanks to all of you for supporting the Round House Cafe.

“Good people,” posted Tilna Bockrath, who donated $50. “Delicious, healthy food locally sourced. A unique, warm atmosphere. Music. Art. It doesn’t get better than that. Rootin’ for you guys.” So are good people from all over the country, and parts of the world.

Cambridge is my town, and the town’s support of the cafe is a powerful thing to see.

Many people here have struggled to find good work, especially if they want to stay here. The American economic system has always created a culture of winners and losers. Right now, the tech workers in Boston and Austin and Silicon Valley and the bankers and hedge fund managers in New York are winners, and many of the people in rural America are labeled as losers, defined as such by economists and politicians, who have no idea what to do with them.

Rural America is considered inefficient – not enough people and cheap workers to compete in the new economy. Politicians never mention them and rarely visit.

Corporations have no interest in rural life, labor is much cheaper in China and Mexico. The problem, everyone agrees, is not the trade agreements, which may be necessary, but the fact that no one in authority has lifted a finger to help and support the traumatized and displaced workers left behind, an outrage and a tragedy that is roiling the political system right now.

The idea that displaced rural and industrial workers – factories and farms left the cities long ago – will somehow magically re-train themselves and find good jobs is simply a way for officials to wash their hands of them, as they have done. If you live in rural America, you know this is wrong.

Our system is based on competition, on some people winning and some losing. Since the economic system embraced by America has largely abandoned farmers and rural life as inefficient and unable to compete in the modern world, many people there have lost. In this system, there are no limits. Costs are lowered at any cost, and profits are raised at any cost. The toll on humans is no longer considered a factor in political or corporate decisions.

Our economic system does not pause or hesitate at the destruction of the life of a worker or a family or the life of a community. Every business decision is meant to choose winners and losers. In the unlimited competition between buyer and buyer, seller and seller, neighbor and neighbor, every transaction is intended to have a winner and a loser. No one is spared.

Economists concede that destruction of life and community is both inevitable and acceptable as a part of the daily business of economic competition as practiced today, as farmers and many rural workers and families know all too well.

My town is challenging this understanding. Here, we still know what people are for.

We have a thriving independent bookstore, intensely supported by all elements in our small town of 2,000 people. We have an arts and education center – Hubbard Hall – that has preserved a more than century old vaudeville house, which sits right next to the Round House cafe, which offers arts education and legitimate theater. And the town is now fighting to keep our cafe, a prime gathering spot and a center of community.

We have lost much – our old Cambridge Hotel, where apple pie was first served, now an assisted care facility; our small community hospital, a center of work and life here; and our independent pharmacy. We have lost a number of employers as well, they have moved overseas.

Enough is enough.

We are working hard to keep our cafe. If you wish, you can support the idea of community by going here and contributing what you can. $5 or $10 is appreciated every bit as much as $1,000. That’s the wonder of crowdsourcing. It is a new and democratic way for people decide which causes they choose to support. Or not. Ordinary people can affect great change in the world. If we can do it here, you can do it there.

I took a nap Sunday afternoon, the day was warm and I was sleepy. I don’t know how long I slept but I had this dream that I was running out to the pasture with the sheep. I came awake, and I was looking straight into the Pirate Eye, Fate’s unmistakable look when she wants to play or go out to work, which is almost always.  Once in awhile she will just hop up onto my chest and stare at me, but usually she creeps up to the foot of my chair and turns the Pirate Eye on me.

I swear she put that dream right into my head, I absolutely believe it, I do not ever dream of running out to the pasture. We are heading out there shortly. The Pirate Eye is strong in Fate, like the force.

Happy Easter, good people, I thank you and love you for being part of this community, for following my life and caring about it, for supporting my work, for sharing your stories of life with me.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was my favorite writer, said that we are not born only once, when our mothers give birth to us, but life requires us to give rebirth to ourselves again and again. I believe these are true and prescient words, I believe my life is marked by rebirth and resurrection, I honor both on this holiday.

It is perhaps strange for a man born Jewish and turned Quaker to talk of resurrection, but I have always admired the true work and beliefs of Jesus Christ and his life has always inspired me to never give up on life, to never stop trying to understand what it means to be good, to never stop praying for the poor to have hope, to never abandon my belief in the goodness of human beings.

In our world, we are called upon every day to choose between hatred and anger, cruelty and judgment, or empathy, good will and faith and compassion. For me, faith is not about being cruel or angry, it is about finding out better spirits and letting them live.  On this day, of all days, I renew my vows to love, understanding and the struggle to learn and practice what it really means to be a human being. We, alone among all of the creatures on the earth, can choose to be better. I am working on it.

That is what this day means for me.

Love, said God in the Kabbalah, is the purpose, it is the point of life. I never stopped looking for love, and my wish for all of you on this Easter Day is that you find love, follow your adventure, that you put your lips to the world, and live  your life.

“A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare
to the jeweled vision of a life started anew.”   – Aberjhani, Quotations From A Life Made Out of Poetry.
 

Happy Easter, peace and compassion to you.

They came into the cafe all day, some with checks, some with envelopes, some with handshakes, a few with tears. They kept pressing  money into Scott Carrino’s busy hands. Some did not have computers, had never been on Facebook.

As tens of thousands of farms and small local businesses of all kinds in rural communities all over America falter and perish under the effects of glutinous economic policies and cruel, political realities, as economists sit in their academic offices and politicians drink the corporate trough, my small and very special town of Cambridge, N.Y. is launching its own revolution, fighting to turn the tide and save its local cafe from the  deprivations of new global economy.

And people from all over the country, and some parts of the world,  have joined in this stirring cause. A new awakening, using the new technology. It isn’t just for discount sales and discounts, it seems. People can use it also, to help one another, to speak to one another.

“Good Luck with your fund raising!,” wrote Victoria Paschisch as she donated $30, “It’s for a good cause – small businesses supporting small communities and small communities supporting small businesses!” And community supporting community.

Good people from everywhere have contributed more than $18,000 towards a fund helping Scott and Lisa Carrino buy the building in which their wonderful cafe lives. Their landlord has put it up for sale. It could be sold to anyone.

. There is already one food franchise in our town, a Subway, and only one cafe. You can do the math for yourself, if you want to know what it will mean to our town if the cafe has no home. Scott and Lisa Carrino are asking for help so they can buy their building, be secure and keep their cafe going.

It is the soul of our community. Here, we meet one another, we see one another, we know one another.

One man, still recovering from a serious illness, walked into the cafe yesterday with a check for $1,000. A dairy farmer took $50 from the family’s “vacation” jar and gave it to me to give to Scott.

Contributions came from California, Canada, Utah, Louisiana, North Carolina, all over New England, Ohio, England, Australia, Michigan, North Dakota, Florida and Texas, among other places.

Scott called me and said one person had messaged him to wonder why he wasn’t asking a bank for money instead. “Why should I give?,” he asked.

Scott is a sweet man, and he thought it a fair question, he wanted to answer the man and asked for advice about what to say. I said he ought to tell him that it isn’t quite so simple. If the banks would have given him the money, he would have happily taken it. But the banks are the problem, not the solution. Banks have put people out of work, taken their homes, shut down their farms, ruined their businesses all over America, and gone unpunished.

The banks are not here to preserve our local community. They are the system that designs the new economy.

We need to help one another. And we have few other choices.

Every farmer or person who lives in rural America understands this story, knows the meaning of  community, and the devastating consequences of its destruction.

No presidential candidate of either party has yet to mention the agony of the small farmer, or the ruined landscape of rural life. The people who live in the rural communities that built America have little money to give the Washington politicians compared to the billionaires and corporations who lobby them and contribute to their campaigns and control the lawmakers. If they are going to fight to preserve their communities, they will have to do it by themselves.

Rural communities are voiceless, caught in the wake of the new globalism. The people sending Scott and Lisa Carrino $5 and $10 to their gofundme site know this, they don’t have to be told or persuaded. They only have to look out their windows, at their own Main Streets, at the empty farms and devastated towns.

Some people do have to be told.

In America, people are so busy hating everyone they disagree with that they have forgotten who to hate or how to do it in a civil and meaningful way.

As the farmers go under, as rural communities lose their pharmacies,their jobs, their hospitals and culture, as their children flee to cities for bad jobs working for people who care nothing for them, as rural America lives in the shadow of free markets, emerging economies, competitive labor markets, as towns and villages everywhere lose their economic supports and local institutions, the economists and politicians tell the reporters that there will always be some winners and losers, that is the price we pay for progress.

Things will sort themselves out over time. That, they say, justifies all of the suffering and loss, all the mistakes that can never be undone, all the ruined land and shattered communities. We know what profits are for, but what are people for?

The author and environmentalist and poet Wendell Berry writes that it seems in recent years that we have been reduced to a state of “absolute economics,” in which people and the land and all other creatures and things may be considered only as data, as economic “units,” in which a human being may be dealt with only as a “covetous machine.”  Our national religion has become profit, gained by any means, at all costs.

Human beings exist only to buttress the bottom line, their lives  and dreams do not matter.

All of this destructive work of mindless genius, greed and power is perhaps unfortunate, but it cannot be helped, they tell us. Progress is progress. And profits are sacred, nothing takes precedence over them.

But Scott and Lisa Carrino, who have devoted their lives to the idea of community, are here to show us that it can be helped. It just isn’t easy, and it is never cheap.

The defenders of the new economic order have no comfort or wisdom for the new losers, the rural people the politicians and CEO’s and economists have no idea what to do with. The new losers simply accumulate, especially in rural communities, earmarked to be human dumps, the inevitable waste and casualties in the greedy corporate nation. The idea seems to be that the displaced and the dispossessed should somehow get retrained, or move, or reinvent themselves after they are tossed into the streets, often at the age of 50 and up.

And then everybody says tsk, tsk, and wonders why people are so angry.

So our idea here is that the Round House Cafe should not be displaced, or that Lisa and Scott ought not to be retrained or wait in the growing and disheartening queue for meaningful and sustainable work. Our community should not be discarded and asked to quietly to off into the good night.

I would tell the man who messaged Scott to either contribute to the campaign or do something else with his money, that is his right. Meanwhile, in our town we are grateful for the many people who understand and are trying to start telling a new and different story for community. If we can do it here, you can do it there. If you are so inclined, please help this good effort by going here.

This revolution is underway.