Comments on: Prairie Humanism and the Politics of the West

By: Glenn W. Smith

Glenn W. Smith — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:53:21 +0000

Thanks for what you have taught me!

By: The Other Sarah

The Other Sarah — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:48:52 +0000

Thank you for talking about how we really know one another and work together in West Texas.
It’s such a nice change to hear the truth about the people out here.

By: Glenn W. Smith

Glenn W. Smith — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:29:03 +0000

I think the trappings or traps of the contemporary world do separate us, but I don’t think they have to. In a couple of days I will publish a piece on prairie humanism and the icehouses of south Houston, where I spent a great deal of time in my youth. We are shaped, in part, by our surroundings, of course, but we are free to change what our surroundings will make of us.

By: Amerloc

Amerloc — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:09:13 +0000

It feels to me as if in speaking of Marathon you speak of community: of knowing each other well enough to trust, to support, to lend aid; you speak of small places everywhere.

And it feels to me as if the problem comes when we try to translate to cities with huge parking lots and high-rise housing and gated “communities” whose gates only separate us.

By: Glenn W. Smith

Glenn W. Smith — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 04:14:25 +0000

Thanks, Ty. Whatever kindness and optimism might be found at DogCanyon, there’s a good chance you helped teach us where to look for it.

By: Ty Fain

Ty Fain — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 03:37:05 +0000

A lovely tribute to the hometown Kate and I adopted. Over those ten years you have enriched our lives with your visits, your Margie and Katie and those pals who come and play music. Now, with the Dog Canyon you bring kind words and optimism — we need more of that, here and everywhere. Ty

By: Glenn W. Smith

Glenn W. Smith — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:02:34 +0000

I don’t know how we restore our connections to one another as a people…

I guess it’s up to us. It is certainly true that hyper-consumerism (a TV in every room the better to target family members of different ages and genders; class-conscious consumption levels; production of alienation and anxiety as marketing strategies) divides us relentlessly even before the political scapegoating begins. Tough to resist these forces. Tough, but doable. Relationships take people. But we all have them, we all know how. We just need to do it.

By: Sonny Collie

Sonny Collie — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:37:46 +0000

From my Desoto porch it looks like the political divide in America falls between those who succumb to the pernicious and well-funded institution of scapegoating and those who don’t.

I don’t know how we restore our connections to one another as a people without an effective educational effort to explain the mechanics of scapegoating and demagoguery and to shine the light on those who profit by it.

Nobody likes to be used, to be someone else’s tool, but there are a lot of extremely tooled Americans out there right now, and what they need is a convincing way to be shown that this is what is happening to them.

I don’t know how much more time we’ve got to be merely ‘fixin’ to find a way…