"lumbering our minds with literature..."

"Somewhere between prayer and revolution....:"

"This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes...I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning. This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning and the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all around her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which overwhelms her." -Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House







Friday, August 5, 2011

No Solutions

I haven't posted in awhile, but I somehow always want to blog when I am supposed to be actually writing my dissertation. I wrote a pretty big section today, though, so I think I will take a break!

When we were driving home on Tuesday, we saw a middle-aged man in a nice car who obviously was looking for a prostitute. He pulled over on Martin, right next to Sullivant, and without thinking I pulled over right behind him. He swerved out and kept driving, but by the time we circled around he had a woman in his car. So we followed him back to Bellows until he finally pulled over to let us pass. We looked him in the eye as we drove by. He was laughing. I couldn't see the expression on the woman's face.

I am not sure what we were trying to accomplish by following him. I didn't want him to get out of the car and talk to us. I really didn't want to start a fight and I knew he was still going to pick up a sex worker that afternoon whether we followed him or not. I guess we wanted him to know that someone was watching him and maybe make him a little nervous. I don't know why he was laughing, but I can't stop thinking about it.

We just finished a powerful conflict resolution class taught by our friend Kyle. A lot of it took place in the spring when I was too emotionally drained to attend a lot of the classes. I wish I made it to more. The conversations I remember most are the ones we had about sex work in our community. I feel so violent just thinking about the abuses to women in our neighborhood that it is hard to imagine a peaceful solution. Or any solution at all.

On a happier note, the goats seem to be doing well! We are getting them fixed up in the backyard. This weekend we need to fence off our house because they love nibbling on the shingles! When Jane Addams first became socially conscious she got a herd of sheep hoping to become more connected to the land. Unfortunately, she didn't know anything about sheet and they all got hoof rot. I am trying to make sure that that doesn't happen! I still have a lot of reading to do, but I have at least figured out how to trim their hooves. De-worming them has been more of a challenge, but it has been a good experience so far!

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