Our topics include an update on trying to get the health care and dental care we need, unmasking to get a driver license photo taken, trying to finish Math Academy’s Foundations II class with poor concentration and bad eyes, dealing with young children (still) after 25 years, the ongoing state of emergency which has become our new normal, our new kakistocracy, Paul’s comments on the five-book Lockwood & Co. series by Jonathan Stroud, our new library acquisitions: anthologies of stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, Grace’s trip to Steubenville, and some background information on the town and the Festival of Friendship. We briefly discuss the poet Ewa Chrusciel and her book Yours, Purple Gallinule.Then, Grace read her keynote address, called "In the Vacant Places, We Will Rebuild with New Bricks.". Here’s our whole conversation:
If you’d like to listen only to Grace reading her keynote address, play the following file:
The text of Grace’s talk follows.
I’m going to start with a few lines by T. S. Eliot, lifted from “Choruses from ‘The Rock.’”
Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen:
In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
There is work together
Those words were published in 1934, and they are absolutely prescient for the moment we find ourselves in, more than 90 years later. And how inspiring is it to have this insight ‘time-travel’ to us? Remarkable really. Yet, sadly — how should I say this? Well… I have good news, and I have bad news. Let’s just get the bad news out of the way: all of our work is destined for failure and brokenness. All of it. Please, don’t kid yourself. But the good news is that failure happens every winter, and is followed by the opportunity of spring. The good news is that failure is necessary — it is the path to springtime, to summer, and the harvest. Right? There’s no way out but through. The good news is… all that is broken, can be redeemed; never ever the same, but redeemed. And it is our privilege to participate in that redemption.
But what, exactly, does that participation look like? I think that can be a bit nuanced and maybe hard to describe plainly. So. I have a story. I don’t tell short stories — so stay with me. I am the seventh of nine children. Five older brothers in stair-steps, a sibling that died in infancy, me, and then a younger brother and sister. When my older brothers were in elementary/middle school-ish they had a game they absolutely LOVED after school. We lived in one of those center hall colonials, right? Is that an East coast thing? Do you have those out here? It had this center entrance hall, rooms to either side, and the kitchen in back. But if you opened all the doors between the rooms — there was this loop, like this race track, on the wood floors with socks. And they would run — hard — until they were exhausted, and then collapse on the couch until dinner. It was grand. Until one day, brother number four, thought that he might beat brother number three this time, and in his haste, he slipped and went flying. Leaving a hole, the size of a nine year old’s bottom in the wall. My mother came in — horrified — and shouted “Oh my G*d!” (she didn’t say that, I’m not repeating what she said here.) “You rascals just wait until your father comes home!” And so my dad comes home, he looks at the hole, and then he just walks outside. He stands out there for like ten full minutes. When he comes back in, he just picks up the phone, and he calls a guy. Then we have dinner. NO ONE DISCUSSES IT. The next day, guy comes over, he fixes the hole, my brothers are angels, they clean up, set the table, help without being asked — the whole bit. You know? Dad comes home, he sees the fix, admires it. He asks how much, the guy is sending a bill, the boys promise to be less rowdy. All is well. So the very next day, brother number two, thinks that maybe he’s faster than brother number one, and if just the two of them race, it will be less rowdy than all five of them, so they can settle this once and for all, AND, maintain their sincere commitment to reduced rowdiness. So brother number two, trips on number three. He goes flying. Into the same wall. Leaving a hole the size of a thirteen year old’s bottom. And friends, let me tell you, that was the day — we became a “play outside until dinner family.” Rain or shine. Hot or cold. Did you know it was my mom that coined the phrase “There’s no bad weather, only bad gear, put your snow pants on?” I think people only use the first part now, but that? That was her.
While it’s funny — no brothers were injured in this story, just to be clear — that event changed so much about our family. We didn’t live in a center hall colonial again until my youngest sibling was nine. And personally? I practically lived in the woods as a child. But the fact is, every community has events that change their trajectory.
My husband and I started a Catholic Worker (CW) house in Saginaw, MI in 2010. While you may not know Saginaw’s particular story- everyone in the manufacturing belt knows this story. General Motors (GM) once employed fifty thousand people — half the population — at a foundry on the river in Saginaw. By 2010, GM employed five thousand people at that foundry, leaving a hole the size of forty-five thousand people in the city. And I’m sure you understand, a hole that size is not just those individuals, but the pharmacies, grocery stores, diners, and schools that they used. All of those local businesses and resources… just gone. A hole that size… is so many vacant lots. When we entered the conversation, the City was trying to call a guy to patch the hole, and they really didn’t want to discuss it. Community members had a nickname for the guy they were trying to call: GM Jesus. The idea was some manufacturing business, somewhere — in response to enough compensation in tax breaks — was going to come out of the clear blue sky, like Jesus himself, and patch the hole in the city with forty-five thousand new jobs. The city just needed to get the compensation right. The concept was ridiculous on it’s face, even if framed in more flattering terms. But like my father — all the City could envision was the restoration of what was in the hole. It literally did not occur to them to change the fundamental dynamics that caused the hole in the first place.
A few years into our time there, I made acquaintance with Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns. And in 2013, he was passing through for a different talk, and stopped to talk to us. I and several other community members attended a hastily organized event, and learned a new perspective on how we might participate in redeeming Saginaw. Possibly the greatest insight for us was realizing that what had become of our place — happened in a specific context with specific incentives that led us to where we were in that moment. And because of those factors: there was really no going back to what was. The context was the offshoring of US manufacturing. The incentive… was to enrich the haves that were in privileged positions to benefit from extending public money to their own connections. They’d already had a false start on the enterprise in the 90’s/early 2000’s, by luring a second tier auto supplier to town — and while the haves came out of that deal okay — the city, after ten years, had lost more jobs than the supplier had brought. Which reminds me of the second incentive fueling the city’s drive to find “GM Jesus” — they were desperate not to have the population fall below fifty thousand. Falling below that threshold would make the city ineligible for a tier of federal funding reserved for “large cities.” But now if we fast forward in time, and look at the seeds scattered in that talk in 2013 — and I say scattered intentionally; nothing was planted and cultivated, the ideas were truly just scattered through the community — if we look now, we can see how those seeds found fertile ground and took root. The focus has shifted from growing the city to reclaim its former glory, to creating a wonderful place for the forty-seven thousand people that actually live there, and keep the street lights on, and the water treatment plant running.
Ultimately what Saginaw — and my parents — came to understand, was that repairing what was broken is less about restoration in itself. Fully participating in repair is about seeing how things have to be different now, in light of what’s happened. And Mr. Eliot says it so plainly, that it’s easy to miss: In the vacant places, we will build (not restore) with new (not old, not replacement) bricks; reading further in that same passage, it might be stones (something else altogether) and not bricks at all.
After all these abstractions and metaphors, you may ask yourself, “…but what does creating a wonderful place for forty-seven thousand people actually look like, in material reality?” Let me tell you. The Saginaw community had a wonderful farmer’s market open six hours a day, four days a week. But they decided to take that a step further. They negotiated a deal for a vacant industrial office building downtown. Then fully renovated the parking lot into a permanently covered, outdoor seasonal farmers’s market. The inside, became a year round farm market, food court, and small business incubator. There’s even a ballroom community space. My children go to cons there — you, know — like a comic con? They’re literally hosting regional comic cons now. Still open four days a week, but year-round and people work eight hour days there now — alongside, and in service to their neighbors. And right now the community is working on renovating their train station, literally with volunteers. Volunteers that aren’t reclaiming bricks are petitioning the DOT to reestablish passenger rail to the city — for tourism. They recently completed work on what is the second largest mural in the United States. They salvaged neon signs from the city’s demolished buildings and created a public, outdoor sign park in collaboration with the County Museum.
Now as wonderful as these initiatives are we need to keep in mind the acceptance of failure from the start. Embrace it, even. What is that clip from the internet? “I am shocked to discover that the process of trial and error, involves error.” When the folks that created the Saginaw with a population of 100 thousand, made that place, there was no consideration of a day when there was no GM. Because before GM, there were beans [at one point — Saginaw, Michigan was the bean capital of the world, I’m not even kidding], and before that — lumber. They worked with what they had, where they were, with the people and the place around them. Part of the stalling out after the reality of GM leaving and nothing filling its place — was the expectation that the project that had worked for so long… would somehow, just keep working. But in fact — it was time to learn the lessons from that season, and start anew. There will come a day when that beautiful farmer’s market fails — it will somehow, no longer be able to meet the community’s needs in the time and the context that it finds itself. Maybe the train station project will never work, and they’ll just need to cut their losses and move on. The day of failure might come sooner, and it might come later. But it will come, and that doesn’t mean anyone did anything “wrong” in the time and context where it flourished. Even if that time and context was brief the effort wasn’t wasted — the community that coalesced in the effort is what nourished the people in it.
The thing is, in a kinda secret way, the failures themselves are the good news. But full disclosure — and I want to be completely clear about this part — those failures are going to feel like failures, and it won’t feel like a good day. For those here that profess the Christian faith, we know that there is no Easter, without Good Friday; and that reality applies to every part of our lives and everything that we do.
In what might be his most famous quote, T. S. Eliot cautions that “Humankind can’t bear very much reality.” But we can bear some. And the reality we must bear, is that we can’t even make failed attempts without each other. Later on in “The Choruses” Mr. Eliot asks:
What life have you, if you have not life together?
There is not life that is not in community
We have to — all of us — learn how to eat a slice of humble pie, and be grateful for it, if we want to live in community. We also have to learn either up front, or the hard way, that inclusion means everyone. So I’ve talked a bit about not dwelling on the restoration of the past, instead accepting — even embracing — failure and grounding your actions in the realities of the present. But that is not in any way to say, that we should disregard the past, and pretend that we are working on a tabula rasa.
Many years ago I taught a class on collaborative strategic planning, using a tool called Future Search. It’s an incredibly effective method. I was a good hour into a ninety minute class, and a woman shot her hand up and said:
“Wait a minute. So if I want to shut down the pipeline in my community — I need to include $hell in the planning?!?”
I said: “You want to get rid of it, right?”
“Yes!”
“Shut it off, and it never comes back on?”
“Obviously.”
“That is never going to happen if $hell is not a part of the conversation.”
Now what does happen when clear stakeholders are excluded, is that everyone gets on a treadmill, has a great workout, and goes nowhere. And certainly, $hell is an unimaginably powerful stakeholder, but this isn’t just true of the powerful stakeholders. You can’t meet just ends without the most vulnerable stakeholders either. One of the founders of the DC Catholic Worker (CW) house, more than 40 years ago, told the story of making pots of soup for homeless men sleeping over the heating grates near the entrance to his apartment. After doing this several times, the largest of the men, confronted him, and poured the soup over his head. The large man said, “We’re not your pets. You set food and bowls out here on the side walk like we’re stray dogs. Do you know if we can even eat this food (allergies)?” It was in that moment that our nascent CW discovered he was not getting anywhere on his treadmill.
In essence — going anywhere and accomplishing anything as a community, means taking the journey there as a community. And every community has a past: past successes and disappointments, past grievances and friendships, past investments waiting to be realized, and past debts waiting to be paid. We can only ignore the past at our own peril. Recognizing the past, reveals the clearest path forward, and the roadblocks that have to be removed to get anywhere at all. In a genuine community, even the individuals you don’t like belong there. Please don’t mistake that for letting the powerful and the bullies have their way. It is not. It means discerning just ends — or reasons — for having a community, and then meeting those ends for everyone in the community. If one of your ends is that everyone governed by the town has safe access to town hall, maybe you build a protected walkway to town hall, and make certain it is accessible to everyone — even the powerful and the bullies, but especially to vulnerable people. In community, everyone is a stakeholder. Wherever you’re going, the only way there is together.
In closing — let’s look again to Mr. Eliot’s wisdom, this time from “Little Gidding.” What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
Thank you.
Here is a direct link to the MP3 file, which should work with most browsers.
And here is a direct link to the MP3 file of Grace’s keynote address.
The Podcast feed is here.
This episode is also on YouTube here. It is audio-only. Note that because I often use brief clips of copyrighted music, YouTube may insert ads or block viewing in some locations (for example, some episodes can’t be viewed in Cuba). Even if a video can be played now, there is no guarantee YouTube won’t change these permissions in the future.
The Podcast episodes playlist on YouTube, which should show all available episodes, is here.
The Grace and Paul Pottscast Archive Index
Grace and I have a long chat about this and that. First, food: Purim treats; a strategy for making virus-safe yogurt; building your food stash. Then, reading: we’re reading The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin together. Paul discusses other books he’s been reading, including: the Lockwood & Co. series by Jonathan Stroud, Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny, Goliath by Max Blumenthal, and others. We give a special shout-out to Detroit Specials Used Books. Finally, we discuss the very long, tedious, and frustrating process of trying to safely get health care from a medical practice that won’t take either precautions or accountability.
I’d like to recommend Detroit Specials Used Books.
I mentioned the following books and authors:
Due to misfiring synapses and numerous interruptions by Potts children while we were recording, I was not able to bring to mind the name of writer Simon R. Green, but I want to mention him here, as I intended to bring up his work when I discussed the Lockwood & Co. series. I enjoyed all twelve Nightside novels, also “low fantasy,” and the first few of his Secret History novels, but particularly relevant to this discussion are his Ghost Finders books that follow a team from the Carnacki Institute as they battle supernatural incursions in the present day. That said, be aware that I don’t consider Green’s writing to be very good; I had to give up on the Ghost Finders books after the second. But I do appreciate the way his works make frequent references to the works of others!
Here is a direct link to the MP3 file, which should work with most browsers.
The Podcast feed is here.
This episode is also on YouTube here. It is audio-only. Note that because I often use brief clips of copyrighted music, YouTube may insert ads or block viewing in some locations (for example, some episodes can’t be viewed in Cuba). Even if a video can be played now, there is no guarantee YouTube won’t change these permissions in the future.
The Podcast episodes playlist on YouTube, which should show all available episodes, is here.
The Grace and Paul Pottscast Archive Index
Grace and I have a long and rambling conversation. Topics: how we accidentally wound up with 450 pounds of Hubbard Squash; becoming better prepared for disruptions in the availability of foods; the state of infectious diseases and the public health response; DOGE and the biggest conflict of interest in history.
Here is a direct link to the MP3 file, which should work with most browsers.
The Podcast feed is here.
This episode is also on YouTube here. It is audio-only. Note that because I often use brief clips of copyrighted music, YouTube may insert ads or block viewing in some locations (for example, some episodes can’t be viewed in Cuba). Even if a video can be played now, there is no guarantee YouTube won’t change these permissions in the future.
The Podcast episodes playlist on YouTube, which should show all available episodes, is here.