Thursday, July 24, 2008

Second Line Parade: A Culture of Philanthropy

This Sunday, as part of our 8th annual Deer Isle Jazz Festival with its special, expanded focus on New Orleans, we are hosting a traditional "second line" parade through downtown Stonington, along our working waterfront.

New Orleans' "second lines"--the dancers and celebrants who followed the mourners and brass bands in traditional New Orleans' funeral parades--are themselves the creatures of an important and unique part of New Orleans' culture: the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs.

These neighborhood clubs are one of the engines that, pre-Katrina, gave New Orleans a uniquely African and community-based culture. As new development and regulations threaten their second line parades and other traditions, these organizations--and the unique jazz culture they support--are under siege.

The African tribal customs that landed in New Orleans as both a slave port and an important place where slaves could win their freedom (in what is today Congo Square) rested on the belief that a productive tribal member was a valued part of the tribe. In times of need or death, that member's family was taken care of. Because everything that tribal member did was for the care and benefit, not just of an individual family, but of the entire tribe. If a member killed an antelope, he or she would divide up the carcass so each tribal member could share. Members shared in the building of huts, or the digging of shallow rock shelters, rituals, and the defense of the tribe and more.

In New Orleans in the late 18th century, these social customs evolved among freed slaves into the first of the social aid and pleasure clubs, created to provide burial, funeral, and even crafts training services for the African-American community. The clubs are based on the principle originally taught in Africa: of coming together, especially in times of need, for the collective good.

Here in coastal New England, we have churches and secular organizations--the Rebekahs, the Odd Fellows, the Masons, etc.--who take on many of the same functions. When someone is lost in a fishing accident, or injured in a car accident, we host bean suppers and post collection jars at the cash registers of local businesses.

New Orleans' social aid and pleasure clubs, and the musicians of the brass bands at the heart of their second line parades, are now at the forefront of trying to sustain traditional New Orleans' culture post-Katrina. In many ways for coastal Mainers, too, it is time to dig deep into our cultural traditions for the strength needed to collectively sustain communities whose unique legacies are under seige by money and development.

On this Sunday, July 27, at noon we'll have a chance to join forces--the Lobster Crackers' Social Aid & Pleasure Club, lead by New Orleans' Own Hot 8 Brass Band--and parade down Main Street and out onto the commerical fish pier, experiencing the rich tradition, power and celebration of a second line parade.

Art, Entertainment, and Outrage

All during this bright and shiny summer of recession and war, careening toward presidential conventions, I've been wondering: where is the outrage?

Then I saw the new Pixar/Disney, G rated animated film WALL-E.

And there was the outrage, packaged into a little trash compacting robot on a planet ruined by overconsuming humans and displayed for the eyes of the world, and especially children, to see.

Well done, Andrew Stanton (WALL-E's animator)--even if on national radio you did for some reason believe you had to maintain a division between art and politics, and deny any deeper motivations for your story crafting.

It's about time our kids--and us along with them--understand it is perfectly OK, indeed the RIGHT THING, to feel uncomfortable with the world around us: to be disturbed and, yes, outraged. After all, we've got a president and government that have driven our economy into ruin via policies that support and promote overconsumption--whether of oil or of bonus checks. These decisions are so defiant in their blatant self-servingness that I'm still not sure why we aren't all marching on Washington, D.C., and burning something every day.

I guess it is because, well, we are all too comfortable. And our entertainment system is geared, for the most part, to keep us that way. So that when we have a choice, in a community theater company, to choose between producing "Carousel," with its dark story of male-female relations, and something that simply makes us happy--we'll choose the latter. I can't tell you the number of times people have tried to dissaude us from producing a piece of theater or booking a film because, "It just isn't HAPPY." Yep. Right.

But not WALL-E. We had one smart and sensitive seven year old in the audience dissolve into tears and run from the theater the night we opened it. The vision it paints of our future is indeed grim, and that's a picture we don't want to look at. Because to really sit with the discomfort this movie--which, as 20th century Holocaust philosopher Hannah Arendt perceptively wrote mid-century, is more culture than entertainment--creates means we need to get off our theater seats and really make some change.

And real change is possibly even more difficult, more time consuming, to create than, well, real culture.

Leaving us all very uncomfortable indeed.

Monday, May 12, 2008

People Conservation

We’re all familiar with conservation: more people are trying to conserve energy and other natural resources; we work to conserve our fisheries and other wild species; we conserve land and the environment. Yet rarely do we apply the idea of conservation to people; and it’s critical to our island community that we do.
The appearance of Martha’s Vineyard-based small business entrepreneur and author John Abrams in our community this coming weekend (see schedule below) gives us a chance to really think about what people conservation means.

As John writes in his book, The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place, “A community consists of a place and those who have a relationship with that place: the land and the people.” The beauty and desirability of our island, like the Vineyard, is responsible for several crises that are causing significant loss to and out-migration of the people who are the backbone of what makes this community work. These crises include: unnaturally inflated property valuations, supported by second-home owner incomes not attainable in coastal Maine, and the inevitable results of inflated valuations: an increased property tax burden on year round property owners; a decrease in state subsidy to our public schools; and a corresponding lack of affordable housing.

These economic shifts, left to their own devices without appropriate community/governmental action over many years, in turn accelerate the transition of work and career opportunities from year round, independently owned small businesses to seasonal, service sector work.

People conservation—community-based actions to ensure that the people who belong on and love this island are able to afford to stay here—is critically needed on Deer Isle. Without year round residents with the education, good jobs, and desire to maintain the independent spirit of Deer Isle—it’s just another pretty place.
What these actions are need to be decided together, as a community. The creation of affordable housing; more diverse year-round jobs; and educational and creative lifestyle opportunities that maintain and attract young residents are all necessary. How are we and can we actively promote such initiatives, and others?

Want to be a part of the answers to this question? The Stonington Economic Development Committee, sponsors of John’s appearance on the island this weekend, invites you and hopes you will attend the community action planning session with John and others Saturday, May 17, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the second floor of the Stonington Town Hall. Let’s start talking, and acting on, people conservation.

John Abrams will appear Friday, May 16 at 7 p.m., in a free speech at the Reach Performing Arts Center; and Saturday, May 17 from 11 a.m. – 1 p.m., in a community action planning session at Stonington Town Hall. His book is available at both the Stonington and Deer Isle public libraries, and will be for sale during his appearances.

Friday, April 25, 2008

A Nation at Risk, Take 2

This morning's New York Times carried the following Op Ed recognizing the upcoming 25th anniversary of the report "A Nation at Risk," which raised the first alarms about American public education and is often cited as the catalyst for modern school reform movements.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/opinion/25fiske.html?ex=1366862400&en=93f25ee7b6823d99&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Twenty-five years of hand wringing over the declining quality of American education have done little to reverse the trend. Today, as cited in the article above, less than 70% of our young people graduate from high school (compared to more than 75% 25 years ago); and ranks 16th out of 27 industrialized nation in the percentage of students who COMPLETE college.

This is shameful, and it is hurting our general economy--not just due to a lack of skilled leadership and work force, but perhaps more importantly because of the way declining public education creates a badly-informed electorate. In the last two national elections, large percentages of America's working class--i.e., "red America,"--voted AGAINST their own economic self-interest whenever they voted Republican. The Republican economic agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and initiatives such as the war in Iraq have caused the staggering burden of national debt to soar--which in turn helps to foster inflation, high fuel prices, and all the other economic woes we currently face. Yet they found a solid base of support amongst working class people: those who have been most directly hurt by these very policies.

A democracy requires a well-informed, questioning electorate. Our nation's founders and many since them knew that an excellent, fully accessible public education system was the key to creating such an electorate. We can't dismiss that knowledge at this late date; and we can't spend another 25 years wringing our hands over how to slowly change our lost public education system. National action is required, and quickly: let's hope that whoever the new resident of the West Wing is has the guts and the wherewithal to do do.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

The Eternal Optimism of Economic Development

Economic development requires three things: vision, optimism, and a will for change.

By its nature, economic development--creating new opportunities for people--is about shifting life perceptions and expectations from where they have lived their whole life to a new vision for how they might succeed.

In Maine, economic development often looks like the paper mill worker agreeing to learn new skills to function in a small, entrepreneurial, wood composite development shop.

Or a lobster fisherman, who can no longer afford the price of fuel and bait with an increasingly limited number of traps, agreeing to participate in a grant and use his or her seamanship skills to run research trips for scientists who need to study the movement of fish stocks. Or a lobster fisherman who uses his boat for a filmmaking crews, documenting the Penobscot Bay ecosystem.

Or people who have worked blue collar, manual labor jobs all their lives learning computer and communication skills so they can participate in the growth of weath generated by the creative/knowledge economy.

Whatever economic development looks like, it looks like change and ordinary community members spearheading economic development efforts must have the leadership skills to, as Kouzes and Posner have written, "do extraordinary things." Leaders do this by a) modeling the way; b) inspiring a shared vision; c) challenging the process; d) enabling others to act and e) encouraging the heart.

For those of us on the coast of Down East Maine--beseiged by the fall of the fisheries; the inflation of property values; and the desire to maintain independent, worker-owned businesses under pressure from the tourism/services sectors--this is tough work. Try convincing a lobster fisherman in the spring of 2008 that he or she should think about alternative opportunities, the larger economic context, or just the future in general and it is very likely you will hear only about the flat, low boat price for lobsters in relation to rising fuel and bait costs.

Change happens slowly and incrementally. If we are to sustain our communities, we must continue to be voices for change: the message of other opportunities and how they relate to former natural resources based lives must be consistent and strong. We can't worry if only one or two people listen at first: it is the consistency and persistence of the message, our long term belief in and ability to create a vision shared by the entire community, and not just a single component of it, that must carry the day if we are to sustain year-round, rural communities across the U.S.

Being an Eternal Optimist is not easy, and sometimes it feels as if fewer and fewer individuals are willing to take on this role. I for one am going to keep on trying, and hopefully a few of you will join me.