I think that the architecture of a town should be built around a small park. You see these central park areas occasionally in the very center of a small town but the small park area is always empty. Why? There is something missing in today's cultural activities. One thing that is missing is feasting.
A feast is something that a culturally alive place does and culturally alive people do. It is a Yin/feminine function. It is a natural and needed complement to our dying patriarchal culture where everything is private property and rarely any shared feasting.
Too many people today feast by overindulgence in drugs. That is the wrong way to feast but it does give a needed break from the humdrum nature of life. Feasting is supposed to be physical feasting with shared food, it is supposed to be emotional feasting with shared good time, mental feasting with shared artistic performance and spiritual feasting as a spiritual something manifests in the middle of all that, as it all synthesizes into a greater whole.
To make sure that the right people were at the feast, the ones who most need it, the town should put bare bones housing near the central park. Instead of marginalizing the poorest we should let them have the center of town and they would have the easiest access to feasting. Somebody would surely then show up for feasting and parks could be full of people having a good time. And city taxes should help pay for feasting.
Just as once tribal things long ago took care of the collective, and just as patriarchal things today take care of the individual, so we need now to fuse them and take care of a collective/individual synthesis in cultural life. And with this synthesis of the cooperative/collective/Yin-feminine elements of culture with its feasting and the competitive/individual/Yang-masculine elements of culture, and its hoarding, we might see an exponential explosion of cultural activity. Feasting would be a vital part of that cultural explosion of activity.
In a culture as dead as ours feasting might turn to riot and so perhaps it should be done on a smaller level at first. But it still does need to be integrated.
Everyone should receive food stamps which they can use or not at times when there is no feasting. How would the republicans complain if everyone got the food stamps? And everyone should receive free "Inalienable right of place to be" stamps. If a person has a nice place of his own and does not want the stamps for the bare bones housing then these would go unused. Or maybe the rich man could trade his "inalienable right of place to be" stamps for something else.
And the only business in the center of town should be a grocery store that could be accessed by the poor, the old, and those without transportation for whatever reason. Churchs and centers for the arts could go there too. The hubbub of vehicles and noisy business could be taken to another part of town and a quiet peaceful place close to Nature could be kept for human cultural activity.
And everyone living in the bare bones housing spaces should have access to nearby inner city garden space where they could raise a bit of food and swap with others who have also grown food. And it could be required that some of this food be brought to the feasting times.
With a large part of a city built to house people who might otherwise have ended up in prison, ( which is much more expensive to maintain ), money would be more stable as well. A society where there are different kinds of capital would have greater strength. Money is good stuff but too inflatable and deflatable. Money, being too abstract, needs others ways of equitable and charitable exchanges to stablize it.
Part Two: A Personal Experience in the Inner City
I live in the poorest county in my state and many young men with nothing to do and no way to grow up go off to war. And war eventually bankrupts a nation. In my inner city suggested environment these young men could find a way to survive without making themselves into targets of war and violence.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
