‘Raise Your Voice’ Archives
Two Harveys Among Us
By Peter Molenaar Almost everyone in the Phillips Community knows something about Hurricane Harvey and associates. Not as many are acquainted with Harvey Winje, editor of the Alley Newspaper. So sad. Truth to tell, Harvey (the hurricane) is not a totally bad sort of being. Actually, Mother Earth deploys hurricanes to flush excess heat from her oceans into outer space. As is revealed in great beds of fossils, this was a common practice in olden times. However, it is no longer the methane of dinosaur farts which confines Sun”'s rays to our atmosphere, rather it is the burning of fossil fuels. So in the recent teaching moment, H. Harvey posed some questions: 1.) How much energy will it take to create the infrastructure for a post-fossil-fuel economy? 2.) How might we mitigate ongoing damage in the process? 3.) Will the pivot from coal to natural gas slow global warming? 4.) Are market forces combined with the profit motive impeding necessary [...]
The Aerobics Beyond the “Y”
By Peter Molenaar Visits to the Lake Street YWCA have become familiar to me, in the aftermath of thirty-five years hard labor at Smith Foundry. However, when worn ankles dictate, treadmills and elipticals won”'t do. It is from the vantage of a stationary bike that I am allowed to discreetly observe. As for aerobics, evidently there are many women who have surpassed what I once was. One wonders why a world-wide movement of women has not been mobilized to fight ISIS. Sending our young men to war tends to make matters worse. Recently, en route to burning 100 calories at 95rpm, the caption line on the big screen flashed BREAKING NEWS: NORTH KOREA THREATENS GUAM WITH MISSILE ATTACK. Amazingly, the elipticals and treadmills kept churning. I happen to garden with the Koreans who founded the Community Peace Garden, at the junction of Highway 94 and Cedar Avenue. From them I received a copy of the spring issue of the Korean Quarterly with the front [...]
Cultivating Heavy Soil
By Peter Molenaar Transforming the USA along socialist lines is like propagating a garden in heavy soil. Dense soils tend to impede germination and root development. Yet, when properly conditioned, a “clay soil” is the most fertile and will produce glorious results. Marxism teaches that external factors are the conditions of change, while internal contradictions are the basis. If things are not right, the seed will not deliver us the flower. Might hard work and perseverance render our desire? As it happened”¦ An elder Korean woman from the community garden kindly gifted me several seed packets from her homeland. The English label read “Blue Bell Root.” In addition to its lovely flowers, this plant produces roots which will cure most diseases and extend our life spans. So, the work was cut out for me. Available to me were several raised beds which, since an early harvest of kimchi radishes, had been fallow beneath grass [...]
