‘Peace House Community Journal’ Archives
The Food Desert is Expanding
from the series Peace House Community Journal... By MARTI MALTBY Marti Maltby Food Deserts are neighborhoods where residents lack adequate access to food. Residents of a country as wealthy as the United States shouldn’t have to worry about getting enough to eat. In other words, we shouldn’t have Food Deserts. Unfortunately, in a country where economic statistics carry more weight than human need, things don’t run as they should. In the last six months, two feeding sites that served take out dinners in Ventura Village closed. Between them, they were serving over 700 meals a night. I don’t know the situation in the other neighborhoods covered by the alley, but I suspect many residents there rely on feeding sites or food shelves to meet one of the most basic human needs. Economics says that the United States is still the wealthiest country in history. The number of people going hungry say that economics is measuring the wrong things. Understandably, a lot of the [...]
Greece’s Golden Age: Passion and/or Wisdom?
from the series Peace House Community Journal... By MARTI MALTBY Marti Maltby Many years ago, I heard a debate about whether Greece’s Golden Age was represented by the great poets such as Homer, or by the philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Why should this matter to us now, thousands of years later? Because it might give us some insight into today’s situation.Homer gave us epic tales involving a vibrant world of violent passions, both positive and negative. Wars were fought over trivial matters. Gods and men competed for glory. Each individual had unique powers and personalities. By contrast, the philosophers sat around and discussed. Plato’s Republic, one of the classics of philosophy, contains no action other than people making speeches. Their goal is to discover reality (or however Plato phrased it; I haven’t read him in over 30 years). They focused on universal truths that applied equally to everyone, not individual people. In our modern [...]
Peaceful, but not Passive
from the series Peace House Community Journal... By MARTI MALTBY Marti Maltby I disagree with Mayor Jacob Frey on many topics, but I agreed with what he said during his press conference following the shooting of Renee Good. There’s so much to say about the current situation, but the part I want to focus on is Frey’s call for a peaceful response. We can debate if that’s the most important thing to worry about, but it’s uppermost in my mind as I write this. Frey was right that we need a peaceful response. But peaceful doesn’t mean passive. We don’t need to accept how our neighbors are being terrorized, but we don’t need to resort to terror in our response either. And, thankfully, Minneapolis seems perfectly willing to be peaceful without being passive. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Twin Cities residents have protested peacefully since the shooting, but they haven’t been passive. They’ve done all they can to protect neighbors and hold the federal [...]
