As my regular readers know, my Sunday morning ritual includes listening to the interviews by Krista Tippett on the NPR program, “On Being.” Sunday, the 30th of August 2015 I listened to her 2013 interview with Grace Lee Boggs, philosopher, activist, and revolutionary. Mrs. Boggs is now in a nursing home, but at the time of the interview she was still living in her home, which was also the headquarters of the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, which was founded in 1990 by friends of Grace and Jimmy Boggs.
It is, of course, noteworthy, that Mrs. Boggs the daughter of a Chinese immigrant born in 1915 not only attended the prestigious Brynn Mawr College, but also went on to get a PhD in philosophy – a feat that was unusual, especially for a woman. Mrs. Boggs says, “Well, you know, I was born in 1915 and I was in college as an undergraduate in the 1930s. And many of my friends became very radical. They flirted with the Communist Party, and I decided to drop all my classes and take up philosophy. I don't know why. If you would ask me what philosophy is or was, I would not have been able to tell you. But somehow I knew that we were at one of those breaking points where we had to begin rethinking things.”
As is true for many of us, what becomes our life passion often begins with the simple dream of leaving the place where we are emotionally and intellectually only to find that what follows has as its base that which we leaving. What we are leaving may be the feeling that we want to know even what questions to asks or to discover a world outside the small circle in which we have grown up or even a vague notion that there has to be a better way for we humans to live together. It may feel as if we stumble upon a class or course of study, a job, or a relationship, which changes our life, but, in fact, we are often, unconsciously building upon that sense of “dis ease” from which the dream evolved.
Dr. Boggs was attending school in the thirties. When many of her friends “flirted with communism” she decided to “drop all her classes and take up philosophy.” The study of philosophy would challenge her to rethink all that she knew or others thought that they knew. The study of the thought and challenge of the dialectics of Frederick Hegel would lead to her lifelong work with turning the double negative into a positive. She states: “And that gave me the opportunity to become a graduate student in philosophy and to begin reading Hegel who had danced around the tree of liberty in 1781 as a young man. And then, in 1831, had experienced the contradictions of the French Revolution and was talking about the need to expand our subjectivity and to see how the positive has to be achieved through the labor-patient suffering of the negative, and that began to give me a whole new way of thinking about change in how it develops, how it takes place.”
Later she goes on to talk about the fact that with the automobile (and the trucks to haul goods) whose factories not only provided decent jobs for many and which gave us the freedom to travel in a way not previously possible, also became a vehicle for an increasing distance from each other. She reminded me of why I hated living in a suburb. I could drive home, hit my automatic garage door opener, enter the garage, and spend the rest of the evening only having contact with my nuclear family. Unless one happened to see one’s neighbor when they simultaneously emerged to get their mail or the newspaper, one could go weeks, months or longer between “sightings.” Often in these sorts of neighborhoods many hired lawn service companies to take care of their lawns. One might “garden” in the back yard, but often it was fenced and thus provided another form of separation from one’s neighbor. Getting to and from work in the private car, unless one carpools, does not require any contact with any other human.
The most social place was often the neighborhood giant grocery store which one might run in to neighbors that felt free to divert one from one’s mission.
When the United States placed an embargo against Cuba (The United States embargo against Cuba (in Cuba called el bloqueo, "the blockade") is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo imposed by the United States on Cuba) several positive things happened. Since there was no gas for vehicles and, thus, no easy way to transport food from the farms to the city, community gardens spring up. With community gardens came more cooperation and daily contact. Also, people were more likely to be going about their day on foot or bicycle. This intensified the sense of community. Also, they were forced to help each other with home projects and to take care of each other in general. In addition, more homes, especially in rural areas, had solar power. Certainly, other issues were not so relatively easy to address. There was often not money or supplies for making even simple repairs. There was much about the government dictatorial rule, which was unkind and even cruel. On the positive side, in the midst of this change, Cuba developed a medical school system which provided doctors and other medical staff to much of South America.
As the prosperity of the auto industry in Detroit slowed down and/or got moved to other areas of the country and forced the closing of much auxiliary business, the city residents began to make changes. They, too, began to create community gardens and to find other ways of reclaiming ways of taking care of each other – of being neighbors. To be sure they are still dealing with the shrinkage of the city from a high of about 2 million people to about 750,000. The city residents are reducing the physical size of the city since the population cannot support the infrastructure of such a large area. They are still dealing with the number of abandoned houses.
Many of the negatives are still negatives. Yet, in pure Hegelian fashion, many of the residents are creating positives out of double negatives.
Dr. Boggs states, “In the '60s, as you know, all hell broke loose, mostly in the big cities, but Detroit was one of the biggest. And that outbreak, that explosion, the media called it a riot because it was obviously a breakdown of law and order. Radicals and the black community called it a revolution. And it made me think what is the difference between a revolution and a rebellion? I never thought about it.
I realized that rebellion was mainly an explosion of anger and revolution was a tremendous leap forward from man's evolution and consciousness and responsibility and a new way of thinking. And that's how the events of the city have shaped my thinking. And I think, until one has had an opportunity to understand how language constantly has to change in response to changing events and how we are living in a time of enormous changes, we have the opportunity to change our thinking, to change our philosophy by responding to and really trying to understand what's happening, what time it is on the clock of the world.”
We humans “know” that in order for positive change to occur we have to change our thinking. Whether it is in the area of equality, finances, community, international relationships, or the rights of those whose voice has been silenced, we have to give ourselves permission to think differently. Individuals such a Dr. Boggs and the long line of creative teachers, philosophers, artists, and other revolutionaries invite us to do that that- to co-opt, if one will, the negatives into creating a more creative, loving, just, community/neighborhood. This is doable.
We can feed the ability that we had as children to dream. We can “To sleep! Perchance to dream: - ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…” It is, as we know, always in ashes of death that new dreams arise. And Blossom? And Bloom!
Written August 30,2015
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