America Out of Work: Is Double-Digit Unemployment Here to Stay? - TIMEOminous, yet appropriate date for the publication of this article (9/11). President Obama is going to have to deal with 9 - 11% unemployment (not counting UNDER employment) for some time in the first 4 years of his administration.
An excerpt from an interview of the philosopher, Grace Lee Boggs, PhD on
DemocracyNow.org:
JUAN GONZALEZ: Much better as an ex-president than as a president (Carter). But I’d like to ask you about something you’ve written quite a lot about, the attempt you’ve been making in Detroit to change people’s relationships to the land and to their city through the urban gardening and farming movement in the cities. How is this part of the revolution you envision for the future for America?
GRACE LEE BOGGS: It’s critical; it’s not just a part. It’s pivotal, because Detroit, with the devastation of deindustrialization, gave us the space and place to begin anew. And we were forced to think very differently about what it means to be a human being and what it means to create a world that embraces and enlarges and expands us as human beings.
And we didn’t choose to be that. I mean, we were once the miracle, a sign of the international symbol of the miracles of industrialization. And then we became the international symbol of the devastation of deindustrialization. So we had to begin anew. And we looked at our vacant lots, and we saw them as an opportunity to begin growing our own food.
And as The Nation article says on the headline on democracy, I mean, growing your food is the beginning of growing democracy, a new kind of democracy that’s not dependent on lobbyists and on representative democracy, but begins to depend on the people from below, from the ground.
I grew up getting my vegetables from an urban garden in my backyard. I'm starting one in my suburb this fall.
Maybe the Farmer's Almanac had it right...
