Global/Local

In recent months readers of Poking Around have quietly endured my efforts to grasp the anomaly of hunger in a world of plenty – the struggle to connect the dots between world hunger and overproduction, to get a grip on the politics that tolerate hungry families in our community, to comprehend what it means to embrace the right to food as a human right. Because my predisposition is to view every issue through the prism of open government, my mind wants to create a holistic approach to thinking about hunger in lay terms. Flailing in an unfamiliar world of ambiguity and complexity, my only tool is a structured approach to gathering and organizing information till it makes sense.

NOTE TO READER: This long post is an effort to convey information, and opinion, about a specific issue I wasn’t aware of, in a community other than my own. I was not seeking to find the issue. To some, the issue described may seem small and insignificant, and it was and remains a non-mandatory issue for the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners – they can do what they wish to do. Nonetheless, to this writer, the voluntary action described illustrates simply one example of a careless action, ignorance of history, and a (possibly) inadvertent and very negative change in tone of leadership in our civil society.

The other day at about 4:10 p.m. I sat in an outdoor amphitheater on the Institute of Buddhist Dialectic’s campus in Dharamsala and took a philosophy test. This test was unlike any I have taken at Macalester. For one thing, I certainly don’t take tests with the Himalayan Mountains towering in the distance and Tibetan prayer flags gently fluttering overhead in Minnesota. Moreover, the test asked us to simply state Tibetan Buddhist philosophical tenets from memory, orally, without any kind of analysis, commentary, or, in some cases, understanding of what I was saying.

It’s March 1st today. Until 1998, when I made my first trip to Bulgaria, March 1st didn’t mean very much. Today, however, March 1st, 2013, some 15 year later, I will share my discovery of what March 1st means to me all over the University of Minnesota campus. I will do it with Hillel students as we give martenitzas to anyone who will take them.