Sat. April 7, 2012:
Three articles over the past couple days inspire, in the face of seemingly hopeless odds:
1. "Saving Fenway," by Lawrence Harmon [Boston Globe, Sat. April 7, 2012]. A small mocked group of die-hard historically-minded Fenway Park admirers -- in the face of little hope -- organized, stood firm, and eventually won over the John Henry/Tom Werner/Larry Lucchino new ownership, to "Save Fenway Park." Many in the 100th Anniversary Ceremony at Fenway on April 20 will be there who wanted to get rid of that "lyric little bandbox of a ballpark." But Save Fenway Park took action, while the rest did nothing.
2. "That Other Obama," by David Brooks [NYT, Fri. April 6, 2012]. Brooks has his off-base moments, but at least he tries to keep alive a spirit of Middle Way in this era of Tea Party zealotry & Al Sharpton march-first-ask-later-ism. He continues to take rhetorical action against extremism, this time in one excessive Obama speech. If both conservatives and liberals get mad at him, can he be so off-base?
3. "Did bad neighborhood design doom Trayvon Martin?" by Zach Youngerman [Boston Globe, Sat. April 7, 2012]. This MIT student dares to take the action of submitting an idea to a major daily newspaper. And lo, it offers a new slant you won't find in the cable pundits' bloviating about the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman tragedy.
Instead it reminds wide readers of Lewis Mumford's monumental 1960 synthesis,
The City in History, which famously decried the dwarfing scale of bad urban ideas over centuries -- ranging from imperial Rome's gladitorial coliseums, to modern gated subdivisions built for cars and without sidewalks or a sense of humans taking a walk in their community.
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