The Barbershop

Chuck Marohn's work, whatever disagreements one may have with it, gives us some good counsel on where to start changing suburban-addicted minds and fiscal incentives.

I worry about our ever-expanding cult of safety and nod in agreement with so much of sociologist Frank Furedi’s description of the “Paradox of our Safety Addiction.” He argues that “the zero risk mentality breeds a culture of anxiety and a hunger for authority.”

We have been thrown back into our own small worlds, but these are worlds we are free to shape. Within the household we have considerable power over how our lives our lived, what we make, and how we consume.

Why have we persisted in peeing outdoors well after the advent of outhouses and toilets?

True, there is much on offer in the world more exciting than tromping around on the muddy bank of a creek in the middle of nowhere. I’m unlikely to convince naysayers otherwise. Deep in their hearts though, they too remember moments during which the light that shone on me at Sugar Creek shone in their own lives.

Front Porch Republic readers all adhere in some ways to principles that are good and true and beautiful: local authority, productive work, and community involvement. Simply fighting against government action seems to embody none of these attributes in this crisis.

Says here malaria treatments work on COVID-19.

To be isolated from one another, and in particular from those third places where the rich possibilities of community are most regularly realized strains urban interdependence as nothing else.

You just do it, and you do it because you know your place is a wonderful place and you want to keep it the way it is. It’s not because you want so-and-so to be like, “Oh, there’s pastor’s wife picking up Wordi Gras trash.” It becomes second nature after a while. It needs to be, I saw it, so now it’s my job.

I’m inclined to believe that both the species and individuals, that both mankind in general and you and I in particular, benefit from the occasional reality check..