Posts tagged as "ramblings" - Chris Hardie

There is a strange and unique destination out there in the political blogosphere called The Daily Kos. You may have heard of it - it's been called everything from one of the most defining websites of the modern political debate, to an analog of the Klu Klux Klan. I suspect it's actually somewhere in between (but for those who don't like encountering ideas they don't agree with, be careful about clicking through, you may find yourself uncomfortable). I recently tried an experiment, where I took...

I remember seeing author and activist Parker J. Palmer speak in Richmond in the late 90s, about the needed renewal of America's public life. He spoke of a time and a culture where U.S. citizens were much more likely to engage each other fully and authentically in the public sphere - parks, playgrounds, town meetings, neighborhood events, community gatherings. And it wasn't just nostalgia - he talked about a strong public life as a therapy for some of the world's ills, by connecting us with viewpoints,...

I tend to have better odd numbered years than even numbered years. But something is wrong with 2007. It's not living up to the pattern so far. Perhaps, and this is just a wild theory here, my fate is determined by more than the digits assigned to a particular sequence of seasons on the Gregorian calendar. Perhaps...it's actually up to me?

One of my favorite parts of living in a small city in the Midwest is that many of us tend to wear multiple hats for each other. When you get to know someone new in one setting, if you stick around long enough, it's a pretty good bet that you'll encounter them again in at least one other setting. These multi-faceted interactions yield some nuances and texture in relationships that I think are hard to find in less personal settings, and perhaps larger cities. A great example I can give is that...

It's been a while since I've posted here - I've had a couple dozen half-finished entries that just didn't seem worth bothering to finish, a barrier I've certainly encountered before. It's also been a busy month and life's been full of some great joys (cooking, consuming, community service, conflict resolving, cat transport, Co-op-ing, colluding in concomitance, celebrating the solstice, cultivating connections, etc.) and concerns that take place away from the world of my keyboard, so things are just...

For the last several weeks I have been participating in a broad stroke study of law enforcement practices on city streets across America. I have done ride-alongs with police officers from coast to coast - Portland, Oregon to Austin, Texas to Cincinnati, Ohio to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. These ride-alongs are usually in the form of 22 minute segments during which I am transported to the ride-along locations using a technology called "Court Television." As the ride-alongs start to blur together...

One of the things that is difficult for me to deal with in the world of blogging and even just editorial/public writing in general is that for any given issue, it often feels like every possible perspective has been rendered by others in so many different ways well before *I* get to that issue. This has gotten "worse" with the advent of blogging, where those viewpoints are often published within minutes or hours of any given piece of information becoming available. So by the time I develop an opinion...