Homeless Teens at School

I visited a drop-in center for street kids in Mexico City when I was there last spring, a place with couches, a computer, showers, and food. I was grateful that there was someplace the many homeless kids in that neighborhood could go, and after getting acquainted with the man who directed it, I left some money and vowed to myself to find some more once I got back home.


Now I read that there are street kids right here in Manchester, teens who can't live at home and don't have anyplace else. Too young to go to the shelter, it's not at all clear where they sleep or how they eat. And some of them are making the heroic effort to attend school in the middle of all that. What's up with this?

Little by little, we bring the so-called less developed world home. Kids on their own, rightly or wrongly believing the foster care system would not be better, undetected by an overburdened system until registering for school brings matters to official attention, they really live here in this little Yankee city. And surely there are more kids, the ones who have decided not to try to keep on with school.

I feel ashamed to know this about my city, and I don't know what to do.

The Market for Ideas

I am old. I remember the early '70's when we had that earlier energy crisis. I remember how sensible it seemed to conserve, to wear sweaters in winter and open windows in summer, to walk or ride our bikes, to grow our own food, to insulate things better, to drive cars that burned less fuel, and all the rest. Something happened, and I remember that by the early '80's, it was all buy-buy-buy again, and never stopped. Some of that stuff has stayed with me, but there are many younger people for whom it is just strange. My nephews have fun by driving cars around on logging roads, trying to burn as much gas as they can on each stage of every rally race. They think I'm a little looney. My son seems to have received some of that earlier sensibility, though -- maybe from all those home-made oatmeal cookies of his childhood -- consuming less, growing a garden, and all that. Of course, we all use ski lifts intemperately, and I have a particularly bad habit of getting onto airplanes to zoom over oceans and continents at great expense of greenhouse gases and fossil fuels.


Now, here is the predictably recurring energy crisis again, and here again is a certain wackiness I remember: All the conversation seems focused on corporations and how they can make money in a new and differerent environment. Of course that matters, but it's as true now as it was in the '70's that decentralized solutions have a big contribution to make. The solar panels that just warm up your hot water are still simple and effective, never mind whether they make electricity. Where are they? Smaller houses with better insulation still make sense, and some people are working on making them popular, but do they make the news? No, it's all about cars and power plants.


It's the same as with the so-called War on Drugs. If we just reduce the demand, the problem becomes manageable. Consider these things, I say:

*live in a smaller house or apartment, closer to the place where you work.

*work to make your city a better place to be a pedestrian and user of public transit.

*turn things off, all the way off, and only turn them on when you are really using them.

*find things to do that don't involve driving someplace.

*when you need things, buy them used.

*find things to do that don't involve buying something.


Solar this and that? Get those light bulbs that use so much less energy first. Then see what makes sense for your life about buying more stuff. Something solar might be a good idea.

One thing I'm pretty sure about: They still don't know how to deal with the waste from nuclear power plants. Quite a lot of time has passed since that other time when we all just said "no" to nukes. You would think they might have found a solution, since that's the #1 technical obstacle, right? Did they look? As long as we don't know what we're going to do with the waste, I say, it makes no sense to build new nuclear plants, even if some environmentalists have been persuaded to advocate them in this scary new world of global warming.


Another thing I'm pretty sure about: Coal is bad.


So, beware of "plug-in" electric vehicles. Where will all that power come from? Nukes or coal.
(I'll give my jeremiad on trading energy shortage for food shortages with ethanol another time.)


Feet. Bikes. Buses. Trains. Living closer to where we want to go. Using less. Planting trees and gardens. We could have a good life doing those things. Why not?

Our Fair City

It seems the Honduras football team from Manchester narrowly lost the league championship to Brazil, a team centered in Nashua. They proudly carry the name of Manchester thoughout the region, proud of themselves, full of energy and commitment. The only thing is, they don't have a place to practice, and the community in general doesn't know who they are.


Ours is a city who has known who she is for a long time. She has baseball and American football, she has hockey, amateur theatre, art schools, and now things are changing. She was able to find a place in her self-understanding for slam poetry, which is a good thing, because her children are making a name for her in the slam world. But now, she's been totally blindsided by this Honduras thing.


Football? She thought she knew what football was about. She thought she had it covered. But here are these lean young fast-running men with their round ball running up and down the field, and she says, "me?" She says, "Are these mine?" They laugh and say "yes," but until now they never even knew how to talk to the Parks and Rec about how to reserve a field. So now they are asking, and now she is wondering. But not for long. Of course they are hers.


All those soccer moms and dads in the suburbs, that's not the kind of game they are playing here. It's football, and serious. The Hondurans play, and I've seen the Africans playing, too, and I don't know who all else. Some people say there isn't a well developed audience for soccer here in the United States. They say David Beckham had to come and help bring his kind of football into the mainstream. But nobody noticed: There's a big group of fans in the United States, but most of them are cheering for Mexico, most of them are speaking Spanish, and others of them are speaking French, Swahili, Portuguese, German, Italian, you-name-it.


Who needs to learn that world football is already a big sport in the United States? The people who already thought they knew who we were; the people in all the cities who thought they knew what was happening with their people.


Hello, Manchester (New Hampshire!) -- welcome to the world.

Wild Speculation

Intrigued by what I learned about the Visigoths in Toledo, Spain, I came home and started poking around to see what more I could learn. Ulfilas, the apostle to the Goths, created a Gothic alphabet and translated the Bible into Gothic. A partial copy of his work remains, the Codex Argenticus, now housed in Sweden. He taught an Arian form of Christianity, that is, he was a Unitarian. He was deeply involved in conversation with leaders of the emerging Roman Catholic faith, trying to persuade them to a different theology. Both Saint Ambrose in particular had Arians the neighborhood of his church in Milan, Italy. They had their own church building and enough followers to make life difficult for the emerging Roman Catholic hegemony. Ultimately, Ambrose won the day, on the theological scene. And ultimately, the Visigoths moved westward to what is now the South of France, but I have no idea of cause or effect.

The Visigoths had come from Dacia, which is more or less where Romania is now. They began their commitment to Christianity when they were there, serving as allies of the Romans, defending the borders of the empire. They were displaced by the Huns, at least as rulers. Who knows how many stayed behind? Much later in Translylvania, part of the ancient Dacia, a Unitarian theology found new roots when it was imported from Poland in the sixteenth century. Even though it came most directly from Poland, the Transylvanian version of Unitarianism originated in northern Italy, one of the places where Ulfila's gospel was taught.

Ultimately, the Unitarian Visigoths traveled to Spain, where they settled in the Duero Valley as well as in Toledo and some other strategically located cities. They continued to have influence in the South of France, the very part of the world where the Cathar heresy later had to be stamped out. I read that the Cathars "denied the incarnation". Unitarians? I wish I knew more.

And of course, many centuries later, Michael Servetus raised the banner of Unitarian theology one more time. He came from Northern Spain, from Aragon, not all that far from the part of the world where the ancient Visigoths had settled.


My wild speculation is that varieties of Unitarianism were actually not uncommon among the Christians of the old Western Roman Empire, that vestiges of much earlier teaching continued to live among the people, even if they had been pretty well suppressed among the official leaders of communities.

My sense of Ulfila's theology was that he had much in common with the Gnostics who are so popular among academics just now. His was a pretty "high" christology, not something most U.S. Unitarian Universalists would find congenial, but I have the sense he was the founder of an important, though hidden, tradition in Western Christian theology. So here's my wild speculation: that the Visigoths were carriers of seeds that blossomed much, much later as Unitarian and humanistic flowers in Romania, in Northern Italy, in Southwestern France, and in Aragon. I'm wondering: if this is so, how were those seeds preserved? Of what did they consist? Who carried them?