World Food Day Rant

I confess. When Michelle Obama was in Chicago a few months ago, and visited Walgreens, I stood in front of the television yelling at her.

Why was Michelle Obama, of all people, in Chicago-city of neighborhoods, home of the nation’s most diverse ethnic population, in the middle of the richest farmland in the world, and leader of the WW2 Victory Gardens movement-standing in some anonymous Walgreens, praising them for importing tomatoes from Chile.

Why was she not walking down Clark Street in Rogers Park, where there are probably 15 locally-owned mercados featuring produce raised locally, and run by families living in the neighborhood. Why was she not on Devon Avenue in the 40th ward, another strip of vibrant local economy? How about 57th Street in her own neighborhood, and home, until the big boxes shut it down, of the famous 57th Street Food Co-op? In Chicago “food desert” doesn’t mean no grocery stores– statutorily it means no big national chain stores. So you get the absurdity of the Albany Park “food desert” where there are at least 6 full service, locally-owned grocery stores within 5 blocks of the main intersection at Lawrence and Kedzie.

The solution to healthy food systems and urban vitality is not another vast parking lot, where private security will boot your car if you so much as step onto the sidewalk to mail a letter, but small, locally owned grocery stores, with sensible inspection protocols, and family management.

After the ’68 riots, Chicago let its local economies die. Where once there were dozens of family businesses keeping the neighborhoods, especially the African-American neighborhoods alive, a decades-long shibboleth has been sold us, teaching us that “business” happens on Wall Street or LaSalle Street, over-regulating small businesses while letting the big guys get away with murder and the family silver, and selling our own livelihoods back to us in Big Boxes stocked with the fruits of foreign slave labor. We’ve been spoon fed the lie that a “small business” is someone with 5 million dollars in annual sales, and 250 employees. That’s not a “small business.” A small business is the corner store (NOT the 7-11, but the old-fashioned Mr. Gower-type of store), or the local nfp animal rescue, or the neighborhood clinic.

Once “business” is what your grandpa did, in his shop around the corner from his house, or downstairs from his apartment. You worked there on the weekends and after school, learning how to run a business, a business that you would take over, when your grandpa and your pa got too old. We’ve let not one, or two, but now three generations of business acumen just die in service to the supposed “efficiency” and low prices of Walmart and its ilk.

Walgreen’s is not the answer to food deserts or to sustainable economies. Walgreen’s is the problem. Bring back the neighborhood pharmacists, tailors, shoe repairs, appliance repairs, and grocers.

A coalition of local food activists agrees with me. They’ve created the Statement of Local Food Economy (pdf). You can sign the statement, too. Also- World Food Day.

Originally posted on Mahlzeit blog in 2010.

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Real Local

Local is the new black.

It goes with everything.

Or does it?

Here at Not Dabbling in Normal we want to know how far we can push this local thing. What can you buy locally and what can you really not? How local can you get? Your yard? Your block? Your neighborhood, your state? Can you tell if what you’ve purchased is local?

This month, we’re going to get “real” at Not Dabbling again. Emily B, Emily S, Suzy, Ryan, Xan, Miranda and DeeDee are going to buy local and only local. We’re talking food, transportation, underwear, cat food, clothes, you name it. We’re going to find out what can we buy that’s locally produced, and what we can’t. If it isn’t produced locally, we’re going to try to find locally-owned shops. And if we can’t do that, we’ll find out what can we live without, and what we have to have.

***

This challenge is perfectly timed for me, Miranda. I have been feeling utterly disconnected from my food lately, and recently had an epiphany of sorts. You can read more about my recent re-connection with seasonal food at Pocket Pause, and i’m looking forward to sharing my new found inspiration here at Not Dabbling.

***

Food is easy. It’s the other stuff. I need curtains, which I can make, but if there is a fabric mill or curtain rod factory within 2,000 miles of Chicago I’ll eat my hat. On the other hand, many communities have shops like this one– a locally owned, owner-managed True Value Hardware.

***

How close to home do you think you can get? Join the Challenge! Let us know in the comments;  leave us a link to your blog and we’ll create a participants blog roll.

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Urbs in villam

Chicago’s motto is Urbs in horto:  City in a garden.

And flowers are nice. I love the gardens that our city has shoe-horned into every nook and cranny. I love that they give away a million tulip bulbs every year after the bloom is done. I love our world-class park system.

But imagine a city that remembers that gardens do not mean flowers alone. Imagine a city that integrates food production within the existing urban fabric. Cafe lined streets on which restaurants grow the food that they serve to patrons. Homes with window boxes filled with Swiss chard and cherry tomatoes instead of petunias and ivy. Office buildings that eschew tulip beds on favor of tomato-filled planters, where employees pick their lunch, instead of picking up their lunch. Imagine city governments that rewrite codes to make it easy for unused land to be used for temporary community gardens. Imagine suburban city councils and home owners associations that see the beauty in an eggplant and let people plant them wherever the sun is, be it front yard or back.

Imagine Urbs in villam. City in a farm.

Today, people in urban areas don’t know how to grow food, but during WW2 Chicagoans started 500 community gardens & 75,000 home gardens. They harvested more than 2,000,000 POUNDS of food and led the nation in the Victory Gardens movement. What if we reached  back into our past to do it again—to make home and community gardening the norm. What if we created an attitude that could lead to edible plantings in every sunny yard, park, store window, work place, and empty lot in the city, private and public.

Urban dwellers in particular, and all Americans–urban, suburban, rural–cannot keep relying on remote, even overseas, sources for our food. It costs too much in personal, economic and planetary health. It divides us from our very DNA, which evolved for us to be farmers and gatherers. Urbs in villam has planters full of tulips down one side of the street, and planters full of tomatoes down the other. By seizing opportunities like the economic crisis that halted construction, leaving lots empty, we can integrate food production into spaces that we already have.

The key is to educate our citizens about how easy it can be to grow our own food, where we live and eat it.

What is your community doing to bring food production home?

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From language to law to community

There are steps to creating a sustainable life.

In our society the realities of sustainability run up against the national character. Rigid self-sufficiency and individualism are the holy grail; in the words of Maxwell Anderson, how you can tell an American is that you cannot tell him what to do, even when it’s in his own best interest. In the current political insanity, any suggestion that we try to save our common heritage–like, for instance, the air–through sensible regulation, is excoriated as “removing choice.”

Enter the idea of the commons–those things that we own together, starting with the air, but also the water, the language, the creative works of humanity.

What I’ve discovered through the creation of the Peterson Garden Project, is that for many sustainable initiatives that revolve around community action, we lack a language. The language of communal action has been removed from the dialog, or vilified as “communist” or “socialist.” But some things, even most things cannot be done alone. The old saying that ‘your right to swing your fist ends at my nose” needs to be understood again to extend to our food and our health.

A new language does exist, in the old language, through the concept of the commons. What we hold together. What we all must use, but also spare, share, and save. Where our right to swing our so-called individual rights ends at the epidemic asthma in the inner cities because of pollutants, or the loss of aquifers because private owners have drained the wetlands that used to belong to all of us. We’ve allowed private bank accounts to be the fist, but haven’t stopped their swing at our collective nose.

Last week was the annual Good Fest Festival in Chicago (formerly the Family Farmed Fest), a really wonderful trade show all about restoring local, sustainable food systems to the urban landscape.  The exhibitors are all local farmers and food makers. It’s where I first learned how to change my diet to nearly 100% local food.

This year my friend LaManda Joy of The Yarden, founder of The Peterson Garden Project, was on the panel “Growing A Good Food Community”, about building urban communities through gardening and creating gardens by building urban communities. The interesting thing was that her fellow panelists were my old high school friend Jay Walljasper and Julie Ristau of On The Commons.

The panel, moderated by Megan Larmer of Slow Food Chicago, was beautifully constructed around the steps we need to take back collective ownership, working in a very American way, through individual action.

It starts, as I say, with the language. Jay talked about first, the need to start thinking again about the commons, and also laid out a basic way to think about the commons again. As important, he talked about how language can lead this new, old way of thinking, focusing right in on the difficulties I have had getting funders in particular to understand that what we’re doing is not a farm with a single owner or board, but collective action for individual benefit.

But it cannot stop with the language; only talking only works for academics. Enter Julie Riskau, founder and former publisher of the Utne Reader and current spokeperson for On The Commons. Julie talked about turning language into policy initiatives of the sort that lead to intelligent municipal ordinances which, for instance, stop creating criminals of people who put their edible gardens in their front yards because that is where the sun is.

But policy is only effective with an army of individuals putting it to work at street level. Which is where LaManda Joy and her Pop-up Victory Gardens come in, as well as the many other community gardening, and community preserving, and farmers markets, local school councils, in fact all of the community-based efforts that will save our cities and towns.

We need to restore the language, so we can affect the law, so we can own the activities that will make our communities livable.

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Conspicuous sustainability

Sustainability for a middle class American is an oxymoron. Our entire way of life is premised on unsustainability. We live in houses bigger than we need (even those of us in “small” houses). Americans own more cars than households; in fact, more cars than drivers. We are blessed with constantly fully-stocked shelves at the grocery store or even the farmers’ market, which simply leads to mountains of trash to make way for the new stock coming in. We have instantaneous access to any product we need; if we can’t get it at our local Target, it’s on the website.

We live in caverns of trash that we call our homes–basement, storage shed, attic, closets, full of things we might even use, but don’t really need.

And the strangest manifestation of this is what I’m calling “conspicuous sustainability.”

If you only buy t-shirts made from organic cotton, or hemp, but you have 9 of them, you’re indulging in conspicuous sustainability. Your full CSA share, where you end up discarding half the box because you don’t know what to do with all that kale. Sending your child to Eco Camp, three states away. Buying a Volt, when you have a perfectly functional ’07 Saturn in the garage.

The oddest manifestation of conspicuous sustainability is the seed swap.

The sustainability cred is immaculate–it’s barter, it’s local, it’s communal, it’s green things. It’s gardening.

The first seed swap I went to I got completely wrong. I’d been gardening for decades in isolation and didn’t know about “seed fanatics”–people who love seeds for their own sake. I thought seed swaps were for seeds you couldn’t buy, so I brought carefully packaged seeds that I had saved.

People showed up with huge boxes, systems even, of commercial seeds. They were for the most part bona fide sustainable–organic, small producers, heirloom varieties. No Burpee’s here. But commercially packaged, and people had dozens and dozens of them, far more than they could plant unless they happened to be the head gardener at Blenheim Palace. They would then lament at how they always bought too many, and would proceed to swap with other addicts, as often as not leaving with even more seeds than they’d come with.

I never used to do the seed catalogs much. I’d see what I could find at the garden center, then supplement with a couple of packages from Pinetree or Territorial. I had no idea that there were people who spent fifty or sixty dollars (or more) on seeds Every Single Year no matter what they still had in their stash.

It disturbs me.

It isn’t sustainable just because you’re buying from a sustainable merchant for a sustainable purpose. Part of the point of sustainability is to not consume, or produce, more than you need. Seed swaps bother me. I find them at best inconsistent, and at worst a little stomach turning.

There’s a thing in fiction writing called “internal consistency.” The best fiction creates a universe where people behave believably; a universe without deus ex machina fixes, or the convenient sudden appearances of long-lost cousins (can you tell I’ve been watching Downton?).

Sustainability is not a “lifestyle choice.” It’s not a fashion. It’s a philosophy that requires consideration about decisions and actions and purchases, from the tiniest seed to the hybrid Hummer. Perhaps it’s a little self-righteous of me, but I believe that every life should be internally consistent. If you want to live lightly on the earth, all of your actions should be consistent with that goal, to as great an extent as is possible.

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I don’t agree with you, but you’re still my sister

I usually try to stay away from politically charged issues. I’m a terrible debater, and I tend to start to sympathize with every heartfelt argument I hear. But we recently lost readers on the blog because of a political position and I feel it needs to be addressed.

I’m not writing this in support of either side of any issue, and I don’t want to see polemics in the comments. Rather, I want to talk about how to get along with and listen to people whose outlooks seem wrong, even abhorrent.

Controversial issues don’t go away because someone slings mud at the other side.  You don’t convince people of either your position or your righteousness by listing facts, especially if those facts come from suspect sources, or from sources with a clear agenda. Even more so when they’re accompanied by name-calling.

Murder doesn’t stop because it’s illegal; wars don’t stop even if they never solve anything. I’m very very liberal politically, and grew up in a household that shunned organized religion. I’m about as different from the mainstream as it gets. And yet I am close to many, many people on the religious Right, and with whom I violently disagree on nearly every political issue. (Yes, I said it–some of my best friends are conservatives. sigh) I have come around to some so-called conservative viewpoints because I’m not afraid to listen, and because I simply don’t argue. Speak your piece, but don’t hit me over the head with it. I listen better when I’m conscious.

I believe in Sisterhood. Brotherhood. Community. I believe that taking sides means you stop listening. I believe that the great issues of our day–war, gun violence, epidemic disease, environmental degradation, poverty, racism–have solutions. I even think that everyone knows what the solutions are, and that we all pretty much agree.

But we allow ourselves to be co-opted into a system that rewards the people already insulated from all of these issues. We let the system define liberals as naive and conservatives as ignorant. We allow ourselves to be convinced that the “other side” is “evil” and often by the very people who are robbing us of our treasure and our freedom even as we drink the koolaid they are offering. We refuse to read what the other side says; we refuse to acknowledge that any part of what it says is valid. We even change positions if the “other side” starts finding common ground. We let a system that doesn’t exist to support, if I may, the 99%, divide us with wedge issues rather than helping us deal with root causes.

I am your sister, whatever my beliefs. We live on this earth together, and it’s the only one we have. If you’re going to fight, make sure you’re fighting with the person who wants to hold you down, and not just with the one who disagrees with you.

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Living by the rules

Recently a new friend remarked that I had “a lot of rules.”  This was in response to my statement that I don’t read the gossip magazines anymore, triggered by the death of Princess Diana, but supported by my belief that we are too susceptible to bread and circuses and that it interferes with our ability to live a mindful life.

Susy wrote about this same phenomenon last week, regarding people who feel like your choices are a direct insult to them.

But what I’m trying to do is not so much “have a lot of rules” as to be true to my internal political and moral beliefs.  You cannot state that you understand global warming and support the reduction of our dependence on fossil fuels, and then sit in a loading zone with the car running, or drive an SUV.  You cannot put a sticker on your car that says “reduce, reuse, recycle” and then walk out of the grocery store with 14 plastic bags, especially if you have resusable bags in the trunk of your car. You cannot complain about Big Ag if you get all your groceries at the national chain, and seldom cook from scratch because you don’t want to devote the time.  You’re not supporting the local food system if you’re eating at chain restaurants. If you believe that privatization of the commons is a bad thing, then you shouldn’t be parking at the privatized parking meters, or driving and paying a toll on the privatized road. A little inconvenience is a small price to pay,.

The political is personal. Your political beliefs should inform your life, not just your vote.

When people first meet me, I’ll warn them, I’m different. They will inevitably poo-poo this, stating that I’m just fine (as though I’m looking for reassurance). And then after they know me a little while, they’ll start to realize that in fact, I am different. I choose to live my life in a consistent way, even when it adds cost or inconvenience to my daily existence.

The personal is political. Small actions can lead to major change. Live your life by the rules you set for yourself, and mighty empires fall.

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Inspired or Inadequate?

We spend a lot of time here at Not Dabbling talking about living mindful lives, eating REAL food, reducing the amount of processed food in our lives, detoxing our lives, living more simply and how to achieve these goals. What we don’t often talk about it how the people around us react to these decisions. This really hit me the other day when someone from an internet show visited for a few days. When he talked about us on the show, he said “Wow, these people are great, I love what they’re doing, but they can really make you feel inadequate”. That was the first time someone had verbalized what I knew other people felt.

We all live in a community, with a web of people around us, usually comprised of friends and family. It can be difficult for those people around us to come to terms with significant lifestyle changes that we make, whether that be eating less processed food or trying to exercise more. I have found that people around me usually have two distinct reactions; they’re either inspired, or they get defensive; they encourage, or they become negative; they build up, or they tear down.

This can be a bit of a problem when the ones tearing down and being negative are those you are closest to. In one way you feel slightly betrayed since they are being negative about something you feel very strongly about. In another way you understand because it’s not something they care about. But if they’re being directly negative about your decisions, not encouraging to you, being negative and pushing back – it’s not healthy – for you or for them.

The truth is that it’s really not your fault if people feel inadequate around you because of you bettering your life, I believe it usually stems from guilt. I think deep down they feel they should make some changes but are unwilling to do so. In their mind, you being able to make some changes makes them look bad.

What do you do about it? Besides not talking about certain things in their presence, there’s not much you can do. I have certain people in my life that I avoid certain topics around. Eventually however, you might have to make the decision about whether or not they can remain in your inner circle. I really believe that those in your close circle need to be people that will accept you for who you are and accept the changes that you make. They should encourage you in your endeavors, even if they don’t agree with what you’re doing. Sometimes people need to be moved back to the acquaintance category so that someone who will support you can come in and take their place.

The farther I get down the road of simplifying my life, leading a mindful life, eating Real food, growing my own, cooking from scratch, and detoxing my life, the less contact I have with some people I used to be close with. As an introvert I do not have many close friends, only a very limited number of people reach that level. I feel the need to surround myself with people that will encourage me and help me achieve my goals in life, and sometimes people are simply unwilling to do that. Right now I’m feeling the pull to trim some of the relationship fat in my life. There are a few relationships that need to be moved bak to the acquaintance level because I simply do not have the time or energy to invest in relationships with people that are negative and defensive around me. I don’t want to spend my time thinking through every single thing I say to make sure I won’t offend them. I want to be able to be open and to talk about things I feel passionate about. I want to spend my time cultivating relationships with people that are good for me mentally.

Of course this is true about many aspects of life, not just people who are doing what we are doing. Whenever you make a significant life change there will be those people around you that will feel like they’ve been left behind. There will be those that will rally around you, and those that sulk in the corner. I believe this is how you know who your true friends are. Just like an apple tree needs pruned to produce the best fruit, often we need to prune some of the old decaying relationships in our lives away so we can truly blossom and produce good fruit. We also need to be mindful that we are not being those that are pushing back in other people’s like and need to accept it when others prune us back to acquaintance levels. (PS and I’d like to especially thank the other ladies that write here at Not Dabbling and all of you, our readers, for being encouraging and providing much needed motivation!)

Have you experienced any pushback from family and friends about your journey down the roads towards REAL food, cooking from scratch, simplifying or other decisions you’ve made?

I can also be found at Chiot’s Run where I blog daily about gardening, cooking, local eating, maple sugaring, and all kinds of stuff. You can also find me at Your Day Magazine, you can follow me on Twitter and on Facebook.

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Take the $5 Challenge

OK all you REAL foodies, this challenge is for you. It’s been 6 months since the REAL Food Challenge and this is the perfect way to get back on track if you haven’t been keeping up with REAL food.

Slow Food USA initiated the $5 Challenge. The goal is to cook healthy meal for less than what you would spend for a meal at a fast food restaurant. They emphasize that the food should fit the Slow Food ideal “food that is good for those who eat it, good for farmers and workers, and good for the planet.”

THE CHALLENGE: This September 17, you’re invited to take back the ‘value meal’ by getting together with family, friends and neighbors for a slow food meal that costs no more than $5 per person. Cook a meal with family and friends, have a potluck, or find a local event.

WHY: Because slow food shouldn’t have to cost more than fast food. If you know how to cook, then teach others. If you want to learn, this is your chance. Together, we’re sending a message that too many people live in communities where it’s harder to buy fruit than Froot Loops. Everybody should be able to eat fresh, healthy food every day.

HOW TO GET INVOLVED: Sign up for the challenge! You can cook a meal with friends and family, find a local event, or host your own event.

You can join in here at Not Dabbling, or head on over to Chiot’s Run and join in over there. I’m giving away a collection of seeds from Botanical Interests to one lucky reader.

How are you doing continuing the REAL food Challenge?

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Ten years

What struck me most in the days after September 11, 2001 was the empty sky. I wrote this on September 12.

The sky my grandmother saw
before the War to End All Wars
before her war, one hundred years ago,
was empty but for cloud rain bird wind leaf snow

The sky my grandmother saw
Had no people sailing in metal boxes
until a handful of adventurers
and a battalion of fighters
and other pioneers and fools filled the cloudy rainy windy sky
until my sky one hundred years on was so full of planes I never saw them.

The sky my grandmother saw came back
after four planes fell
on a building on a building on a building on a field

and for four days all of the planes that I never saw
weren’t there.

In the sky my grandmother saw
there aren’t any people.
A two-dimensional world—
breadth and width without height

–Xan

***

What struck me most in the days after 9/11 were the American flags that I saw everywhere. A sense of patriotism was palatable in the air and I really appreciated it. When I was young I did a patriotism project in school (while living in Colombia, South America) and I remember distinctly listing all the reason and drawing pictures about why I loved the United States so much. I think I had a different view of it than most kids did since I was spending three out of every four years living in a very dangerous third world country. I always felt as a kid that most Americans didn’t appreciate the wonderful country that they lived in, and I still kind of feel that way now. That’s probably why the deep sense of patriotism and pride in our country was what I noticed most after 9/11. Sadly I think many people have lost that once again. There are only a few of us that still fly flags here on my street.

***

Ten years ago I was a senior in high school, just beginning my final year of school before college. I know, I’m kind of dating myself here and I don’t mean to pull the “young” card, but it’s amazing to me how surreal September eleventh was to me.

The first plane hit the trade center while I was in the main office of the high school. I was filing paperwork for the art department (as a student assistant) and suddenly there were administrators running to televisions. They crowded the little pixel-y box in the assistant principal’s office, huddled together and crying on each other’s shoulders. I was ushered away quickly by the, normally composed and harsh, mascara streaked assistant principal while she shook her head, saying they weren’t supposed to let students know anything until they had an emergency administrative meeting.

As I walked back to the art classrooms (where I had somehow managed to secure 5 of my 6 hours of senior classes) there was a call over the loudspeaker “Mister Ferris has lost his yellow folder, if anyone has found it, please return it as soon as possible to the office.”

By the time I had made it back across the school to the art rooms there was another announcement. “Correction: Mister Ferris’s folder is red. If anyone has seen a red folder, please return it to the office.”I can only imagine this is when the second plane hit. This was when we went into lockdown. We were stuck in our classrooms for nearly three hours.

My art teacher had planning hour that hour, and because I was her assistant we were usually the ones in the art rooms. When I made it to the classroom I found her fiddling with wires on the back of the school-issued classroom television. A fuzzy image came up on the screen and I remember the feeling of numbness as I realized what was happening. She was crying quietly, as was the shop teacher who had dashed in through the door when he hear the television was on. He was a hardened older man who rarely said anything to anyone but his shop students. My art teacher turned to me and said “This is Your Kennedy Assassination. You will remember this moment for the rest of your life. “

As a high school student in the days following 9/11, I watched the school become a ghost town. I grew up in a city adjacent to Dearborn, Michigan, and people were instantly made afraid of the Arabic neighbors they had previously been more or less accepting of. Parents were pulling kids out of school, and we had less than 20% of the student population show up the day after. I was one of those students, and it wasn’t fear of the Arabic community that had me short of breath, it was fear of the non-Arabic community retaliating against them.

The students that were actually in school had divided into two distinct groups. Those that were somber and very aware of the sadness that swept our nation, and those that were completely naive and made open jokes about the tragedy.

I remember distinctly seeing a boy hold his arms out like an airplane, soaring down the high school hallway towards his friends: twin brothers.

I used to blame and almost hate them for being idiots, but I realize now it was just their way of coping with something so terrible. My generation was unprepared for so much sadness and grief, and it took us several days to snap out of our numbness before we were able to really think clearly about what was happening around us.

The thing that struck me most in the days following 9/11 was the way the students and children around me grew up. I saw bullies stick up against the kids that were joking about the attacks. I saw the quiet, shy kids stand up for the Arabic students. I even saw administrators get told off by students for abusing their power. It was like we had each gained some serious perspective, almost like our community was going through the various stages of mourning simultaneously, and in the end we were left distinctly more sure of where we stood, and how precariously balanced the world we lived in as kids was.

-Tanglewood

***

The magnitude of tragedy and hate and misunderstandings surrounding September 11, 2001 is so lost on me, as I imagine it is for many others. My thought process is a lot like saying the words “a thousand million” and then counting them verbally, and then seeing them visually stretched across a distance as if each digit were an inch. My brain can’t quite wrap around the extent that that day has affected a huge portion of the people of the world.

I know we all probably hold our children a little bit tighter. We’ve watched as our cousins, siblings, and friends have rushed off to wars. I’ve seen a fear of and a hatred for a people because of their religion, regardless of their political agenda … just as I’ve seen a hatred of people for their political agendas.

We witnessed heroes arise and the humanity of people as they’ve assisted in the best way that they could. Blame has been tossed around and fingers have been pointed and wagged. A new pride for our country has emerged, just as new extremes of political and religious beliefs have. Communities have embraced cultural differences all while we are removing our shoes and having body scans at airports.

The effects of that day are ongoing. The attacks on America on this day 10 years ago still continue. And we’re finding new symptoms still. To this day. Ten years later.

I think we’ll always wonder what the truth is –without bias – and I don’t know that we’ll ever truly get a story without bias in our lifetime.

I cannot fathom the hatred.

I cannot fathom the love.

A thousand million tears have fallen for that day.

 

-Jennifer

***

 

 

Do you remember what struck you most in the days following 9/11?

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