Images of Home

Thirty years ago, in 1991, the Blandin Foundation turned fifty years old. In anticipation, the Foundation published a book, text by Paul Gruchow, photographs by Jim Brandenburg, title: Images of Home. This morning I skimmed through my copy of that book, which I haven't read for some time, and was startled by the language in the Preface. It certainly didn't evoke the memory of the "good old days" that I recalled. Let me share an excerpt:

In 1991, the Blandin  Foundation will celebrate 50 years of service to the people of Minnesota. As we mark this milestone, our state faces a special challenge: the struggle to hold a common purpose in the face of economic realities that threaten to divide and  polarize us.

In the countryside, farmers and miners have been battered by more than a decade of bad news.The prospect of a sharp turn away from the farm price support systems of the past 50 years promises continued uncertainty and instability inour rural communities in the near future, whatever effects it might have in the long run.

In the city, corporations are also contending with the difficulties of major restructureing so that they can compete successfully in global markets. And this happens at a time when members of the families that founded our mainstay corporations are stepping aside in favor of professional managers, who may have no particukar commitment to preserving or advancing the Minnesota commonwealth.

So both urban and rural Minnesota are caught up in the tensions of enormous change. At the same time, a growing economic gap threatens to divide rural Minnesotans from their urban cousins, and the wealthiest urbanites from their neighbors, who have not shared in recent income gains....

 

Doesn't that seem all too familiar? Even without mention of climate change, COVID-19 and variants, vaccines, political parties and lost elections and misinformation and disinformation? It sure looks to me as if we have continued down a misguided path and ended up with even more significantly dysfunctional systems and symptoms thereof.

I moved to Minnesota in the late 1970's, back when it had a reputation as a "state that works." If the Minnesota of today had existed 50 years ago, the state wouldn't even be on the list of places I'd consider as a possible home. Minnesota today does not evoke any images of a place I would want to call home. The economic gap has been publicly joined by a racial gap, a deteriorating environment, a malfunctioning state government with regulatory agencies doing, at best, a poor job of protecting our  commons and our most vulnerable and a political system either gridlocked or worse.

The Blandin Preface noted  that "...if Minnesota is to work well,  it can claim only one interdependent future." We appear to have failed miserably at exercising that claim over the past 30 years, but then so have 49 other states, many greater failures than our own. What do we need to do differently to create the kind of home our children deserve? The current baseline is too deteriorated from what it was a generation ago. We need to find common grounds and restore them.

Coming Home

by Mary Oliver

When we are driving in the dark,
on the long road [home],
when we are weary,
when the buildings and the pines lose their familiar look,
I imagine us rising from the speeding car.
I imagine us seeing everything from another place–
the top of one of the pale dunes, or the deep and nameless
fields of the sea.
And what we see is a world that cannot cherish us,
but which we cherish.
And what we see is our life moving like that
along the dark edges of everything,
headlights sweeping the blackness,
believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.
Looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongs
to you and me.

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