[Dialogue] [SPAM] Re: Letter to Alumni of the kemper building communitiesof the last few decades

[ed feldmanis]

I echo Marge's words. We love to have guests, so please invite yourselves to
come see us. I  thank George Packard and Jim Wiegel for their kind words and
deep care for us.

I also appreciate Marge's insistence that community is the social question
of our time. I thought she had a good idea there. As Dick West has said to
me the broad sweeping question that immediately precedes the one of
community is "can we all live?"  And even with that being true it interfaces
with the question of community.  This is also the question that now seeks to
frame all of the social questions that we find so pressing and salient.

Kemper, the Global Centrum, was a diverse and sometimes tumultuous community
when I lived here and when perhaps you did as well. There are events I
remember as remarkable.  One is having RS-1 in 1965.  Another is opening the
Kemper building with sea of desks and no walls.  My little daughter, Rita,
went to"mini-school" here.  We as a family were launched out into service
from this place.  We have tasted our own order version of community in
places like the Cleveland, Memphis, Houston, Sendai, Hai Ou, Taipei, and
Hong Kong houses.  But the Centrum for me has been special. This for
example, very recently, was where K. Elise invented the fantastic learning
basket and along with that "invented", so to speak, her doctorate in
philosophy.  And proudly I say the the 3 youngest of my grandchildren are
"learning basket babies."

Today a remnant of us forge on to create a community here,  It's genesis was
the order and it's sensibility is about social justice and caring in the
world.  We have taken on the special mission of promoting the green earth
agenda. Part of our focus remains to live in voluntary simplicity, keeping
our housing affordable, and part of the agenda is about demonstrating and
encouraging a new sustainable and "earth-loving" praxis in the world.  We
remain an experimental place echoing the old name "RCX" (residential
community experiment).

So we are grateful for all friends and supporters.  It is pleasing to us but
being and creating a community these days is no cake-walk.

Ed
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