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

[R Williams]

Ed,
 
Maybe the "community" question is, "can we all live together?"  Occurs to me that's the only way we can live.
 
Randy

--- On Wed, 6/18/08, ed feldmanis <edfeldmanis at gmail.com> wrote:

From: ed feldmanis <edfeldmanis at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] [SPAM] Re: Letter to Alumni of the kemper building communitiesof the last few decades
To: "Colleague Dialogue" <dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
Date: Wednesday, June 18, 2008, 5:55 AM


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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