Some of my best-remembered college memories are of my freshman creative writing class where, on two or three afternoons, our Marlboro-packing professor David Walton led us out to the lawn next to Carnegie-Mellon’s Fine Arts building to stimulate our discussion of words, ideas and life.
The warm grass, our circle of classmates, the encircling buildings. Our open-air enclave. Students walking by, out of listening range, barely in recognition range. A young woman named Motoko Inoue makes an earnest observation as the rest of us earnestly try to listen. Walton taps the ashes off his nth Marlboro. This is one of those experiences I can see as if I had videoed it. (Motoko had made a positive comment on one of my assignments, which surely helped me remember her.)
This was in my 17th year. In lower-numbered years, I had done Cub Scout field trips and family road trips and Sunday evening drives to the Forbush frozen custard stand halfway to Ellwood City and that was pretty much the extent of my travels as a college-bound teen. Despite this, Carnegie-Mellon chose to accept me while Harvard, Yale and MIT did not. Good thing, too, as I would have been toast in an Ivy League school. Unlike Ivy Leaguers, I had neither the money or the arrogance to compensate for my sheltered upbringing and provincial ignorance. Pittsburgh would turn out to be the right place for me: big enough to open my eyes while not blinding them.
And so, having class outside on the CMU lawn felt very adult and transformative, at least to me. (Was Motoko already worldly and so took our class outside in stride? Or did she also taste the freedom?) Up to then, education had been administered like communion, with us sitting reverently in tidy rows and columns. But now we were being entrusted to sit in a circle, an irregular circle at that, face-to-face with our peers, of whom our professor was now just one, all poised to absorb whatever insights our mutual curiosities unleashed, surrounded by massive brick buildings enshrining the pursuit of artistry and knowledge, from whose confines we had just exultantly escaped.
• • •
Class outside was like taking your first decent baseball glove onto the field at age thirteen. You found you could catch balls you couldn’t catch before. You suddendly felt legitimate. You thought of yourself as more capable and your confidence helped make it so. You lived in the moment of anticipating the catch and nothing beyond.
• • •
Class outside was like, 25 years later, crossing the street from Gare de Chalon-sur-Saône to the tile-roofed Hôtel Saint-Georges on my first-ever overseas business trip. Historically, Kodak’s U.S. technical grunts rarely left the Rochester mother ship: if and when it was absolutely necessary to collaborate with an international site, it was always the English or the French or the Australians or the Brazilians who made the pilgrimage to Rochester. And so Guy English, our lab head at the time and who not incidentally was from England, decided it was finally time for a few U.S. process engineers, including me, to visit their counterparts in Europe and exchange ideas. Looking back, I wonder how he justified this trip to our management, but to his credit he prevailed.
I vaguely recall a few meetings in bland conference rooms, not unlike those in Rochester, but my most vivid memories were of the camaraderie and the restaurants and the espresso and the wine — it was all like having class outside. I found an eye-opening world beyond the U.S. and, more importantly, understood that we were not the center of it.
• • •
Inspecting my room at Hôtel Saint-Georges, I noted how the shower area was simply an extension of the bathroom floor, with no curb. How, I thought, could the French be so lax to allow one’s shower water to flow wherever it would? Shouldn’t it be contained?
No, there was no need. It was free to explore its space, as now was I.
Knowing no action is likely at the Federal level until the day Addison Mitchell McConnell changes his middle name to Delano, at least 11 U.S. cities have stepped up and launched efforts on their own to pay slavery reparations. Asheville is one of those cities.
Now, while I support the concept, I have no idea what a fair and reasonable reparations plan would look like, or whether such a thing is even possible. In money terms, my guess is that the debt owed to the descendants of slaves would be 20 to 25% of 200-years-worth of the economic output of the former slave-holding states as well as any state which had Jim Crow laws. This is too much math for me to tackle — others who have done the math have suggested sums as large as $20 trillion. For reference, the current total U.S. annual personal income is about $21 trillion.
Any Federal reparations plan that would ever see the light of day in this environment will be more a political statement than a fulfillment of economic justice. That is why what is happening (to various extents) in those 11 cities is important, and why I am highlighting the recent action by the Asheville Police to partner with the Lights On! program.
Others who have launched this program include the police departments of Evansville, WY, Chatham County, GA, Suffolk County, NY, Chattanooga, TN, the University of Maryland, and over 100 agencies in the Minnesota area, where MicroGrants was founded.
The Lights On! website points out that “a broken taillight or turn signal can … spark a downward economic spiral that for some yields multiple tickets, confrontations with law enforcement, and even vehicle impoundment. The Lights On! program has the potential to disrupt the downward spiral and build goodwill between police departments and the communities they serve.” This is an ingenious way to reduce the combat mentality of the police (with its often fatal consequences) and is a wonderful example of badly-needed social reparations.
My concern is that, at this writing, only one Asheville repair shop is participating in the program. (Thank you to the owners, who don’t even live in Asheville.) Hopefully more will sign on as the program gets going here.