>
> On Feb 27, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Dennis Perrin wrote:
>
> Going food shopping outside of Ann Arbor is quite depressing. The sad
>> expressions on people's faces. The heft. The slo-mo gaits. Death seems to
>> have already arrived. Only gravity holds together what's left.
>>
>
> It does seem that there's very little for elder citizens other than medical
> appointments, and careful shopping. But there's always 'hope'.
>
> It would be nice if there were areas in the public space for elders to
> pursue activities for which they've developed some degree of skill during a
> lifetime of service. Pursue the activities for a purely personal benefit, or
> a local public good. A place to bring their lifetime collection of tools,
> and skills, and use them for the benefit of their community. Maybe even
> passing on some of their experience.
>
> martin
Martin, living an hour WNW of Ann Arbor, in East Lansing, and working an hour N of here, in Mount Pleasant, my sense is that Dennis isn't writing about the elderly... its large swaths of the population at all age levels.
Outside of the university towns and few wealthier areas of Michigan, Real America dominates (and while the history of industrial labor unions means that our Traditional Values folks are a little more likely to have a left economic populism attached to their right cultural populism than in some other regions...) and xenophobic anti-cosmopolitanism reigns whether you're talking about consumption or politics, religion or the environment, or guns or sex/gender/sexuality. Sometimes the xenophobia dominates and sometimes the anti-consmopolitanism but each almost always informs the other... my students often speak of folks not like them as if they were (space or illegal) aliens.