Chicago: the Stupid Experiment

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/moses04262008.html


Recalling Jane Addams' Lost Classic "The Spririt of Youth and the City Streets"
Chicago: the Stupid Experiment
By GREG MOSES

Chicago is bleeding, and the Mayor has called the citizens to action: “I don't want people to wait for Mayor Daley to call a meeting. I want you to call a meeting in your home with your children and loved ones. I want you to go next door and talk to those children next door. I want the parents of the block to say ‘This block will be free of violence.’ Suddenly, all voices converge upon the insight that if nobody else actually provides time or space for youthful thrills, the gun industry will.

Ninety nine years ago Jane Addams wrote about “the stupid experiment” of American life that she saw all around her in Chicago. The adult world had thrown together a city based on round-the-clock work. Impressive piles of cash were daily stacked and sorted. In the hustle-built streets meanwhile stood all the children dropped and stranded by a colossal shift of economic priorities. Stranded youth were symptom to a deeper cause, argued Addams. In modern life the whole spirit of youth has been exiled and detained.

“This stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play has, of course, brought about a fine revenge,” wrote Addams in 1909, pre-dating by a full decade the better known thesis of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Adults were damming up their own “sweet fountains” of pleasure, “but almost worse than the restrictive measures is our apparent belief that the city has no obligation in the matter, an assumption upon which the modern city turns over to commercialism practically all the provisions for public recreation.”

Public recreation? “Only in the modern city have men concluded that it is no longer necessary for the municipality to provide for the insatiable desire for play.” SWAT teams and jobs programs are what headlines call for today; more “restrictive measures” and “organizing work.” According to the Addams formula, these can only add up to another “fine revenge.”

[mac2]

1. The quilty the glum have taken over our society.

No dancing, singing, or happiness. Religious non-joy folks want us to be like them. Fear and hate fill their days.

[Selatius]

2. You can maximize profit margins by regimenting the daily lives of workers to squeeze maximum labor.

Play is a waste of time, and time is money. Therefore, it is vitally important to keep workers focused on the tasks at hand: To make you money. :sarcasm: