GftNC - Home is not "wherever we are," though being able to feel at home wherever you are is a gift.
I have lived in Seattle since the mid-1970s (aside from a few years interregnum when I had to go back to Florida), and have been in my current house for nearly 30 years. I agree with you whole-heartedly that the thought of moving is fairly horrifying.
OTOH, if I ever do have to relocate, I hope I have the grit and spirit to make an adventure out of it.
I felt oddly at home while visiting London many years ago.
While London can feel like you are permanently swimming upriver, oddly enough it also feels like home to so many different people because of its diversity. That word has been thrown around unthinkingly a lot in recent years (along with "vibrant", real estate agent speak for "deprived", argh) but I don't think there are that many cities that are actually as truly diverse as London. Among other factors 40%+ of the people are foreign born so there is no one group dominating the city in any significant way and despite the crazy prices there are still council flats in Hampstead. And Londoners are by and large a nice bunch. I have different "homes" in my head as well, but feel this is it for now.
I was dragged around a lot as a child (4 countries), homes changed and parents said "but darling, surely home is wherever we are?" (for clever and worldly people they were remarkably clueless about children's psychology), so I have now lived in the same apartment in London for 47 years - longer than almost anybody I know has lived anywhere. I lived in LA for a year in the 90s, but kept my apartment and it was always "home". Even when I married, I split my time fairly equally between the North Country and my London pad, and since my husband died eight years ago I have been permanently in London. The idea of moving is fairly horrifying to me. I wish I were more flexible, but I have just turned 70, so maybe that's that.
I felt oddly at home while visiting London many years ago. I haven't been back since. Aside from leaving a lot of people behind, my lack of UK citizenship, and the high cost of living there ... eh, never mind.
Seriously, though, I immediately felt like I belonged there.
As I have mentioned before, we’ve been thinking a lot about (early) retirement due to the combination of burnout, security concerns, and the right’s ongoing attempts to decimate and subjugate higher education in the US. A big chunk of that conversation has to come down to affordability and sustainability, but once that is accounted for, a lot of the rest comes down to the sense of place. As we have been discussing that, I’ve found myself building a Venn diagram of the different ways that we think of home, and trying to fit potential new homes to those overlapping categories: community, environment, history.
Community wise, I think we would most feel at home in a(nother) college town. It’s not that we think of ourselves as academics (we’re non-tenured faculty, which leaves us outside of a lot of that sense of academic community), it’s that college towns are more connected to, and invested in, a sense of a collective future that can be made better through better equipping our future generations for change. It would also be nice to not be surrounded by people dead set on seeing us as the enemy. Still, I feel like this is the level of “home” furthest from our hearts in many ways.
Environment...the better word here is probably “bioregion.” I grew up in the Great Lakes region and both of us have spent nearly 20 formative years on the Colorado Front Range. These are the bioregions we most feel in harmony with. Even after 20 years in Southern California we have never quite managed to feel at one with the coastal hills and the Mediterranean climate. We are Deep Ecologists in worldview and our hearts practice dark green religion, and the trees here don’t speak to us in the same way.
But it’s not just that we don’t feel a personal connection to the biosphere here – it’s that this bioregion does not mesh as well with the folkways that connect us with our sense of family heritage, which is more Nordic. We want a bioregion that we connect with on both an ecological and on a mythic level.
My mother’s side of the family was part of the Swedish diaspora of the mid-1800s. There’s not a lot of yearning for a homeland. That whole side left the homeland because they found their communities unlivable. Their hope lay in a new place. My father’s side were all restless religious malcontents. Neither group feels any connection to an earthly place. Their homeland was always the gated community of heaven.
But when they did land on these shores, they went in search of the lands on which they knew how to live. And those places resonated with the folkways that they brought with them, even as they rejected the communities that they came from.
All this is why I have no sense of homeland in the “god-given place” way of things. It’s more a sense of having places with which my life and spirit resonate. I hope we can find on of those places when we finally get a chance to settle in for the rest of our lives.
I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland.
This is in the same category as "who are your people?" questions.
At a party once, standing on the outskirts of a conversation and not really paying attention, someone asked, "And what about you, Mike? Who are your people?" I think the answer was supposed to be something like the English, or the Baptists, but what popped out of my mouth before I had even thought about it was, "The applied mathematicians."
My childhood home is still "home", as I still have many friends in the area and zoning laws as well as environmental preserves have kept development from completely overwhelming the place. Still a lot more McMansions than we had growing up, but the basic complexion is recognizable.
I've lived in other places, but the Northeast is my preferred world. Dunno if it's the weather or the landscape or the culture or what. Lived on the Pacific coast for a bit - which was beautiful. But it wasn't *my* ocean. I can't explain it.
On the other hand, I know more than a few George "I'm shakin' the dust of this crummy little town off my feet" Baileys who never looked back and for whom home is where they chose to make it.
So, I dunno. I think "home" is an idea - a place of comfort and familiarity - much more than a point on a map. But I can see how people might be attached to a specific patch of ground, especially if it's been in the same hands for generations. I've always wondered how the perceptions on that differ in, say, Western Europe.
I vaguely recall a conversation a while back about relocating Israel to a carve-out in Baja California. Would it still be "Israel"? Ship of Theseus and all that. I'm pretty sure substances were involved and are at least partially responsible for my lack of recollection.
Since we're on the subject of homes, I'm glad ObWi has found a new one!
Someone once said, “‘Home’ is where you bury your bone.”
Roger Waters wrote and sang a variation on that, the only one I was previously familiar with:
So, I don't feel alone on the weight of the stone
Now that I've found somewhere safe to bury my bone
And any fool knows a dog needs a home
A shelter from pigs on the wing
I wonder if I'm a born nomad, because I have no sense of an ancestral "home." I've lived in different parts of the country and liked or disliked them for what I found there, not for any larger ethnic or familial attachments.
The yearning for a "true homeland" has been at the foundation of many wars, pogroms, dispossessions, and conquests - either by an entity out to capture the homeland, or the former inhabitants thereof trying to reclaim it.
In dramas where conflict is central to the plot, there is often a scene where the main character loses a loved one - a sibling, usually - to that conflict. And thereafter the main character burns with a special rage for vengeance. I've always considered this either bad plotting, a form of "fridging" or - if it does happen in real life - sheer lunacy. It's a WAR, you nitwit; one that you and your loved one willingly signed up to fight, or even instigated yourselves. People die in wars. Maybe if you didn't want to risk your loved one, you shouldn't have pushed for this battle, eh?
I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland. Maybe the way you lost it was horrific and unjust, but inflicting similar or worse damage on the people currently occupying it (who may not even be the same ones who drove your ancestors off) will only set up another cycle of dispossession-revenge-war. If it were as clearcut as getting rid of the usurpers and replacing them, that would be one thing. But it is seldom that clearcut.
The I/P horror is non clearcut beyond description, with claim to the same bit of land going back generations on one side, centuries on the other, possibly millenia on both sides. At what point do ancestral claims cease to be arguable? One generation? Ten? A thousand? At what point do past atrocities justify, or cease to justify, current and future ones?
Someone once said, "'Home' is where you bury your bone." I've always liked that.
Home is where you make it. Wherever you find yourself, you can bury your bone there.
I can relate to the "can't go home again" simply because California has grown so dramatically since I was young. I grew up on a ranch 5 miles out of town. Now, that ranch, and everything for an additional 5 miles, is all houses.
It's not that I physically can't go there. I can. It's not just that the specific house we live in is no longer there, although it's not. It's that the open space that was all around is no longer anything like open.
I expect that the situation for people who can't even get back to the physical location, and the culture that was there, is far worse. But I at least have a glimmer.
bc's comment is a bit of a misapprehension, because in this context, I imagine that there would be new principles enshrined as amendments rather than trying to contort current rulings into something new. We don't have a lot of history to work with, but I see amendments as making new law to specifically overturn earlier decisions. They didn't say 'how can we reinterpret Dred Scott so that African-Americans are actually citizens'.
WRT BC's linking of environmental justice to the rights of the unborn, the opposite legal flourish would be to invoke Castle Doctrine as a defense for an abortion in a state with restrictive abortion laws, but liberal firearms laws.
The think I noticed was that the rhetoric of retribution was about evenly split between End Times dogwhistles and QAnon dogwhistles. Either way, it's pretty clear that I, being an academic, am on the wrong side of the friend/enemy distinction.
I think the potential for some sort of campaign of retribution is very high, and California campuses have to be near the top of that list. I especially worry for my friends and colleagues at UCLA, but I think we all need to be wary.
Seems to me that it is preferable to have some framework rather than none, even if inconsistently applied (at least you have something to measure against and criticize). Otherwise, you are just making things up. And by a small group of people no less. Claiming the Constitution is "living" runs a great risk of just making things up and thwarting the amendment process.
That's what happened with Roe. Although the article mentions this, it seems to ignore that the modern resurgence of originalism was a direct response to the "penumbra" of Roe. Well, that and the protests that broke out on the Supreme Court's steps hoping to influence what the vote couldn't bring.
GftNC, if originalism is "insane," what do you suggest?
Btw, I think of Scalia more of a textualist first and foremost. I lean textualist as far as that can get you, originalist after that.
Lj: "an amendment specifically about environmental protection, possibly couched in terms of the rights of future generations."
Interesting thought, especially in light of Dobbs. Trying to bring back discussion of the rights of the unborn at the federal level are we?
Well, these are people who have been absolutely hammered with eliminationist propaganda for a generation now. If you can accept the premise the rest flows naturally, despite the lack of names. Anecdotal violence is pumped up to provide examples of the violent left, and that is sufficient for these warriors for Truth and Good. They love the righteous feeling, but will that be enough to pull the trigger when the moment arrives? We will all find out together, because this kind of worldview never stays controlled, only unleashed.
I never thought I'd paste a link to a facebook post, but here it is. A friend of mine shared it. The original poster is someone (I'm guessing an actual human) going by Cory Nichols. I haven't a clue who that is.
https://www.facebook.com/share/1DC6bLNdGj/
The first 20% or so:
The misinformation surrounding Charlie Kirk is astounding - and I’m not talking about average people sounding off on social media - I’m talking about the BS being spread by major news outlets.
While Kirk’s shooter was obviously overly steeped in internet whackadoo memelord culture - the “normies” don’t have a clue about how internet culture works at all.
Charlie Kirk wasn’t someone who was looking for honest debate. He was a political operative spreading hate and divisiveness. When you show his fans his racist, sexist or bigoted rhetoric - they defend it by saying “That’s not (racist, sexist, bigoted) - it’s true.” And that was his goal.
The whole “Prove Me Wrong” setup that made Kirk famous wasn’t really about proving anyone wrong. It was about creating content. Kirk mastered a specific type of performance that looked like debate but functioned more like a carefully orchestrated show designed to make his opponents look foolish and his positions seem unassailable.
What the writer gets into later tracks with some of the things nous has said about what constitutes meaningful dialogue.
More simply than that murk, though, I'd expect that The Papaya of Hate would either pardon or under-bus-chuck whoever oversaw the whole thing, and then sleep secure in the cover that the USSC has given him over presidential immunity.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Rule Six, there is NO … Rule Six!…”
Bruce (Pete): "I vaguely recall a conversation a while back about relocating Israel to a carve-out in Baja California."
You would probably have a better (nothing like good, but better) chance selling it as a relocated Palestine.
"
GftNC - Home is not "wherever we are," though being able to feel at home wherever you are is a gift.
I have lived in Seattle since the mid-1970s (aside from a few years interregnum when I had to go back to Florida), and have been in my current house for nearly 30 years. I agree with you whole-heartedly that the thought of moving is fairly horrifying.
OTOH, if I ever do have to relocate, I hope I have the grit and spirit to make an adventure out of it.
"
I felt oddly at home while visiting London many years ago.
While London can feel like you are permanently swimming upriver, oddly enough it also feels like home to so many different people because of its diversity. That word has been thrown around unthinkingly a lot in recent years (along with "vibrant", real estate agent speak for "deprived", argh) but I don't think there are that many cities that are actually as truly diverse as London. Among other factors 40%+ of the people are foreign born so there is no one group dominating the city in any significant way and despite the crazy prices there are still council flats in Hampstead. And Londoners are by and large a nice bunch. I have different "homes" in my head as well, but feel this is it for now.
"
I wish you did belong here, hsh!
I was dragged around a lot as a child (4 countries), homes changed and parents said "but darling, surely home is wherever we are?" (for clever and worldly people they were remarkably clueless about children's psychology), so I have now lived in the same apartment in London for 47 years - longer than almost anybody I know has lived anywhere. I lived in LA for a year in the 90s, but kept my apartment and it was always "home". Even when I married, I split my time fairly equally between the North Country and my London pad, and since my husband died eight years ago I have been permanently in London. The idea of moving is fairly horrifying to me. I wish I were more flexible, but I have just turned 70, so maybe that's that.
"
I felt oddly at home while visiting London many years ago. I haven't been back since. Aside from leaving a lot of people behind, my lack of UK citizenship, and the high cost of living there ... eh, never mind.
Seriously, though, I immediately felt like I belonged there.
"
As I have mentioned before, we’ve been thinking a lot about (early) retirement due to the combination of burnout, security concerns, and the right’s ongoing attempts to decimate and subjugate higher education in the US. A big chunk of that conversation has to come down to affordability and sustainability, but once that is accounted for, a lot of the rest comes down to the sense of place. As we have been discussing that, I’ve found myself building a Venn diagram of the different ways that we think of home, and trying to fit potential new homes to those overlapping categories: community, environment, history.
Community wise, I think we would most feel at home in a(nother) college town. It’s not that we think of ourselves as academics (we’re non-tenured faculty, which leaves us outside of a lot of that sense of academic community), it’s that college towns are more connected to, and invested in, a sense of a collective future that can be made better through better equipping our future generations for change. It would also be nice to not be surrounded by people dead set on seeing us as the enemy. Still, I feel like this is the level of “home” furthest from our hearts in many ways.
Environment...the better word here is probably “bioregion.” I grew up in the Great Lakes region and both of us have spent nearly 20 formative years on the Colorado Front Range. These are the bioregions we most feel in harmony with. Even after 20 years in Southern California we have never quite managed to feel at one with the coastal hills and the Mediterranean climate. We are Deep Ecologists in worldview and our hearts practice dark green religion, and the trees here don’t speak to us in the same way.
But it’s not just that we don’t feel a personal connection to the biosphere here – it’s that this bioregion does not mesh as well with the folkways that connect us with our sense of family heritage, which is more Nordic. We want a bioregion that we connect with on both an ecological and on a mythic level.
My mother’s side of the family was part of the Swedish diaspora of the mid-1800s. There’s not a lot of yearning for a homeland. That whole side left the homeland because they found their communities unlivable. Their hope lay in a new place. My father’s side were all restless religious malcontents. Neither group feels any connection to an earthly place. Their homeland was always the gated community of heaven.
But when they did land on these shores, they went in search of the lands on which they knew how to live. And those places resonated with the folkways that they brought with them, even as they rejected the communities that they came from.
All this is why I have no sense of homeland in the “god-given place” way of things. It’s more a sense of having places with which my life and spirit resonate. I hope we can find on of those places when we finally get a chance to settle in for the rest of our lives.
"
I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland.
This is in the same category as "who are your people?" questions.
At a party once, standing on the outskirts of a conversation and not really paying attention, someone asked, "And what about you, Mike? Who are your people?" I think the answer was supposed to be something like the English, or the Baptists, but what popped out of my mouth before I had even thought about it was, "The applied mathematicians."
"
My childhood home is still "home", as I still have many friends in the area and zoning laws as well as environmental preserves have kept development from completely overwhelming the place. Still a lot more McMansions than we had growing up, but the basic complexion is recognizable.
I've lived in other places, but the Northeast is my preferred world. Dunno if it's the weather or the landscape or the culture or what. Lived on the Pacific coast for a bit - which was beautiful. But it wasn't *my* ocean. I can't explain it.
On the other hand, I know more than a few George "I'm shakin' the dust of this crummy little town off my feet" Baileys who never looked back and for whom home is where they chose to make it.
So, I dunno. I think "home" is an idea - a place of comfort and familiarity - much more than a point on a map. But I can see how people might be attached to a specific patch of ground, especially if it's been in the same hands for generations. I've always wondered how the perceptions on that differ in, say, Western Europe.
I vaguely recall a conversation a while back about relocating Israel to a carve-out in Baja California. Would it still be "Israel"? Ship of Theseus and all that. I'm pretty sure substances were involved and are at least partially responsible for my lack of recollection.
Since we're on the subject of homes, I'm glad ObWi has found a new one!
"
Someone once said, “‘Home’ is where you bury your bone.”
Roger Waters wrote and sang a variation on that, the only one I was previously familiar with:
"
I wonder if I'm a born nomad, because I have no sense of an ancestral "home." I've lived in different parts of the country and liked or disliked them for what I found there, not for any larger ethnic or familial attachments.
The yearning for a "true homeland" has been at the foundation of many wars, pogroms, dispossessions, and conquests - either by an entity out to capture the homeland, or the former inhabitants thereof trying to reclaim it.
In dramas where conflict is central to the plot, there is often a scene where the main character loses a loved one - a sibling, usually - to that conflict. And thereafter the main character burns with a special rage for vengeance. I've always considered this either bad plotting, a form of "fridging" or - if it does happen in real life - sheer lunacy. It's a WAR, you nitwit; one that you and your loved one willingly signed up to fight, or even instigated yourselves. People die in wars. Maybe if you didn't want to risk your loved one, you shouldn't have pushed for this battle, eh?
I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland. Maybe the way you lost it was horrific and unjust, but inflicting similar or worse damage on the people currently occupying it (who may not even be the same ones who drove your ancestors off) will only set up another cycle of dispossession-revenge-war. If it were as clearcut as getting rid of the usurpers and replacing them, that would be one thing. But it is seldom that clearcut.
The I/P horror is non clearcut beyond description, with claim to the same bit of land going back generations on one side, centuries on the other, possibly millenia on both sides. At what point do ancestral claims cease to be arguable? One generation? Ten? A thousand? At what point do past atrocities justify, or cease to justify, current and future ones?
Someone once said, "'Home' is where you bury your bone." I've always liked that.
Home is where you make it. Wherever you find yourself, you can bury your bone there.
"
I can relate to the "can't go home again" simply because California has grown so dramatically since I was young. I grew up on a ranch 5 miles out of town. Now, that ranch, and everything for an additional 5 miles, is all houses.
It's not that I physically can't go there. I can. It's not just that the specific house we live in is no longer there, although it's not. It's that the open space that was all around is no longer anything like open.
I expect that the situation for people who can't even get back to the physical location, and the culture that was there, is far worse. But I at least have a glimmer.
On “Precursors”
Maybe we need a "Meta Godwin's Law" regarding the probability that someone will invoke Godwin's Law.
"
Whose fault is that?
On “An experimental first post”
bc's comment is a bit of a misapprehension, because in this context, I imagine that there would be new principles enshrined as amendments rather than trying to contort current rulings into something new. We don't have a lot of history to work with, but I see amendments as making new law to specifically overturn earlier decisions. They didn't say 'how can we reinterpret Dred Scott so that African-Americans are actually citizens'.
"
WRT BC's linking of environmental justice to the rights of the unborn, the opposite legal flourish would be to invoke Castle Doctrine as a defense for an abortion in a state with restrictive abortion laws, but liberal firearms laws.
On “I just can’t…”
The think I noticed was that the rhetoric of retribution was about evenly split between End Times dogwhistles and QAnon dogwhistles. Either way, it's pretty clear that I, being an academic, am on the wrong side of the friend/enemy distinction.
I think the potential for some sort of campaign of retribution is very high, and California campuses have to be near the top of that list. I especially worry for my friends and colleagues at UCLA, but I think we all need to be wary.
On “An experimental first post”
No, not really, I was thinking of these
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/29/historic-german-ruling-says-climate-goals-not-tough-enough
and
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/29/south-korea-court-climate-law-violates-rights-future-generations
On “Precursors”
We don't even need Godwin's law anymore. The probability is 1 from the get-go now.
On “An experimental first post”
Seems to me that it is preferable to have some framework rather than none, even if inconsistently applied (at least you have something to measure against and criticize). Otherwise, you are just making things up. And by a small group of people no less. Claiming the Constitution is "living" runs a great risk of just making things up and thwarting the amendment process.
That's what happened with Roe. Although the article mentions this, it seems to ignore that the modern resurgence of originalism was a direct response to the "penumbra" of Roe. Well, that and the protests that broke out on the Supreme Court's steps hoping to influence what the vote couldn't bring.
GftNC, if originalism is "insane," what do you suggest?
Btw, I think of Scalia more of a textualist first and foremost. I lean textualist as far as that can get you, originalist after that.
Lj: "an amendment specifically about environmental protection, possibly couched in terms of the rights of future generations."
Interesting thought, especially in light of Dobbs. Trying to bring back discussion of the rights of the unborn at the federal level are we?
On “I just can’t…”
Well, these are people who have been absolutely hammered with eliminationist propaganda for a generation now. If you can accept the premise the rest flows naturally, despite the lack of names. Anecdotal violence is pumped up to provide examples of the violent left, and that is sufficient for these warriors for Truth and Good. They love the righteous feeling, but will that be enough to pull the trigger when the moment arrives? We will all find out together, because this kind of worldview never stays controlled, only unleashed.
On “Don’t know much about [ObWi] history…”
Thank you for doing all this work
"
Thanks! Can I ask you a few more questions off list? Email me at libjpn@gmail.com.
On “Precursors”
I never thought I'd paste a link to a facebook post, but here it is. A friend of mine shared it. The original poster is someone (I'm guessing an actual human) going by Cory Nichols. I haven't a clue who that is.
https://www.facebook.com/share/1DC6bLNdGj/
The first 20% or so:
What the writer gets into later tracks with some of the things nous has said about what constitutes meaningful dialogue.
On “Don’t know much about [ObWi] history…”
same katherine
On “IANAL, but…”
More simply than that murk, though, I'd expect that The Papaya of Hate would either pardon or under-bus-chuck whoever oversaw the whole thing, and then sleep secure in the cover that the USSC has given him over presidential immunity.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.