I don't have a lot to say right now. Everything is fine on my end--this is 2016 me, in case you weren't sure. Sorry I didn't post yesterday--I just got busy.
It's curious watching all the political races this year, and not just because of the curiousness of the races themselves. The school community is becoming functional again, as I've said, though we're not anything like what we were--we're not a college, we're a group of friends who organize various public educational events and also have a small, secret group of unofficial students--mostly teenagers, Aidan and his friends, though there are a few adults, too. And the thing is, as a group, we need to find ways to respond to politics.
This is not something we ever did before. The school was isolated and, as such, apolitical, a world apart. We expected students to get involved in the world, that was part of the point, but only after they left, and we never taught them how to be involved except in an interpersonal way--how to be of service to individuals, as clergy. That we aren't that way any longer is largely Steve Bees' doing, though he has my support--and the support of the others, to varying degrees. He says "it's all right to live in Shangra-La, but if you never get out in the world, what's the point? What good does it do?" And so we're getting involved.
And we're inventing ways to be involved. Like, do we want to endorse specific candidates? What do we do if community members end up on opposite sides of some serious political divide? What can we give to the situation that is uniquely ours, different from what people who aren't part of our community can do?
We don't know yet. We're trying a few things. This school, as far as I understand it, has always been a group of friends trying things out, ever since the beginning in Shrimp and Jim's townhouse.
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