Of weaving baskets and stitching cultures

The following is an excerpt from a book I am currently reading. The author was what they call an organizer, working on social issues, trying to improve the lives of African Americans residing in Chicago. The author's work was focused on people living in the Altgeld Gardens Public Housing Project which was mainly a black community. Altgeld Gardens was sand witched between a garbage dump, a sewage water treatment plant and the Calumet river, in the waters of which swam fish deformed by the river's toxic waters. The people who lived there happened to be those who had lost their jobs to outsourcing and globalization.
Here is the author talking about jobs lost, lives wasted and cultures crushed:

"...the scene took me back to the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betlenut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.
I'd always taken such markets for granted, part of the natural order of things. Now though, as I thought about Altgeld...I saw those Djakarta markets for what they really were: fragile precious things... "
"...For how could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars?
Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet river, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Atlgeld Gardens, into a deeper despair. "

The author happens to Barack Obama and the excerpt is from his book Dreams from My Father.
It is indeed comforting to know that someone with so much power today has such sensitivity and honesty.

I Have Arrived

It was exactly a year ago...I was anxious about him shifting to Mumbai, I was thrilled from just the prospect of him shifting right here, in my very own city, praying that everything works out well and he comes here...Was so vulnerable then, things happening miles apart decided my mood for the day. I was nothing but a bundle of emotions bouncing around.

Its been a year, yes, and now finally I can talk about it and smile! There is no regret about all that happened, or didn't happen, no qualms about anything. I can talk/blog openly about it and not feel my stomach squirm. Because the period of intense numbness has gone. This numbness caused me to think that whatever happens, just let it happen, I don't give a damn! That I shall not be hurt or sad if some guy in the future doesn't like me back. I slipped into a period of insensitivity to banish all emotions and just be me, plain and bland. I cultivated this numbness so that I could make some kind of protective sphere around me; a sphere that made me feel I am immune to pain.

I shed that protective cocoon today.

I am ready to feel again! I am ready to set forth on another adventure, to take another plunge!