My Isolated Opinion
posted Saturday January 15th, 2011
I don’t know that I have anything to say about what happened in Tucson that has much more meaning than anything anyone else has to say, but a very nice editor at the Washington Post insisted otherwise, and this piece I wrote will appear in the paper’s Outlook section tomorrow.
It could have happened anywhere — but it happened in Arizona. And I don’t think that was by accident.
Did you enjoy this article?
Share the love
Get updates!
Thanks, Amy, once again for speaking Arizona’s “other” voice. We won’t recover, and, in a way, I think it’s important that we don’t. There is no room for complacency, especially here in the Wild West. We have much work to do.
Amy, thank you for putting into words so many of the complexities I’ve been grappling with this week — for posing the questions,”Who should have citizenship? Health insurance? An organ transplant? A gun?”
In the desert there can be a sense of remoteness, a landscape magnified, but then too there are those expansive skies. I’ve often wondered why those expansive skies of the desert don’t more often lead to expansive thought.
Amy, I think your article provides an apt and timely description of Arizona.
And yet, I live in the friendliest of neighborhoods here in Arizona. I know my neighbors, lots of them. I know their kids, I know their dogs. We eat in each others homes and watch out for each others children. We celebrate together and help each other out when needed.
How I ask myself did a community such as my neighborhood happen here in Arizona?
I wonder what we could learn from taking a closer look at the communities in Arizona that do work.
Amy, how did you get to be so wise? Thank you for writing this. I’ve thought many of these same things. I don’t want to give up but now I’m not just frustrated, I’m scared.
ME
Hi Amy,
This is a really good article… I can see why the editor published it! I agree with a lot but thankfully live in a neighborhood like Noan… I guess I’m lucky (or my kids are)…but its hopeful to know that some communities are working! (Although no one here talks out loud about their political views… maybe that’s why its so civil?)