( On Not Going Home)

A wonderfully written and enjoyable article by Richard Cohen. It is always in our subconscious but never much thought about the question and subject. It is worth expressing your thoughts on the subject in comments section. (F. Sheikh) Some excerpts;

” In a fascinating recent essay in The London Review of Books, called “On Not Going Home,” James Wood relates how he “asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood.”

It was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.

That question is worth repeating: If I had only a few weeks to live, where would I go? It is a good way of getting rid of the clutter that distracts or blinds. I will get to that in a moment.

In the essay, Wood, who grew up in England but has lived in the United States for 18 years, explores a certain form of contemporary homelessness — lives lived without the finality of exile, but also without the familiarity of home.

He speaks of existences “marked by a certain provisionality, a structure of departure and return that may not end.”

This is a widespread modern condition; perhaps it is the modern condition. Out of it, often, comes anxiety. Wood does not focus on the psychological effects of what he calls “a certain outsider-dom,” but if you dig into people who are depressed you often find that their distress at some level is linked to a sense of not fitting in, an anxiety about belonging: displacement anguish.

Wood describes looking at the familiar life of his Boston street, “the heavy maple trees, the unkempt willow down at the end, an old white Cadillac with the bumper sticker ‘Ted Kennedy has killed more people than my gun,’ and I feel … nothing: some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection, no past, despite all the years I have lived there — just a tugging distance from it all. A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: How did I get here?”

“Wood writes: “Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness,’ which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: It is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.”

Yes, being not quite home, acceptance, which may be bountiful, is what is left to us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/opinion/cohen-in-search-of-home.html?hp&rref=opinion

Shared by,Nasik Elahi

As Asian-Americans Age, Their Children Face Cultural Hurdles

Asian-Americans are struggling to abide by a strong tradition in which they are
commonly expected to care for their parents at home, but few institutions are
prepared to help.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/us/as-asian-americans-age-their-children-face-cultural-hurdles.html

In a recent court ruling in Utah, a Federal judge ruled that the ban on marriage co-habitation is un-constitutional. The plaintiff in this case was a Mormon and asked the court to rule the ban on co-habitation un-constitutional because the existing law uses the language of co-habitation and not polygamy, but the law was applied to polygamy also. The Judge ruled that marriage license, for legal purposes, can be with only one wife but others can be only co-habitants. Following are some thoughts by experts in NYT. Dr, Aziz Amin gave a wonderful talk on this subject at Thinkers Forum some time ago.  Although it has religious dimension also, but If you like to comment, please comment only from social and legal point of view and not religious aspect. Thanks. ( F. Sheikh)   

Legally, No Different From Same-Sex Unions

Ron Den Otter is an associate professor of political science at Cal Poly San Luis Opisbo.

DECEMBER 17, 2013

Americans are becoming more accustomed to the idea that it may not be wrong for people to have unconventional intimate relationships, provided that all of those involved are consenting adults. Television programs, like HBO’s “Big Love,” TLC’s “Sister Wives” and the National Geographic Channel’s “Polygamy USA” have illuminated the unique challenges of multipartner relationships. The more charitable media portrayal of polygamy, coupled with the debate over same-sex marriage, has encouraged a few academics to think more deeply about the meaning of marriage in a morally pluralistic society like our own. Limiting the size of a marriage may soon be seen as no more justified (or constitutional) than restricting marriage to same-race or opposite-sex couples.

Enough With the Scare Tactics

John Corvino, chairman of the philosophy department at Wayne State University, is the author of “What’s Wrong With Homosexuality?”

UPDATED DECEMBER 17, 2013, 6:30 PM

 

Conservative fearmongers have long warned that same-sex marriage will send the nation down a slippery slope to polygamy, and they’re pointing to the recent Utah decision as evidence. The marriage-equality movement does indeed have a connection with recent challenges to polygamy bans — just not the connection that fearmongers contend.

 

 

There are two versions of the slippery-slope argument from gay marriage to polygamy, and as I’ve argued at length elsewhere, they’re both bad. One version claims that because procreation requires one man and one woman, that’s the only logical arrangement for marriage, and once you reject that standard, anything goes. But whatever its merits as an argument against same-sex marriage, the physical complementarity of the sexes makes a terrible argument against polygamy: Human biology makes it quite possible — which is not to say desirable — for a man to impregnate multiple women or for a woman to bear the children of multiple men.

We Are a Nation of Boundary Breakers

Melynda Price is an associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law and blogs at Thoughts of an Ivory Tower Interloper.

DECEMBER 17, 2013

We tend to forget this nation began with the pushing, then breaking, of boundaries. We have moved in slow, plodding steps from a nation that practiced widespread exclusion to a more expansive democracy. It may be hard for some to swallow polygamy as a democratic practice, but perhaps it is.

Polygamy Is Bad for Women

Shoshana Grossbard is a professor of economics emerita at San Diego State University and a visiting professor of economics at the University of Zaragoza. In 2010, she testified as an expert witness at a constitutional reference case in British Columbia aimed at determining the validity of Canada’s polygamy law.

UPDATED DECEMBER 17, 2013, 6:39 PM

According to Pierre Trudeau, late prime minister of Canada, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” In that spirit Adam Winkler favors lifting the ban on plural marriage.

I used to agree with him, but now I think differently. Under polygyny, markets for wives are sellers’ markets, where men can participate multiple times but women can only do so once at a time. Assuming a free market, women will pick their marriage partners and capture the entire value added of marriage.

A Step in the Wrong Direction

W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, is the author of “Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives.” He is onTwitter.

DECEMBER 17, 2013

 

In their embrace of a laissez faire approach to family life, some liberals andlibertarians seem blind to a basic truth: namely, the success of liberalism depends in part on thriving two-parent families. Not so for William Galston, who recognized in his book “Liberal Purposes” that American liberalism depends upon virtues most likely to be cultivated in a particular family type. He wrote: “From the standpoint of economic well-being and sound psychological development, the evidence indicates that the intact, two-parent family is generally preferable to the available alternatives.”

Understanding Who ‘They’ Are

Ralph Richard Banks, the Jackson Eli Reynolds professor of law at Stanford Law School, is the author of “Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone.”

DECEMBER 17, 2013

Will the advent of same-sex marriage portend the demise of laws that prohibit polygamous marriage? Maybe. The legal arguments for the continued prohibition of polygamous marriage are not nearly as weighty as commonly thought. Rather, what undergirds the continued rejection of polygamy are social understandings that inform moral and legal reasoning about marriage laws.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/12/17/should-plural-marriage-be-legal/understanding-those-who-practice-polygamy