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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: September 6, 2004
Reviewed:
Latest Update: September 6, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
We Dont' Go There Anymore
- Introduction
Why I chose to share this reading.- Focus:
Main point of this reading.- Reading
Full identification of source for reading AND excerpt.- Concepts:
Concepts and Key Words.- Discussion
Discussion questions.- Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses
What this has to do with our class.* * *
- Issues of poverty revolve around more than welfare and aid to dependent children. As the society moves ahead technologically, the poor are increasingly isolated. This reading calls to mind the kinds of issues that came up in the nineteenth century when railroads refused to lay tracks to outlying areas that they considered would not produce any profit.
- I would like you to come away from this reading with a sense of the extent to which isolation and transportation are intersectional issues, that is, issues of both gender AND poverty.
- cost of doing business: Back in the 80s we still used a term "enterprise liability." I doubt that anyone still uses it much in this corporate clime. But basically, that old term referred to the fact that harm occurs, to land, to buildings, to people, as a result of business meeting its needs. Agricultural land disappears. Workers' homes are moved further away, or isolated in a ghettoo-like area. In the Ryan case, a spark from a steam engine burned down a nearby house. Tort law is the area of law that addresses these concerns. Something bad has happened to someone. The someone was an innocent bystander. The harm was caused in some way by the activities or needs of the business. Who should pay for the cost of repairing that harm?
In the nineteenth and early 20th Century America was industrializing. Courts reasoned that business needed to be supported for the good of the country. So, in the Ryan case, the railroad was not held liable for buringin down the house and the townspeople pulled together and rebuilt the house. That was a long time ago. When today, Greyhound decides a particular route isn't "profitable," it cancels the route and leaves the people without any transportation, though I reckon they could call out stage coaches again. The courts mandated that the railroads build tracks to provide a network of transportation for the whole country. But that was a long time ago.
In Latin America, The United Fruit Company wasn't mandated by the courts to build a network of transportation for the whole country, so they just build trucks from the banana farms to the docks. The rest of the country relied on, well, stage coaches, I guess. When United Fruit was forced to leave and its land and buildings were nationalized, it was horrified that it had raped the Latin American country. After all, it left them everything. Yeah, except the network of transportation that might have permitted them to grow into a functioning democracy.
- As Greyhound Cuts Back, the Middle of Nowhere Means Going Nowhere By Eli Sanders. Published: September 6, 2004 Backup
- "Tuesday, August 31, 1999
House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Ground Transportation, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Washington, D.C."The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:00 p.m., in the Port of Seattle Commission Chambers, Pier 69, 2711 Alaskan Way, Seattle, Washington, Hon. Thomas Petri [chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.
"Mr. PETRI. The subcommittee will come to order. We are meeting today to hear testimony on a variety of ground transportation issues in the great Pacific Northwest. And I for one, welcome this opportunity to learn, firsthand, about the transportation challenges and accomplishments of this region of our country, such as multi-modal solutions to freight congestion along the Interstate 5 corridor and the notable success of intercity passenger rail.
"The Pacific Northwest is a model for our country in using public-private partnerships, as well as in interstate and international agreements, to meet the complex passenger and freight needs of this thriving corner of the world. I am very happy that Washington and Oregon are taking advantage of the funding made available in TEA 21 for innovative corridor and border projects to help ensure the region remains competitive in the international marketplace."
Things to be considered in answer.
Things to be considered in answer.
Some clue to what you were thinking about.
Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses:
Sample linking: Ways in which underlying assumptions of assimilation affect services offered and clients' ability to access and use those services. How does this reading illustrate the need for social agencies, for more generalized agencies, for what Bolman and Deal would call "leadership" AND "management"? How does this reading suggest ways in which we could be more effective in rendering help, and what is the reading's relationship to a "safety net" for those who need help?
Sample linking: Ways in which some groups are underrepresented in the unstated assumptions of our theories. How does this reading serve to illustrate adversarialism, mutuality, retribution, revenge, illocutionary understanding, the definition and operation of the criminal justice system?
Sample linking: Extent to which laws are made on the assumption that we are all essentially assimilated to the dominant culture. How does this reading help us see the need for contextual readings in law? How does it relate to our natural instincts to seek some kind of natural law? What facts and principles does the reading offer for discourse that could clarify for Others validity claims presented by an Obscure Other?
Sample linking: Ways in which to make validty claims of harm understood by those who have never experienced many of the world's different perspectives. How can this reading enlighten our praxis in terms of different kinds of discourse, like instrumental, illocutionary, governance?
Sample linking: The culture of poverty and assimilation. How does the reading deal with our underlying assumptions about poverty, especially poverty of the exploited, the NOT- male? What does the reading suggest of the interrelationship between our society and its children, generally cared for by women, often poor?
Sample linking: The extent to which silence has been imposed by these affiliations so that domination and discrimination have entered our unstated assumptions in interpersonal relations and the structural context arising from them. What does the reading tell us about exploitation and alternative ways to deal with one another? What does it tell us about institutionalized -isms and our denial of complicity? What does it tell us about our common humanity?
Sample linking: The spiritual component. Humans are spiritual creatures, creatures that recognize moments that go beyond ourselves to God, Allah, Isis, Gaia, the Universe, or a deep sense of responsibility to create our own meanng. How does the reading fit into our ability, our need to create such meaning in life?
Sample linking: What's the aesthetic link in this reading? How does it bring us closer to one another as humans? What does it tell us about our need for love, unconditional love, not rewards for doing well or being well, but caring and acceptance for being who we are?
