YET- In practice my life and family have blossomed under the disciplines of “Discipline of Place.” Tomorrow, my son Micah marries Adriene Willems. Like his father, Micah is a rolling stone that will never gather moss.

Adriene too is a “busy-accomplisher.” She gets it honestly. Her parents model it.

Yes, both are only twenty, but as driven-dreamers, motivated, and already successful by many definitions I intend to remind them, through my brief comments during the ceremony-the strength, solidity, and bent, yet never broken character of the two families from which they are born and loved have come from the Barclay’s and Willems practice of the “Discipline of Place.” This has been accomplished by Pieter, Alice, Cindy, and I saying no to more things than we have said yes.

Both sets of parents are quite capable people. We have been and thought ourselves into many new places, but how excellent to always know how to return from some glorious horizon and sit again on our own front porch, under our own familiar blue sky. God is everywhere, but He and we are at our best when we are “home.”

Marriage and relationships thrive under the “Discipline of Place.”

Thank you Caleb!

A copy of the letter sent by Stephen Reily, founder and CEO of VibrantNation.com, is published below:

Dear Ms. Quindlen,

Like many Newsweek readers, I was stunned when I read your final LAST WORD column. I was even more surprised — and a bit concerned — as I considered your rationale for “Stepping Aside.” Don’t get me wrong; I respect your decision. Among the great advantages of living and working in the USA are our freedoms: of speech, of the press, of the choices we get to make in our personal and professional lives.

But as the founder of VibrantNation.com, a website for women age 50+, I’ve got a vested interest in ensuring the voices of this powerful, yet often ignored niche of the Boomer generation, continue to be heard.

Now, more than ever, our nation can benefit from the strong, wise and opinionated voices of the women who comprise the Vibrant Nation. In a world where women over 50 are too frequently pushed aside, written off and broadly ignored by marketers despite their exceptional purchasing power, stepping aside to create opportunity for a younger generation cannot be the best or only solution.

As you regularly do, you eloquently wrote in your farewell column about how, “Barack Obama hopscotched over an entire generation of politicians to reach the White House; he had not waited his turn because a majority of the American people decided that he ought not to do so. They agreed that the country needed change.”

I respectfully suggest that the reason Barack Obama became President Obama had little to do with his age and lots to do with the potent combination of better ideas and inspiration. He surrounded himself with advisors (younger and older) and combined the latest advances in communications technology with traditional, proven political campaign techniques. He called upon us to bring our best to make this a better world — regardless of one’s age or generation.

It is this combination of smart ideas, diverse experiences and well-stated opinions from our nation’s youngest and oldest citizens that truly represent the image and likeness of our nation and our world. Stepping aside is not an option, because we don’t believe you’ve said all you want or need to say.

Surely I’m not the only one who worries that your self-imposed retirement simply reinforces what the marketplace has always imposed on women over 50: silence and invisibility. Why else imply that it’s time for women like you to get out of the way? I am confident that women your age (and you’re only 56, for goodness’ sake) can make room for younger voices while continuing to share everything they’ve learned along the way, both in the broader arena and (as they always have done) with each other.

Please accept this formal offer to join the chorus of smart, passionate women over 50 as Contributing Editor for VibrantNation.com. We hope we can play some small role in helping you continue to share your important perspective on our world with other women like you who are eager to hear your voice…trust me, they’ll let you know how they feel about what you have to say.

Sincerely,

Stephen Reily

Founder and CEO

VibrantNation.com

Money talks, is what I guess. As Jefferson wrote, rogues rise disproportionately to the top. And when they do, they redefine what is moral so as to justify their actions, past, present and future. (see Cheney et al).

Jake

Bootstrappers tend to be all talk and no cattle, no offense. 90% of all small businesses close within 5 years. Family farms are dying not growing. Very few people make good money in real estate. Yet there are always people not only arguing there are exceptions – obviously there are – but you and everyone else will be the exceptions. The only thing that can hold you back is a lack of industry, or at least they claim.

So, what is the political question you feel you and I avoided thru cheap moralizing? Perhaps you have stated it elsewhere in this conversation, and if so, please, point it out to me and I will go reread it.

Although, taken altogether, your fix to whatever the problem might be seems to tend towards the standard conservative cant – lower taxes!!!

Like they aren’t already the lowest in living memory (well, my living memory).
Jake

You are moralizing. I am talking about politics. Like I said above, I think this moralizing was one of the weaknesses of my original essay. This is not to say political questions are amoral, but rather that moralism is a cheap way to escape and avoid difficult political questions; or, worse, it is a trap laid by those with more political savvy than you.

“Apparently, you have a very narrow view of community, Caleb.”

Yes, I do. See Aristotle and Jefferson.

Not.

We love those who are near and dear best, most certainly. But to say that we have no love for those we don’t know well, or those we don’t know at all, is simply to say that we don’t know love at all.

Love is not a feeling, Caleb, it is something you do. You spoke of taking breakdowns of your old truck as an opportunity to build community (my words). If you were in a strange town, not your home town, would you feel the same? If you felt the same, then are you not saying that you agree that community is everywhere, not just in one place, but wherever you are? If you tie your love to your sense of community, then when you take that community with you to someplace new, does it not deserve your love? Then, if it deserves your love when you are there, does it not deserve your love when you are not present?

Apparently, you have a very narrow view of community, Caleb.

Jake

In a word, yes.

In more than a word, it’s not about portioning. My heart is not a gumball machine kicking out little morsals of love here and there. To love truly is to give the fullness of oneself in time and place. In other words, it is to embrace the limits of this world of suggested yet missed perfection.

Or as I wrote elsewhere and linked to above: “It is to live in love with the frailty and limits of one’s existence, suffering the places, customs, rites, joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, and community–all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly.”

Yours is the counterfeit coin of John Lennon’s “love.” Which is a form of life-denial and self-loathing at root.

That’s what all good rebels say!!

Besides, I only said that the character of the effort is revolutionary, as in, it seeks to overthrow the current order, which it most certainly does. This does not mean it seeks to overthrow the current institutions, which is does not, except for the IRS and various and sundry other pipsqueek meddlesome and perfidious federal agencies.

Now there’s a restorative thought.

$800 a month may be high. My only excuse is that it made for a nice round $10k per year.

[T]he most ennobling work we do is seldom remunerated in greenbacks. Bearing and raising a child, cultivating a garden, just being there for a sibling or friend to lean on: this “work” is compensated in a currency far more valuable than Uncle Sam’s paper. This, in fact, is the work that should be honored on Labor Day. The work we do for “nothing.” (For everything, really.) The work that enriches us as human beings; that binds us to our families and our neighbors; that shrouds even the most commonplace of lives in glory. This is the work whose coin, whose only coin, is love.

Tell me, Caleb, what woman is not your sister? What man is not your friend? Are only the people whom you know personally worthy of love? Is your love all to exhaustible, so that you must portion it out to those most near and dear, with little left over for others?

I don’t see the kind of love to which you say you aspire as being all that parsimonious.

Anyway, I will keep reading. I enjoy your writing, mostly, even if I often shake my head in disbelief at what you say.

Jake

The bottom line is that FedCo (the corporation that runs this part of North America) has totally screwed us. It has subsidized (by its picking of winners and losers over the last 100 years, at least) subvervience, amorality, externalized costs, wage slavery, infantilized consumers. The only real way to “fix” this is to kill the beast (military coup)… or at least escape from it (secession).

I take issue, Caleb, with the notion of (need for) revolution. Right wing revolutions never work. (And left wing ones rarely fail.) I think “restoration” is the more accurate term.

-Samuel Adams

I think he is talking to some of you……

but again, to each his own……

Junker Says: life is to be lived…..