Detroit: The Next American Revolution

Grace Lee Boggs is a woman I heard about just last weekend. I'm sorry I didn't know about her sooner. Started reading her newest book "The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty First Century" today. Grace Lee Boggs is an activist. She's 96 years old and still writing, still contributing mightily. The James & Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership at Field and Goethe in Detroit is training young social changers, the next leaders for our new century. I'm just in the introduction, written by Scott Kurashige, and already it's more absorbing and informative, and hopeful than I thought this century might be. Detroit is the center city of this book, because it is the headquarters of Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs' history. Detroit is a microcosm of the industrial world we are leaving; the age of materialism, militarism and racism. It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. The American Dream is dead. Long live the American Dream. Will we reemerge as better humans in a more egalitarian society? Will the future be a world torn apart by famines, pandemics, and wars over vanishing supplies of oil and freshwater? Stay tuned. I heard about Grace Lee Boggs from a woman who knows her. She told us that when Grace Lee was a little girl the cook in her family's restaurant told her girls should be left on the street. I can't wait to read more about this remarkable woman, and her work in the state and country I love. Maybe I'll learn how I can help to rebirth the city of my birth.