Guest Blogger Karl again: Googling his Roots
Guest blogger Karl here again…one of the more fascinating aspects of the Internet to me is the
ability to explore areas of my past to see how they’ve changed and grown over the years. I moved out to the state of Wisconsin when I was 12, but I’m originally from the twin cities of Lewiston/Auburn, Maine. Recently, I spent a fair amount of time on a lazy afternoon retracing my childhood haunts using the closest Satellite view in Google Maps I could get away with (I anticipate a lot of time wasted when they get around to implementing Street View in that area.)
Scoping the Arts
In the same vein, I thought I’d mine the Arts and Entertainment section of the local newspaper as the
basis of my post on the Eastern Time Zone, the Lewiston Sun Journal which serves the Central Maine area.
The website itself is pretty standard for its type, nice to see it’s keeping up with the times and not all
blink tags and comic sans font. Nothing surprising in the headlines: someone plagiarized off the Internet (sigh, so 1999), some notable local court cases, and some discouraging news about homeless crackdowns and shelter protests.
But, there is the “Encore” arts section under Entertainment in the left navigation menu. And under
that, a link to the World Refugee Day in Kennedy Park. And that does a lot to lift my heart. You see, while there were a lot of nice small town aspects to the Lewiston/Auburn area that I left as a child, I also recall that on the whole it was extremely conservative, extremely religious, and very ethnically uniform in its Franco-American Heritage.
A Hope for Cultural Maturity
As I said earlier, I’ve peeked in from time to time over the years. There was a Harry Potter book burning in the same park some years ago that I still shake my head about. But on the other hand, I’ve also read about the migration of Somalis refugees to the area. I have to admit at first I was skeptical, but this festival gives me hope that the area as a whole is slowing joining the world around it. Hope, which while not universal to all art (nor should be, I’d be the first to admit), is certainly one of its best abilities.
So, if you’re in the Eastern Time Zone today, in Central Maine in general, and Kennedy Park in Lewiston in particular…please go to the World Refugee Day festival. Listen to their experiences, enjoy their local foods and drinks, and as you listen to their music and watch them dance, look up or sideways. With hope, I’ll see you on Google.
Refugee festival set for Friday
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