Culture

Solidarity is the firm conviction that we are one human family, responsible for one another, and the practical love that acts on it. It is not a vague feeling of goodwill but a determination to seek the good of others as truly as our own, especially the weak, the poor, and the newcomer. Its opposite vice is indifference, the shrug that says 'their troubles are not my problem,' along with its harsher cousin, scorn for the outsider. The whole of Scripture insists on welcoming the stranger: God commanded Israel, 'You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt' (Deuteronomy 10:19), and the Holy Family themselves fled as refugees into Egypt. Jesus made it the test of judgment: 'I was a stranger and you welcomed me' (Matthew 25:35). The immigrants pouring into America around 1900, many of them Catholic, were often met with suspicion and prejudice. Mother Cabrini answered with solidarity, building homes and schools so they would not be alone. Solidarity begins small. This week, try this: notice someone who is new, alone, or 'on the outside', a new student, an elderly neighbor, someone who doesn't speak the language well, and take one concrete step to welcome them. Then write down how it changed the way you saw them.

The 1920s roared. After World War I, the economy boomed, and a new mass culture took hold. Cars rolled off Henry Ford's assembly lines and onto new highways; families gathered around radios; movies and jazz filled the air, giving the decade its other name, the Jazz Age. Many women, who had just won the vote in 1920, cut their hair short and claimed new freedoms. On the surface, America seemed unstoppable.

But the prosperity was built partly on debt and reckless stock-market speculation. In October 1929, the stock market crashed. Banks failed, savings vanished, and businesses closed. By 1933, about one in four American workers had no job. This was the Great Depression, the worst economic collapse in the nation's history. To make matters worse, a severe drought and poor farming practices turned the southern Great Plains into the Dust Bowl, where massive dust storms buried farms and forced thousands of families to flee west.

In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) took office promising 'a new deal for the American people.' His New Deal created an alphabet of programs to provide jobs, relief, and reform — the CCC put young men to work in forests and parks, the TVA brought electricity to the rural South, and Social Security promised support for the elderly. The New Deal did not end the Depression (World War II finally did), but it eased suffering and reshaped the role of government.

Key facts: - The 1920s were called the Jazz Age; women gained the vote in 1920. - The Stock Market Crash came in October 1929. - At its worst (1933), about 25% of American workers were unemployed. - The Dust Bowl devastated the Great Plains in the 1930s. - FDR became president in 1933 and launched the New Deal. - New Deal programs included the CCC, TVA, and Social Security.

In the 1870s a band of Paris painters broke nearly every rule of the academy and launched modern art. Rather than carefully finished scenes of myth and history, the Impressionists painted ordinary modern life, a train station, a riverside cafe, a field at noon, and they painted the fleeting effects of light and color. Claude Monet would paint the same haystack or cathedral facade again and again at different hours to capture how light transforms everything; his loose, visible brushstrokes seem to shimmer. Edgar Degas caught ballet dancers and racetracks in surprising, snapshot-like angles. Critics first mocked the movement, taking its name as an insult from Monet's painting 'Impression, Sunrise.' Then came the Post-Impressionists, who admired the Impressionists' freedom but wanted more: structure, emotion, or meaning. Paul Cezanne sought the solid geometry beneath nature, simplifying mountains and apples into building blocks, a path that would lead toward Cubism. Vincent van Gogh poured raw feeling into swirling, vivid color; his 'The Starry Night' turns a night sky into a current of cosmic energy, and he saw his art as a kind of striving toward the eternal. These artists matter because they shifted the question of painting from 'what does the world look like?' to 'how do I see and feel it?', the doorway through which all of modern art would walk.

Write one sentence: 'How does Impressionism reflect a fast-changing, modern world?' Then note which painting from today you would most like to see in person.