by Madeline

Our dinner took place in Bowling Green, KY on April 15th. Caroline, Jenny, and Zora attended. Our Kentucky Kitchen Table was a little unconventional since Zora and I were unable to have them at home with family, and I think this gave our KKT a unique college perspective! Caroline is a junior at Western Kentucky University majoring in advertising and grew up in the Lexington area. Jenny is a junior majoring in nursing originally from the United Kingdom, but moved to America when she was in elementary school. Zora is a freshman majoring in economics with aspirations to do law (also in Honors 251) and is from Bowling Green, but has moved around as both her parents are social workers. I’m from Scottsville, KY, a small town about 30 minutes south of Bowling Green. We had baked spaghetti with garlic bread, Zora brought special food as she is vegan. I made the food, but Caroline and Jenny provided their apartment and dinnerware.

We talked about what it means to be a citizen, on both a local and national level. Overall, everyone seemed to come to a consensus that citizenship is about being kind to one another. Jenny talked a lot of how her Christian faith led her to want to help and be kind to others. She wants to be a nurse, so her future is going to be centered around caring for other people. She said she wanted to be kind to people and have a good impression, because maybe one day she can share the love of Christ with them. She also talked of the difference between the United Kingdom and the United States in regard to kindness. She said in the U.K. everyone is in their own little world just trying to get from place to place, and that smiling or saying hello to a stranger would be strange. I feel like this is more of a Kentucky thing, but it made me feel good about being a U.S. citizen nonetheless.

When it came to eating around a kitchen table, Caroline and Jenny had, while Zora and I had not on a regular basis. Zora’s family has an odd schedule from both her parents being social workers, and they all have different eating habits. She said it would have been nice to have dinners together, comparing it to how she enjoys holidays with her family. For me, I lived with my single grandmother for years, and my mom and brother moved in with us when I turned 13. We all had different schedules and the kitchen table was never clean, so we had a lot of fast food and freezer meals. Because this was unconventional, we never really ate around the table together and definitely did not have any neighbors over. I always wished that that had been different, but it was hard to advocate for it at the time because no one else really wanted to. Caroline and Jenny both had positive experiences from eating at the table. Caroline said it was a sort of release to get to have that time with her family, in that it was a time to just relax and not think about anything else going on. I think eating at the table and having that conversation probably strengthens family relationships as well. If dinners have any of the same conversation that our Kentucky Kitchen Table did, they are most likely opinion shaping. I would say actually talking about these issues probably results in children having some of the same ideas as their parents, which is neither good nor bad, I just know that I have a completely liberal view on life in contrast to my grandmother, and it could be from not ever talking about it and how my opinions were shaped outside of the home.

When talking of what advice we would give to future politicians running for office our stances were centered around keeping people in mind. I feel this is odd in that political leaders should already be trying to represent the vast majority of people. Politics have become more about popularity, fame, and money than service to the country. It is sad that a group of college students are so disheartened by the government in our country, but maybe this can be some sort of fuel for change. When looking at the three questions that frame our class, I feel that this issue relates to them all. We can solve problems if we talk about the issues at hand. We can live better together push for change. We can have more of a say over our lives in just doing these things.

I also think it is interesting that everyone at the table wanted to be a good person that people respected. This seems like common sense, but how does chaos and evil break out if everyone in the world had a desire to do good? This relates to the Love Thy Neighbor readings by Peter Maass, that is surrounding the violence within the Bosnian War. Everything was normal and peaceful prior to war, a place like the United States. War was able to start out of what seems like nowhere. Misunderstanding and unresolved conflict is the core of fighting, and this dinner represents a grain of sand in the scheme of talking it out, but is still a representation of working to an understanding nonetheless.

This leads me to the overall way this dinner translated into the class for me. After a week of deliberations I realized this dinner represented something much bigger that society is lacking. The key thing that tied this dinner and deliberation together is conversation. One thing that I feel people really are not good at today is talking about issues. People never want to listen to opposing opinions. I think this has led to the younger generations just staying out of all of it, not wanting to engage in confrontation that actually should just be conversation. In the David Brook’s article If it Feels Right he talks about this, in that people just go with “what feels right” in the moment, rather than analyzing and coming up with new ideas of what is right.

Eating with my peers was refreshing, and I came out of my Kentucky Kitchen Table with a better understanding of how this small dinner can relate to the overall themes of the class. I feel like sharing this experience with college students made the dinner different, but did not affect the depth of the assignment.