Nothing could be less celebratory than having to celebrate. Imagine someone holding a gun to your head: “Sing Christmas carols! And sing like you mean it!” Where does celebration come from? What does it mean? I’m inclined to think that any word connected to “celebrity” has to be suspect. 

The dictionary, source of so much wisdom, tells me something unexpected: “to perform with appropriate rites and ceremonies; solemnize, observe, commemorate, sound the praises of, make known publicly.” No wonder we can feel it’s a heavy burden. Appropriate rites: like holiday cards, Christmas trees, and end-of-year letters. I’m happy to observe and commemorate, but solemnize?

By Lourdes Cardenal (Own work)

In the mall culture, Christmas is light as a snowflake, but some part of it is heavy, as heavy as labor, a forced journey while you’re nine months pregnant, on a donkey yet. And what’s the journey for? To pay taxes. Then the hotels are all full. Joseph must have cursed a blue streak and Mary felt the floor drop out, facing her first labor far from home, from a midwife, from her mother.

I know most faculty, much less students, will not have time to read the Student Success Task Force Draft that various people in CA are proposing to “reform” community colleges. My general impression is that, with a few exceptions, the measures proposed will be harmful to the poorest and bar them from college by assuming they aren’t making an effort if they cannot succeed within needlessly early deadlines even if they are learning and growing. It is also assumed that every student has a computer. So to illustrate the way it works, I imagined applying it to another realm: the public library. Here is my report.

Reserving Libraries For Those Who Can Make Best Use of Them: those with time, skills, and money

What Kind of Person Can’t Afford Community College?

I’m going to begin this blog like a Cassandra, but end it more positively. No one needs another blog entirely dedicated to how awful things are.

So here’s the bad part:

I was talking with some moms recently and one, disparaging an acquaintance who was saving up to attend a two-year college, asked with an incredulous laugh, “What kind of a person can’t afford community college?”

The remark sent a chill through my bones. First, she was so insulated by privilege that she honestly didn’t know how a decent hardworking person could not afford the bottom rung of the educational ladder, and second, that she seemed to consider it a moral failing to be poor. Finally, she represents the people most likely to vote, most likely to lobby a school board, Congressperson, or Council member.

Textbooks

“Books are actually very expensive,” I pointed out, and later I wanted to kick myself for that answer because even without books, tuition at a community college – the very institution set up to serve all – is too expensive for a worrisome segment of the workforce. I recall talking to a waiter who told me that when the price went up to $20 a unit, he couldn’t afford to go anymore. He had two kids and he couldn’t work a second job. However, he was very interested in books for his kids. It was painful to think that someone willing to learn and grow, wanting a better job, wanting to contribute more knowledge to his kids and capable of contributing more skill, and taxes to the economy, should be barred from that opportunity. How un-American! And how troubling to meet a person with a great deal more power in the world who insists that he and people like him don’t exist.

Anyone driving through Madison, Wisconsin in April and May would have recognized those nine beeps of car and truck horns, ubiquitous throughout the city: This is what democracy looks like!

Wisconsin State Capitol

The mainstream media focused on unions, of course, public and private, coming together in unexpected solidarity, but not everyone realized that spiritual and religious groups played a significant role as well. And here’s something that will challenge your prejudices: evangelical groups were among them. Together with the religious organizations that form the usual progressive “suspects,” they chanted their own variation on a theme: This is what religion looks like.

Bruno, Hawkings, Dowling at WCSA

Houses of Worship: the new “public” spaces for political action?

Churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques have an ambivalent history with social justice, but a panel at the Working Class Studies conference in Chicago this June offered evidence of deep and innovative support for justice movements, worker rights in particular, which really inspired me. Not everyone knows, for example, that during the Wisconsin Uprising, a Shabbat service was held in the Capitol with Hebrew songs in which Rabbi Renee Bauer played a key role. Or that four hundred clergy signed a statement of support, and one hundred fifty of them marched in the protests. Robert Bruno, author of Justified by Work, moderated an impressive panel consisting of Father Larry Dowling, a Catholic priest from a 50 percent unemployed, 55 percent ex-incarcerated parish, and Rev. C. J., . Hawking, Executive Director of Arise Chicago, and Minister of Social Justice at the Euclid Avenue Methodist Church. Unfortunately, Rabbi Brant Rosen, leader of an activist Jewish Reconstructionist congregation, and a Muslim Imam were not able to come.

Wisconsin workers

Happy International Workers Day, everyone! All over the world, on grand and small scales, people are celebrating the majority in every society: workers and would-be workers. Every day, in my work as a teacher, I see that the belief in fairness continues to flourish among the majority, the baristas and servers, the nurse’s aides and clerks, the dishwashers and groundskeepers.

photo by Jonathan McIntosh wikimedia commons

It’s a complex situation, of course. Workers can be hard on one another, proud of their endurance under extreme conditions. As one server told me recently, “If you can’t take abuse and disrespect every day, you don’t belong in the restaurant business.” And yet, in a recent class discussion, both men and women restaurant workers acknowledged that at the end of the working day, they often cried.

There Is Hope

Though the power of the privileged has grown grotesquely and the power of workers has shrunk, commitment to justice is a motion-sensitive light that turns on again when we move.

The fires of democracy continue to burn brightly in Wisconsin.

With a Smile, Photo by Rebecca Congo

Recall campaigns are racing along, and a recent community meeting in Milwaukee, usually a sleepy, ill-attended affair, boasted several hundred attendants. When their representative, Chris Larson, one of the “Wisconsin 14″ showed up, they jumped to their feet in a standing ovation. Neighborhood listservs are boiling with activity.

Photo of and by Rebecca Congo+Friend

On Facebook and in a thousand union and church meetings, people solidify their connections with each other and their commitment to recover and strengthen our precious democracy.

Meaningful Individual Acts, Meaningful Collective Acts

April 4^th and 5^th, there were dozens of opportunities to participate in democracy both publicly and privately. At least five activities were planned for the South Bay (Please comment and post photos if you attended one of these.)

Protest in Wisconsin photo by A. Renner

Special Dispatch: Solidarity in Wisconsin

In Jordan, teachers protested this week for the right to form unions. In Wisconsin, they fought to keep that right. The stakes and the dangers in Jordan are enormously higher, but it’s a sad irony that we find ourselves sliding down to the status of a country that doesn’t even pretend to be a democracy. I wish with all my heart for these dangerous struggles in the Mideast and North Africa to bear real and lasting fruit, that in each of these cases, justice will prevail.

And I’m proud of my home state. I’ve been proud all week. Newly-elected Tea Party Governor Walker proposes to remove collective bargaining rights on workplace rules, safety, pensions, benefits, overtime, and, for salary, more than a cost of living adjustment would require a state referendum! This drastic curtailment of a voice for workers in their working conditions affects teachers, custodians, game wardens, university employees, librarians, health service workers, everyone except firefighters, police, and state troopers.

The Perils of Privilege

At the college where I teach, I get free parking: prime spots right on the edge of campus. Should my designated places fill up, I can help myself to any student space. Nice deal. For me.

How is student parking? Well, I don’t know exactly. They pay for parking and it’s farther away, but I’m hazy on the details. Unless they speak up, I won’t know how often they circle for half an hour or how long it takes them to walk from class to where they parked. Even if they do speak up, might I dismiss it? Might I think they’re just complaining to cover up a lack of effort?

This, in microcosm, is the peril of privilege. Those with even small amounts of power, education, and wealth can remain ignorant and unmotivated to change an unjust situation. We owe a great debt to the privileged who seek out the truth and act on it and to the unprivileged who dare to step into the light and speak: canaries in the coal mine we all inhabit.

Entitlement, Self-Blame, and Injustice

What if the aforementioned students shrug about parking injustice and suck it up?

Auburn University professor Alan Gribben has just come out with a revised version of Huckleberry Finn from NewSouth Books that replaces the N-word with “slave.”

Wow, the reaction! Typical of many critics is Michael J. Kiskis of Elmira College who says in a newspaper interview, “I don’t think you should change a writer’s text” (So much for translation!) “It changes the tone and intention.” When he teaches the book at the college level, he notes, “We talk about the context” and adds, “It’s not enough to just say ‘well, everybody used this language in the 1880s’.’ That’s not true.”

My reply? There’s theory and there’s practice. And practice at the below-college level is mighty rough.

Why is it so hard to be grateful?

In the churches of my childhood, the ministers would intone, “Let us give thanks,” perhaps after the collection plate had been passed, and we would all bow our heads and go through the motions. I don’t remember feeling actual gratitude.

But that wasn’t for lack of reminding. A hymn too exhorted us, “Count your Blessings. Name them one by one, and you’ll be surprised at what the Lord has done.” I do not recall ever literally counting my blessings or being surprised, except in a bad way, at what the Lord had done. Being the pious kind of person who read the Bible from cover to cover on summer vacation, I must have gone through the exercise, in prayers on my knees, but I do not recall feeling grateful. Maybe I thought my blessings wouldn’t add up to much, or maybe I didn’t know how to be grateful. Gratitude was hard to muster; however, sardonic and sarcastic responses arose with great ease.

Isn’t gratitude just happy talk, denial, and bullshit? Isn’t it masochism?