This year, I finished my Christmas shopping early. Two telephone calls to two catalogues and voila, my shopping was done. I made these calls shortly after Thanksgiving and the first week in December, my packages arrived. My son put up the Christmas tree early. So, I had plenty of time to take a week and go up to the North Pole to help Santa.

Aside from the elves and his full-time workers, some of us volunteer during the holidays to come up and help with the rush that the season brings. Everything is on computer now. But, letters still come in with children’s wish lists and that data must be entered and then cross checked against the naughty and nice list. However, Santa has such a generous heart that if he could, every child would get something. Then, there is the work of keeping track of address changes. Since the economic downturn, Santa and his helpers have had to do more work to track down those children whose families have lost their houses due to foreclosure or other difficult circumstances. Santa thunders with anger whenever he sees yet another situation of a child and h/er family becoming homeless.

“How in the name of all that is holy can a country as rich as the United States allow such a thing to happen?” he asks at the top of his voice. He is most definitely NOT a jolly old man when the issue of poverty in the world, especially poverty among children, raises its ugly head. Yet, it is an ugliness that he insists that we tackle when we return to our home countries. (Note: Santa gets volunteers from all over the world.)

Figure 1

HOBOS TO STREET PEOPLE: ARTIST’S RESPONSES TO HOMELESSNESS FROM THE NEW DEAL TO THE PRESENT
by Art Hazelwood
Freedom Voices, 2011

In 1939, the iconic American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) took and disseminated a photograph of a mother and her two children on the road in Siskiyou County, California (Figure 1). Like all of Lange’s Depression era images, this work reveals the powerful human pathos of poverty and homelessness. Viewers cannot fail to feel the agony and despair of a mother trying desperately to maintain her family in the midst of overwhelming economic catastrophe. Like hundreds of her photographs, this effort represents the essence of socially committed art, the result of a visual artist who used her creativity to call attention to the human face of social disruption and human suffering.

Art historians universally accept Lange as one of the masters of American photography, both for her outstanding artistic skills and for her profound empathy for the most marginalized members of society during the Great Depression. Her image is the first illustration in a new book entitled Hobos to Street People: Artists’ Responses to Homelessness from the Great Depression to the Present, written by socially conscious artist Art Hazelwood in conjunction with a traveling exhibition on homelessness art in the San Francisco Bay Area.

by Richard Wolf

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference 2011 in Washington, DC. Ryan, among other Republicans, has described Obama's deficit reduction plan as "class warfare." (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

Republicans and conservatives have done us a service by describing federal policies in terms of “class war.” But by applying the term only to Obama’s latest proposals to raise taxes on the rich, they have it all backward and upside down. The last 50 years have indeed seen continuous class warfare in and over federal economic policies.

But it was a war waged chiefly by business and conservatives. They won, as we show below, and the mass of middle-income and poor Americans lost. Obama’s modest proposal for tax increases on the rich does not begin a class war. On the contrary, it is a small, modest effort to reduce the other side’s class war victories.

Big business and conservatives have worked to undo the regulations and taxes imposed on them in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, an upsurge in labor union organization (the Congress of Industrial Organizations sweep across basic US industries) and in membership in both the socialist and communist parties gave Franklin Delano Roosevelt the support and the pressure to tax business and the rich. He took their money to pay for the massive federal hiring program (11 million federal jobs filled between 1934 and 1941) and to start the Social Security Administration etc. He regulated their business activities to try to prevent devastating capitalist depressions from recurring in the nation’s future.

Since the end of the Great Depression – and especially since the 1970s – the class warfare waged by business and its allies (most conservatives in both parties) was successful. For example, at the end of World War II, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. In contrast, today, for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it gets 25 cents in taxes on business. Business and its allies successfully shifted most of its federal tax burden onto individuals.

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.

The City of Orlando has made over 20 arrests for sharing meals with the hungry at Lake Eola Park. The city limits the group to sharing twice a year per park.

Food Not Bombs has been sharing free vegetarian meals and literature in public for over 30 years. While many believe that hunger and poverty is the result of personal failing and the solution can be found by getting closer to God, Food Not Bombs thought the solution could be found in changing public policy, economics and society.

Risking arrest sharing food in Orlando (courtesy FNB website)

With fifty cents of every federal tax dollar going towards the military, no one in the world’s wealthiest country should have to stand in line to eat at a soup kitchen. It was clear that fliers and banners were not enough to motivate the public to take action to redirect military spending towards the real security of education, healthcare and other social services so the eight co-founders started to share meals at their literature table. People of all walks of life visited Food Not Bombs at Harvard Square and the Boston Commons. Visitors engaged one another in dialog. People new to the ideas of peace and social justice were introduced to groups organizing to end the war in Central America, the Nuclear Arms Race and the virtues of vegetarian meals.

The corporate machine’s drive for profit has resulted in a race to the bottom. The bottom line is profit at the expense of people, social justice, and the environment. In the United States, wages are stagnant, unemployment and homelessness grow, and more families are finding themselves unable to afford food.

Food Not Bombs is doing something about hunger. A worldwide all-volunteer organization that has existed for 30 years, Food Not Bombs feeds people vegetarian meals and protests war and poverty. Around the world, nearly one billion people go without food every day, and more than 25,000 die each day as a result. Hunger is growing in the United States, where more than 44 million people rely on food stamps and food pantries and kitchens are so overwhelmed that they are turning people away. This is unacceptable, especially in one of the richest nations of the world.

It is even more unacceptable that people are being arrested for sharing meals with the hungry. Volunteers with Food Not Bombs were first arrested in Orlando, FL, on June 1. They continue to return to feed the hungry and undergo arrest. Cities throughout Florida are introducing laws that could restrict Food Not Bombs to sharing food only twice a year per park. Can you imagine that now it is a crime to give food to hungry people?

This Sunday, I published an editorial in the Albuquerque Journal North explaining why I terminated a pregnancy at 16. I was inspired by Democratic Representatives Gwen Moore (WI) and Jackie Speier (CA) who stood up on the House floor in the middle of an assault on Planned Parenthood and the definition of rape and described their own decisions to end a pregnancy.

I intend to mail a photocopy of my editorial to the Congresswomen.

I hope every woman who has ever faced this decision will do the same. If we refuse to be intimidated or shamed, then we can’t be intimidated or shamed.

My public response, which appeared in the Journal North on March 6th follows below the jump. (Sorry, I can’t link because I don’t have a paid subscription to the Journal online).

At one time in my life I taught sociology to both young undergrads and older social work students. I had a great time with the older students, some of whom had been working for many years already and really wanted to understand and change the world. But the younger, middle class students, many of them from Catholic high schools and homes where obedience had been taught more than curiosity and argument, needed a showman, an entertainer, to wake them up, and someone brilliant with ideas to give them something deep to think about once awake. That person did exist in our department: Bruce Luske. He was way to the left of most others at the college, but was able to put radical ideas across in highly popular classes. When I was contemplating crossing the continent to work at Tikkun he gave me good advice and encouragement, because he had studied with Michael Lerner years before. It’s a great pleasure that he has emailed me with his recent piece on OpEd News, drawing on Michael’s ideas:

A Note on Politics and Spirituality

by Bruce Luske

My remarks here as we engage a new year are inspired by pieces debating spirituality in the military and by the work of Rabbi Michael Lerner and others; and are meant to broaden the discussion to society as a whole. I begin with the premise that we humans are born with an innate need for positive recognition and connection to our fellow humans every bit as fundamental to human life as the need for food and water. In fact, as psychologists who study early childhood teach us, we will not become fully human unless this need is met. We are born needing to care and be cared for. I further believe, with all the major world religions as well as aboriginal spiritual traditions, that this innate need for recognition and connection to others has an intrinsic spiritual wellspring to which we must return.

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8)The shepherds make for a nice presence, don’t they, both in Luke’s nativity and more recently in countless nativity pageants the world over. In Luke’s version of the nativity story, the shepherds are the first to receive the good news of Jesus’ birth.

The shepherds matter to my understanding of Jesus – of Yeshua ben Miriam – because of where they stood in the social hierarchy of their day. So who were the shepherds? Peasants at best, and therefore marginal figures. There is some possibility they even belonged to the outcast class, according to writings from after Luke’s time. They were not people with power or status. Who would they be in our time? Poor kids who are lucky to get fast food jobs, maybe. If they really were outcasts, perhaps undocumented immigrants. We have plenty of shepherds today. And we know who they are.

What would constitute “good tidings of great joy” (luke 2:10) for the shepherds of Judea, circa 4 BCE? Maybe the announcement of a particular birth: the birth of a man who would, as an adult, go into the synagogue and say that God had anointed him to bring good news to the poor. And especially in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus had a lot of good news for the poor. He said they were blessed. He said the Kingdom of God was theirs. He ate with them and healed them and invited them to walk with him along the way. What an incredible experience that would have been, to be a marginal figure in society and suddenly to find oneself in relationship with a God-intoxicated prophet and teacher.

Little Rock, 1959. Rally at state capitol, protesting the integration of Central High School.

In April, I was riding the DC Metro to the Capitol Mall, when several Tea Party demonstrators got on and sat a few seats away from me. The first, a young white man, wore red-and-white striped shoes with blue tops and other Uncle Sam garb; the young, white woman with him carried a hand-made sign on which was glued an old document titled “The Constitution” and the words, “Miss me yet?”

Their origins, judging by hair, clothes, accent, and where they got on seemed to be lower middle class church goers. Not rich. Not sophisticates. And not stupid. I wanted to ask the woman, “Which part of the Constitution do you see as lost?” Had she read it all the way through?

Who Are These People?

Who dresses up in red, white, and blue costumes, demonstrates, and now, votes for astonishingly extremist candidates in New York and Delaware? What motivates them?

We hear from investigative reports that the Tea Party is, by and large, a middle class group, including ironically people with jobs in the Department of Defense (never a waste of tax dollars), and nourished behind the scenes by wealthy conservatives like Dick Cheney and his daughter, but it has spread. Looking at those two, I caught a glimpse of a world they probably longed for, a world I grew up in, a place that we, as a country, have been before.

Cross-posted as a Morning Feature at Daily Kos.

Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other luminaries are skewering Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) for crowing about his insertion of a new IRS rule into the Health Care Reform Bill after first voting against HCR. Because he has publicly mocked and blocked HCR (along with other Repubs), and because the importance of his new rule is only appreciated by hospital financing aficianados, his announcement had the loft of a lead comforter.

I love Rachel Maddow. I wake up every weekday at 5:00 am to her podcasts. And I am no fan of Chuck Grassley. But I am ecstatic about the Grassley rule. You will be too, once you understand it.

Some of you Tikkun-ers have told me from time to time: “Share with us about the people who inspire from your context in Brazil.”

Fair enough. I’ve already posted a link to one other video of my dear Brazilian friend, Claudio Oliver. But I couldn’t resist posting another: a video interview that took place earlier this week in Australia. This video continues the same line of reflection regarding poverty, friendship, and the presence/action of the local Christian communities.

To set the stage, I’ll just mention 2 key themes:

In response to one of the comments on my humorous post “Satan Responds to Pat Robertson on Haiti,” I found this article on the Voodoo view of the quake. Vodou is the earth-based religion of Haiti, so it makes sense that a Vodou priest would view his country as a manifestation of Mother Earth.

From the Washington Post:

Voodoo’s view of the quake in Haiti

By Elizabeth McAlister
Associate Professor of Religion, Wesleyan University

Vodouists in the Haitian diaspora are praying on their knees today, just as Catholics and Protestants are. Why did this devastating earthquake have to happen in Haiti, a country already so vulnerable that people live on a dollar a day, where on a good day, the government cannot employ or educate or provide health care for the majority? In Port-au-Prince, they are coping by searching and rescuing, sharing resources, crying, and praying. In Vodou most ritual is about finding balance, putting yourself into equilibrium with the spirits, with your family, and with yourself. In Haiti things are way out of balance. We might say that spirits of death have launched a coup d’état.

My friend and colleague, the artist, educator, and priest of the spirits, Erol Josué, has been praying and crying in Brooklyn. Through Twitter, Facebook, and his cell phone he has learned of at least twenty dead friends in several Port-au-Prince congregations. He told me today that for him, as a spirit-worker, this event is both scientific and symbolic. This is indeed a natural disaster for Josué. But the land in Haiti is a person, he said. We consider it a woman, our mother. “Haïti Chérie,” as the well-known ballad goes. She wants to know, ‘who will make me beautiful, put clothes on me, and take care of my children?’ When you mistreat her, and uproot her trees, when you give her too much responsibility, she is like a woman with cancer. The tumor metastasizes, and explodes.

For Erol Josué, the earthquake was mother nature, the land of Haiti, rising up to defend herself against the erosion, deforestation, and environmental devastation that have been ongoing for the last few decades. “Everybody was smashed to the ground,” said Erol. “Rich and poor. But look how symbolic this is. The Palace is smashed, the legislative building, the tax office, and the Cathedral. The country is crushed. We are all on our knees.” This Vodou priest is not speaking about divine retribution, as has Pat Robertson. God is not punishing us for disobedience. Erol is speaking about a giant natural rebalancing act, a reaction against human dealings with the ecosystem.

How many of us know what it is like to have someone love us enough to go all the way to the wall for us?

I was thinking about this question yesterday, and about how it relates to our struggles for social justice. In the “praise and worship” part of our service, we sang “Everybody Ought to Know,” a song that often makes me squirm amidst our extremely diverse congregation, which draws people from a variety of faith traditions to walk together what we call the “Jesus path” (which doesn’t require that you identify as Christian). The lyrics go

Everybody oughtta know
Everybody oughtta know
Everybody oughtta know
Who Jesus is.

Oh, he’s the lily of the valley.
He’s the bright and morning star.
He’s the fairest of ten thousand, and
Everybody oughtta know.

See what I mean? It smacks of Christian exceptionalism and easily conjures up theologies that threaten nonchristians with eternal hellfire. I’m way too much of a universalist for that.

But yesterday I heard it differently.

We usually think of environmental justice when we refer to how the disadvantaged suffer from pollution and other toxic chemicals more than those of us belonging to the middle or upper classes: siting of waste facilities, home location near highways or poison-spewing factories are just some of those issues. But when I spoke with my sister Amy, she brought up another form of environmental inequality — lack of access to wilderness and nature. You could call this a form of nature-deficit disorder imposed by poverty and class, not by the decisions of middle-class parents or their kids. (You can see the third part of my talk with Amy at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj8LIWpVw_0&feature=channel_page).

This issue has interested me for a long time. In fact, at least a dozen years ago I read about Alastair McIntosh, head of Graduate Studies at the Centre for Human Ecology at the University of Edinburgh and a program he began there. Several of McIntosh’s students introduced groups of poor inner-city youths and adults to the Scottish Highlands, a place they had never visited before. According to McIntosh, at first these people felt frightened or ridiculous, because wilderness was an environment foreign to them. But after two or three days of supportive experiences in the wild, these city dwellers began to change. Some of them became angry, others quite sad, as they realized what they had been missing all their lives. Direct contact with nature, with wilderness, with trees and animals and birds, is a profound experience of beauty, “almost a spiritual experience,” according to McIntosh, an experience of which the urban poor had been deprived. (Of course, as a Wiccan, I would delete the “almost” from his statement.)

Today we celebrated our annual water service at First Unitarian Society. Pouring water together that we had brought back to Madison from vacations in other spots, we celebrated our community gathering again after a summer spent apart.

Like rivers running to the sea,/We’re coming home… (UU hymn)

The worship service also commemorated water as the holy necessity it is in our lives: the sacred water that runs through our veins, the water we drink to maintain our lives, the water that brings the earth alive, the life-giving liquid flow that cycles through the clouds, the rain, the springs, the lakes, the streams, the rivers, finally streaming to the oceans, where it evaporates to become rain again. Without water, there is no life.

The ocean is the beginning of the earth./All life comes from the sea. (Wiccan chant by Starhawk)

This fall I’ll be teaching “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” again. Shirley Ranck wrote this groundbreaking curriculum about women in Western religion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it was first published in 1986. The fact that it took the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) at least five years to put it out says a lot about this pioneering course.

The UUA is notoriously liberal, even progressive. But this class pushed the buttons of Unitarian Universalist’s still largely male hierarchy, and they delayed publication. Why? Maybe because it offered consciousness raising within a religious context. Maybe because it included some controversial research. Maybe because those patriarchs could see its long-term consequences: More women embracing the Goddesses in their lives.

It certainly had all of those effects. In fact, the consciousness of UU women — already empowered by political feminism — became raised even further by contact with spiritual feminism. And although the curriculum contained references to the controversial archeologist Marija Gimbutas, that didn’t stop UU women from pouring into Wicca, welcoming both its deities and its ritual. In fact, UU women made Wicca one of the fastest, if not the fastest-growing religion in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

With the help of the UU Women and Religion Committee, Ranck updated and re-issued “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” last year. It’s still a wonderful course. And it still empowers women in ways that political feminism can’t. Where else would a teacher request that women sketch themselves nude and then talk about how this experience helped them to understand their concerns with body image? Where else would women talk about how patriarchal mothering antagonizes mothers and daughters in a divide-and-conquer strategy that has supported male domination? And where else would women learn about the history of masculine Gods displacing Goddesses?

I don’t normally read Thomas Friedman’s op. ed. pieces. But this one — “Connecting Nature’s Dots” — drew my attention, probably because of the word “Nature” in the headline. Practicing Wicca attunes me to nature, since to me it’s sacred. I ground my spirit in its rhythms (as the title of Starhawk‘s recent book The Earth Path proclaims). We are creatures of Mother Earth. She sustains us. And being in touch with Her cycles gives me significant insights into my life.

Thomas Friedman’s recent eco-safari in Africa seems to have brought this home to him. Of course, as a journalist, he sees it all from the perspective of a newspaper. In fact, you could sum up his piece as “Extra, extra, read all about it in the animal and insect tracks on the earth.” But I found his insight significant, nonetheless. Friedman’s guide, Map Ives — the 54-year-old director of sustainability for Wilderness Safaris, which supports ecotourism in Botswana — could read the tracks of passing animals as well as detecting the weather from their marks. More importantly, Ives pointed out all the interconnections and “free services” that nature provides.

Plants clean the air; the papyrus and reeds filter the water. Palm trees are growing on a mound originally built by termites. “If you spend enough time in nature and allow yourself to slow down sufficiently to let your senses work,” Ives said, “then through exposure and practice, you will start to sense the meanings in the sand, the grasses, the bushes, the trees, the movement of the breezes, the thickness of the air, the sounds of the creatures and the habits of the animals with which you are sharing that space.”

Today after returning from a delightful vacation in the Adirondacks, I’ve been immersing myself in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. This week to my utter astonishment, the entire magazine section of the Sunday Times has been devoted to the international issues surrounding women’s rights. It’s entitled “Saving the World’s Women.”

The cover story, “The Women’s Crusade” by husband-and-wife team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, begins by enumerating several of the causes for women’s oppression in China, South Asia, and Africa — sexual slavery, lack of employment opportunities, lack of education, even lack of food and medicine for girls (but not for boys) — and how some of the women affected by these issues have turned their lives around through microfinance. These are wonderful stories, inspiring and perceptive about women’s situation in the developing world.

But soon Kristof and WuDunn move on to what they consider the more important issues: that educating and empowering women undermines extremism and terrorism; that aid to women in the Third World is the key to ending global poverty; that gender inequality hurts economic growth; and quoting Larry Summers (chief economist of the World Bank in the 1990s) that “Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.” Even the aid organization Care, the World Bank, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kristof and WuDunn tell us, are beginning to focus on women’s empowerment as an antidote to poverty and extremism.

It saddened me to see women once again viewed from an instrumental perspective and reduced to tools for the improvement of the world. Instead of looking at women’s stories and what they tell us about women’s rights, this NY Times duo seems interested in how helping women ultimately fights poverty or how empowering women fights terrorism, i.e. how women can be used for the betterment of society. I don’t understand why people don’t realize that the issue of women’s rights is important in and of itself. We don’t have to justify it by showing its geopolitical or economic significance. Women’s rights are human rights.

“You’ve come a long way, baby!” I guess that’s what I keep hearing in the background of the Senate Confirmation Sessions for Sonia Sotomayor. “And once you’ve come that long way, you should act like a (white) man, and not rock the boat with your ‘difference.’” Those white, male Senators don’t ask questions about impartiality when white, male judges are being confirmed, because, by definition, those men are unbiased, the norm, hey — they look the same and act same as the Senators asking the questions, so hey — they must be impartial.

But Sonia Sotomayor has bright, red toenails, which we can all see, because of her broken ankle. And she looks like she’s Hispanic. And as Joanna Russ (in The Female Man) said many years ago, when she walks into the hearing room, she “might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS!” Given all this difference, I guess Sotomayor has to write off her “wise Latina” comment as a “rhetorical flourish that failed.” And she’s probably smart to remain calm, unruffled, and unemotional or as Maureen Dowd called her “robotic.” These hearings are not the place to educate the elite about hegemony (and US Senators certainly count as the elite; just look at their health care packages!).