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A few ideas that are in the mix for this Sunday’s service:
Stories of local cases of trafficking and slavery, such as the restaurant in Berkeley that inspired David Batstone’s involvement in the issue, the use of Thai slaves to repair the Bay Bridge, or even closer to home, forced prostitution in San Mateo and Sunnyvale.
Our heritage of Unitarian abolitionists like Theodore Parker and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Universalist abolitionists like Benjamin Rush–and those Unitarians and Universalists who opposed them. The former are important because we honor them and may be inspired to follow in their footsteps, creating the 21st century movement to equal their abolitionism of two centuries earlier. The latter are important because their hesitancy may illuminate what barriers stand between us and action.
Harriet Tubman’s repeated journeys back to slave states, the most dangerous places she could go, in order to free others. Clearly her answer to Kevin Bales’s question, “And if we can’t use our power to bring about the end of slavery, are we truly free?” would have been “No.” The same challenge faces us: we are ostensibly free. Are we willing to venture into troubling territory to bring people out of bondage? That territory, for us, does not carry the risks the South did for Tubman; the risk we run is the discomfort of learning of others’ suffering and having to change.
Videos about human trafficking playing on the patio before and after the services, my technological abilities permitting.
The longing to be a part of a UU abolitionist movement. We don’t have one. We need one. I’m starting it now. Join me to get in on the ground floor.
Yesterday, day two of the Abolition Academy, the implicit theme of the day seemed to be messiness. There is a lot we can know about the supply chain from slaveholder to consumer–apparel corporations, for example, can identify every subcontractor and source all the way back to the cotton field much more easily than they often claim–but there are still complications in ensuring that no one in the chain is trafficked or enslaved.
For example, one of the requirements is monitoring: monitoring one’s suppliers, contractors and subcontractors, to make sure they are not committing any of the abuses that point to forced labor. (Examples: holding workers’ passports so that they can’t leave; requiring overtime; beating people who don’t make their quota.) Well, there are third-party monitoring organizations. But even they sometimes hesitate to make unannounced inspections, because they want to have a relationship of mutual trust with the subcontractors. (Hey, we can’t even get unannounced inspections in this country. But that’s because we specifically rewrote safety laws so that corporations could conceal problems before an inspection. Would you like E. coli with that hamburger?) The whole system is a work in progress.
For this and other reasons, instead of the shorthand “slave-free,” Not For Sale recommends the term “zero tolerance.” Even the most diligent company, conducting third-party unannounced inspections, can’t guarantee that abuses of workers’ rights won’t occur. The commitment we ask of them is that they keep a sharp eye out for these abuses, and when they find them, take effective action. That’s zero tolerance for forced labor. Monday’s facilitator compared it to a university having a zero tolerance for racism. They aren’t guaranteeing that no one on the campus will ever do anything racist–that’s not possible. Instead, they are promising to pay attention and to act on such incidents.
This is wisdom for congregations, which can be paralyzed by the impossibility of guaranteeing perfection. Being a Welcoming Congregation (UU lingo for proactively welcoming and supporting LGBTQ people) doesn’t mean promising that no one at church will ever utter a homophobic word; it means speaking up if anyone does. Being a multicultural, antiracist congregation doesn’t mean you always get diversity right, but that the congregation is stretching, listening to what its people of color have to say, and being willing to change. Standing for justice doesn’t mean you’ll never do something hypocritical like treat a church employee badly–on the contrary, it means you’ll diligently watch for just such moments and correct course when they happen. The aim is not perfection. We are human and messy, and so the aim is to be honest and keep on moving forward.
The troublesome verse, Matthew 5:48, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,” has come in for a called-for re-interpretation in recent years. The Aramaic word that’s usually translated “perfect” evokes, not the absoluteness that “perfect” has in English, but a strong sense of integrity, maturity, completeness: a fruit come to ripeness, a person grown to adulthood, a body whole and healthy. In a world where, as last year’s Trafficking in Persons Report says, “it is impossible to get dressed, drive to work, talk on the phone, or eat a meal without touching products tainted by forced labor,” it’s important this movement is calling us, not to perfection, but to integrity.
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A woman in the class recommended this primer, 18 minutes long, by the author of Disposable People and founder of Free the Slaves, Kevin Bales. If you don’t have time to read his book, check out this excellent talk.
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ETA that Boy in the Bands, my colleague the Rev. Scott Wells, just posted about one of the worst cases of child labor in the world today, the girls pressed into being soldiers and sex slaves of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Here’s his post, and here’s the link to help fund the film on the subject being made by a friend of his. Thanks, Scott!
Yesterday, day one of the Abolition Academy (the week’s theme: the supply chain), was pretty fact-filled and unemotional, overall. Even the movie we watched about the trafficking and forced labor of children in the Ivory Coast’s cocoa plantations, The Dark Side of Chocolate, went very light on the heart-wrenching details; from what I know of the abuses against these children, they could have shown us much worse, but they were very restrained. One exchange in the movie, however, brought tears from me that wouldn’t stop.
Children are lured or simply kidnapped from the surrounding countries–Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria–and taken to the plantations, from which most never return, much less send home the money they were promised they’d earn. The filmmakers follow a bus that takes Malian children to the village closest to the country’s border with the Ivory Coast. Once there, they’re taken by motorcycle taxi over the border to an Ivory Coast village, from where they’re distributed to whoever buys them around the country.
Once on the Ivory Coast side, the director went up to a little boy who was sitting alone and crying, and asked him why he was crying. “I’m looking for Ali,” the boy said.
“Who’s Ali?”
“Ali. The man driving the bus. The bus over there,” the boy said, crying and gesturing toward the village square as if the bus had disappeared from there. My heart broke to see this child who wanted only to go back to the bus, who didn’t even realize that he was now in another village, in another country.
I didn’t blog all last week because we were on a family road trip to Southern California, so daytime was for driving and/or activities like hanging out with my mom or touring Legoland, and nighttime was for much-needed unscheduled time with the family, and sleep. It was great. The first day took us down Route 5 through the Central Valley, which contains about 1% of the country’s agricultural land but produces 8% of its agriculture. The politics of water, a major issue in California, is in your face, with various pleas to make water cheaper and reminders that cheap food depends on it. “Food grows where water flows,” the signs say. “Congress-created dust bowl”–they mean Democratic Congress-created, since the signs list the culprits as Pelosi, Boxer, and the local Congressman, Jim Costa. My primary impression whenever I pass through this land, however, is bewilderment that anything edible grows here at all. It’s practically a desert–not a dust bowl, but very dry land. Rerouting water here in the amounts needed to raise things like fruit trees, lettuce, and cattle is a major problem–as anyone in the Sacramento Delta can tell you. It seems that there just isn’t enough water to green this valley and still have salmon in the rivers and water in the pipes of cities with populations in the millions.
My first impression is not quite right, though. Actually, the desert, like the abundance of food growing in it, has largely been created by humans. The valley used to be a mix of grassland, woodlands, and marshland, with lots of rivers. We turned the grassland into fields, cut down the forests, drained the marshes, and diverted the rivers to irrigate the farms and provide water for 30 million people around Los Angeles, as well as the smaller but significant population centers of the Bay Area, Sacramento, and the lower Valley itself. Now we are trying to grow food in what has indeed become a desert.
On a related political issue, I hid from the heat in the air conditioning of the car, and whenever I had to emerge for gas and food, the heat of the air was like a hammer pounding me into the ground. I can’t imagine going out there day after day to plant or pick, unless I had no other options. Maybe Mexicans feel otherwise, being more accustomed to a hot climate, but there’s only so much adjusting a human body can do; farm workers die of the heat there every year. One thing’s for sure, it’s the kind of job that should be very generously compensated, if we compensate based on the value of the work done and the strength needed to accomplish it. Obviously we don’t. Another hidden cost of our cheap food.
We drove by fields (lettuce and strawberries), orchards (almonds was our guess), enormous feedlots where a lot of the country’s beef cattle live out the last one-third to one-quarter of their lives (beef-eating friends tell me the taste is about what you’d expect compared to grass-fed cattle, but obviously most consumers of beef are fine with it). The water policies of the past several decades have given rise to entire communities, a history and a home, a whole way of life for many thousands of people, that are now threatened by changes in policy; yet the old policies don’t seem to be sustainable. No wonder the people are angry. What is a fair approach to solving the dilemma we’ve created?
I’m now on study leave and one of my projects is a week-long intensive course in modern slavery at Not For Sale’s Abolition Academy, conveniently held across from the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. (If you’re interested, but aren’t close to the SF Bay Area, they also offer shorter “Backyard Academy” sessions all around the country.) I first learned about this organization when their president spoke on a radio show earlier this year, then I did more research when I was looking for an anti-slavery organization to support, as I chronicled in May, and along the way got interested in learning more from them.
I know a few things about slavery today, the first being that it’s alive and kicking: actual cases of people being locked up, forced to work, deprived of their wages, and even inheriting their servitude from their parents. Another is that it is far from a remnant; more people are enslaved right now on Earth than there were in the entire African slave trade of the 16th through 19th centuries. Tens of thousands are enslaved in the US or pass through here each year–obviously it’s illegal, but enforcement and prosecution are rare. A large component is sex slavery (the Iowa Family Leader kicked up a little dust yesterday by coming up with an outrageous euphemism for a child who was the property of the man who had produced him by raping his mother, who was also his property: “raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household”). I also know that apart from a few well-publicized cases, like the Thai workers locked in a sweatshop in Los Angeles several years back, there isn’t much awareness of the problem even among people who are attuned to social problems.
I’ve been pretty ignorant about it myself, which is why I want to learn more. The course I’ll be taking later this month is on the supply chain, following the connection from slaveholder to consumer and empowering companies and consumers to break it. A couple of reasons I like Not For Sale (NFS) is that they also train people in investigating slavery in their neighborhoods, and they do outreach to the faith community (possible future courses to take, if this one is good). I hope we Unitarian Universalists will act on our pride in our abolitionist forebears by leading the movement to (as NFS puts it) “re-abolish slavery.” I’ve already committed to preaching on 21st century slavery and abolition on August 14, so now I’ll have much more knowledge to bring to the pulpit.
The morning’s news brought yet another report of a California official telling public employees that they need to give up a chunk of their pensions. This one was the mayor of San Jose. It’s a statewide problem, as cities, counties, and the state find that their pension funds don’t have enough in them to pay out the contracted amount. As the wife of a state worker and a user of state services, I’m really tired of the public-employee bashing. (I know the pension system needs to be reformed. But you can’t change the terms retroactively. We signed the contract and then we gambled with the pension funds, and lost. In a trustee, that would be called irresponsible stewardship, if not malfeasance; for the citizens of a state, it means suck it up and pay what we promised.)
So when I heard that Wisconsin’s governor was trying to eradicate collective bargaining for Wisconsin state employees on everything but wages, and limit their raises to inflation–work for Wisconsin and tread water!–I was depressed but not surprised. So cynical have I become about the attitude most people take toward public employees that what surprised me was the fervor of the protests. Actually, I didn’t hope for any protests except a few squawks from the usual suspects. Instead, the last I heard, the Democratic state senators refused to show up for the vote, denying a quorum. Twenty-five thousand people turned out at the Capitol, and it’s cold in Madison. (Yeah, a temperature in the 40s isn’t cold compared to what they’ve been going through this winter. But try standing outside in it all day.) Teachers are walking out and schools have been shut for lack of staff. The president spoke up on behalf of public employees. People seem to actually care.
One of the great regrets of my life is that I will probably never join a union. Despite their flaws, they are so eminently sensible to me, their history so much a part of the struggle for justice in this country, that I’d like to have my very own union card (I could show it to the National Guard if necessary). Lacking one, I sing “Union Maid” to my daughter, tell anyone in a purple SEIU hat “That’s our family’s union!,” honor picket lines, read Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, proudly claim the identity of worker, and watch events like those in Wisconsin with hope that the newly inaugurated GOP governors around the country are watching too. Maybe, like the leaders of Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Yemen, etc. this week, they’re wondering if they can quite get away with what they’d planned.
Caltrain's Baby Bullet train at Diridon Station, San Jose (photo by snty-tact)
Caltrain is in trouble. It’s a major commuter line, running from San Francisco to Gilroy and serving San Jose, tenth-biggest city in the country, and Silicon Valley, where, according to Price-Waterhouse-Coopers, one-third of venture capital invested in the US is spent. A mighty important transit service, you would think, yet it doesn’t even have its own dedicated funding source. It’s funded by three area transit agencies that do have taxes dedicated to funding them, and that decide each year how much they’ll give to Caltrain. It hasn’t been enough. Right now things are so bad that Caltrain is in danger of shutting down completely within a year, and is planning to cut back service drastically this year–which, of course, would cause ridership to plummet.
We only refer to a few kinds of transportation as “public,” but the fact is that no transportation system in this country thrives without public funding. Transit can’t survive on passenger fares alone, any more than the highways are funded by tolls. The federal government subsidizes car travel to the tune of almost $80 billion a year, which is well over half the Department of Transportation’s budget. (My wife, who knows a lot about this stuff, reminds me that the interstate highway system, launched in the Eisenhower administration, is the biggest public works project in the history of the country. These Republicans, always taxing and spending!) Trains have had to compete with airlines as well, while both the airlines and airports have received government funding far outstripping that of railroads and transit. And that’s just federal funding; states also fund roads, bridges, highways, and airports more generously than they fund rail. We’ve gotten what we’ve paid for: gridlocked roads everywhere and a marginal rail system.
Transit can’t be done by halfway measures. The service has to be fast and frequent enough that it makes other options unattractive. For example, I would take transit to work much more often if it ran earlier on Sundays and more frequently on weekdays, but since the train can’t get me to work on time on Sunday, and leaves me waiting an hour for the next train on weekday nights, I usually drive. More bicyclists would take the train if it had more bike cars, but it can’t do that and carry its capacity of riders–unless it has a lot more funding and can run more trains. Partial and insecure funding just creates a system that turns would-be users away.
It’s the same story with Amtrak and the once-thriving private railroads that used to serve the whole country. Amtrak receives less than $1 billion a year, and not surprisingly, has become less and less useful and relevant since its creation in 1970, but there are members of Congress who seriously propose that we cut what little Amtrak funding remains. McCain is one of the worst–man, did we dodge a bullet when we declined to make him President. He’s not proposing that we de-fund transportation–our tax dollars will still pay for air and car travel. But when it comes to rail, he insists it be purely private.
The solution being sought right now by the BayRail Alliance includes a lot of private help: Stanford University and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group are funding polling and studies. That help is key, but long-term–even past the next few months–Caltrain needs serious public funding, because it’s competing with heavily government-funded options. If we want transit and rail service, we ought to fund them at the levels we fund the roads and highways, or cars will become our only option.
Polls often reveal that gun owners oppose legislation being pushed by the National Rifle Association (NRA). This is true to a large extent even of gun owners who belong to the NRA. For example, Frank Luntz, who is a Republican pollster and frequent analyst on Fox News, found that 69% of NRA members support closing the loophole that allows buyers at gun shows to circumvent background checks (the figure was 85% for all gun owners). Seventy-eight percent of NRA members support requiring gun owners to report lost and stolen guns (88% of all gun owners). I’m just citing Luntz because he’s a conservative, though of course the NRA disputes his findings; there are other studies that also show that the NRA is too extreme for many of the people it claims to represent.
I used to belong to AAA; my parents bought me a membership when I got my driver’s license, and for many years it was synonymous in my mind with “roadside assistance.” Gradually, as I read the AAA magazine and paid attention to the news, I realized that “the highway lobby,” with which I disagreed on almost all issues, was in fact the better synonym for AAA (see what you can learn if you’re a compulsive reader?). Roadside assistance and those handy little tour books were just a sideline use of our membership funds, while the major use was to pay lobbyists to get Congress to increase highway funding, oppose un-American activities like rails-to-trails conversions, and generally resist any policy that might move us more toward other forms of transportation than the almighty automobile. As soon as I learned that there were other roadside-assistance plans available, I stopped sending my money to AAA.
The NRA is forever hiding behind “responsible gun owners” and “hunters” and implying that anyone who does target shooting, goes deer hunting, or for that matter, keeps a handgun in their home for self-defense, supports their positions. If you are a gun owner, please have a look at what the NRA wants to accomplish, and if you disagree with them, don’t fund them. There are other organizations for gun owners, responsible ones that, unlike the NRA, are not the bane of police departments. Join one of them. (And that gun in your house? Lock it up well. There are kids around.)
I had my sermon all but finished, but Saturday morning, a niggling voice told me it wasn’t where my passion lay, and I listened to it and wrote an entirely different one. I had been brooding over the economic news, but Bernie Sanders’s own sermon in the Senate this week–it sure hit me like a sermon–sent me over the edge. Our crazy economic system and how we are arguing about just how much crazier to make it–that was what I wanted to say about childhood in this country at this moment.
So with the couple of hours in the early morning of Saturday and Sunday when I’m usually up before my family, plus a strong dose of anger and grief, I wrote this. I’m glad I followed my instincts. I heard from many people how much they needed to hear it, and I think that was mostly because it was the sermon I most needed to say.
Two years ago I thought we were headed for a serious depression and almost everyone else seemed to think so too. Not Great Depression levels, maybe, but a worldwide crisis, with U.S. unemployment remaining in double digits for years, perhaps pushing 20%. But two years later, the people who’ve been trying to hold the roof up seem to have done it. It’s leaking, and props like stimulus spending are causing their own, predicted problems (a high deficit, but since when have Republicans cared about those? Oh, right, since the Democrats took power). But still, it’s over our heads instead of down around our ears.
So you would think that “We kept things from being really, really bad and held them to just pretty bad” would be a strong campaign slogan (okay, after some editing), but instead, it seems to be conventional wisdom that that argument will get the Dems nowhere. Certainly, Obama has stopped campaigning on what they’ve done over the past two years and is instead trying to focus on the future. Judging from the polls, the party that saved our butts is about to take a licking, as angry voters try to return Congress to the people who created this mess to begin with.
I’m wondering how things were different in 1934. FDR had taken office with a landslide win in the 1932 election, 57.4% of the popular vote; like Obama, he also saw his party take control of both houses of Congress that year (moving from a slight to a commanding majority in the House, and winning the majority in the Senate). So the Democrats went into the 1934 midterm elections in a comparable situation to today’s party, having been able to pass legislation to address the economic crisis over Republican opposition. The Depression was far from over. Unemployment was at 21.7% that year (the Bureau of Labor Statistics can no doubt provide a month-by-month account if you’re curious).
So what happened in those midterms? The Republicans lost big. And then, in 1936, with unemployment and other effects of the Depression still ravaging the country (the world), FDR won re-election in a landslide.
So what gives?
There are differences between 1934 and 2010, of course. The Depression was well underway when FDR ran in 1932; Hoover and a Republican Senate had had three years to turn it around, but between the 1929 crash and the election, things had only gotten worse. In contrast, Obama came into office at a time when, while almost everyone was predicting economic disaster, the tidal wave had not yet struck. It’s much less psychologically convincing to point out a disaster averted than to turn around a bad situation.
But geez, FDR and his Democratic Congress had barely turned around a bad situation, themselves. They’d created a barrelful of new programs meant to end the depression, and yet the unemployment rate had dropped an undramatic 1.9 points. Why didn’t the voters say “You’ve had two years and things are still a mess!”?
Got a theory? Know some history to fill things in for us? Recommend any books on the political history of the ’30s?
ETA on 10/28: Hendrik Hertzberg just took up the same question in this week’s The New Yorker.
Sermons in Stones 
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