Everybody’s fight

March 9, 2015 in human rights | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Unitarian Universalists smiled when we heard President Obama mention “a young mother of five” in his stirring speech in Selma, Alabama, last weekend. If one hadn’t heard of Viola Liuzzo, one might have thought he was just giving a random example of the kind of person who might possibly have answered the call to go to Selma, the way a speech will refer to “a Georgia sharecropper” or “a factory worker from Cleveland.” In fact, when he spoke of “the willingness of a 26-year-old deacon, or a Unitarian minister, or a young mother of five to decide they loved this country so much that they’d risk everything to realize its promise,” we knew that he was talking about three specific people who not only risked, but paid the ultimate price: Baptist deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson, Unitarian minister the Reverend James Reeb, and Detroit Unitarian Universalist Viola Liuzzo.

Although I don’t know her story in a great deal of detail, and can’t know her personality enough to be sure, I doubt Liuzzo went to Alabama to die. She went to join in a struggle for justice that she regarded as hers as much as anyone’s, and while she knew it was dangerous because she’d seen the terrifying coverage of “Bloody Sunday,” when people were beaten as they tried to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, she joined a march there two weeks later and was unharmed. Maybe having taken that plunge, she felt safe. Maybe she didn’t really suppose that teaming up with another activist to drive people from the Montgomery airport to Selma could be as risky as that march. But a carload of KKK members chased them down the highway, pulled up next to them and fired into the car, killing Liuzzo instantly.

I ask myself now and then, for what would I risk everything? Mostly I would like to give my life by living and working for a cause, not by dying for it. When I think of what I would risk dying for, I think of freedom and fairness, of the earth, but mostly of people: people I know. It’s a principle of community organizing and congregational leadership that what people give to, sacrifice for, go to the wall for, is their connection with other people. When we know someone who is suffering under oppression, abstractions such as freedom and justice take on flesh. They acquire a face, and the face silently asks us to act. Their fight becomes our fight.

It’s probable that that face was a specific one in Liuzzo’s life: her close friend Sarah Evans, who was African American. Evans warned her that it could be dangerous, but as Liuzzo told her husband, she felt compelled to go to Selma because what they were seeing on television was “everybody’s fight.” Lots of other white people joined it, though mercifully few paid the price that Liuzzo did; but in any fight, most of us cheer or cry from the sidelines, while only a few actually pack a bag and show up on the battlefield. The world is turned by those like Liuzzo who do, and whenever I hear her story, I wonder again whether I’m ever one of them, and for what, or for whom, I’ll fight and even die.

We who believe in freedom

March 8, 2015 in countering racism, human rights | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

(Two notes: Blogging every day is hard! Losing an almost-finished entry to a technical glitch is a huge gumption killer–save your draft often, kids! Okay, done whining now. On to three posts on women in the civil rights movement, as we mark the 50th anniversary of the marches on Selma.)

EllaBakerElla Baker was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), having already spent many decades as a leader of the NAACP and of black consumers’ cooperatives, which she regarded as a training ground in democracy and self-determination. Accounts vary as to whether Martin Luther King anointed her Executive Director of the SCLC or she anointed him leader. What’s clear is that her leadership was central to turning this small faith-based organization into a major force for civil rights.

She was mostly a behind-the-scenes organizer and a mentor to emerging leaders who got more face time, but that doesn’t mean she was meek. When students in Greensville and Nashville began holding sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, she saw a need to help them organize more broadly, and called a meeting at her alma mater, Shaw University. The meeting was attended by hundreds and ended with the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Other SCLC leaders wanted SNCC to be an auxiliary of their own organization, arguing that SCLC had helped it get rolling, but Baker stood up for the autonomy of the student organization. Later, she helped start the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which pressed for anti-segregationists to represent Mississippi’s Democrats at the 1964 Democratic Convention and became the focus of tremendous media attention during the convention because of the split in the Democratic Party that it illuminated and the persistence with which it made its case. Meek? No.

To me she stands as a reminder of a certain kind of power: not fast and flashy like lightning, nor loud like a rocket, but tireless and immovable, like an oak tree. That kind of power is as necessary and mighty as any other. “We shall not be moved . . . ”

When the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner drew the nation’s eye to Mississippi, it was Ella Baker who pointed out the many black bodies in the swamps of Mississippi that neither the FBI nor the nation’s conscience had deemed important, and said, “Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son–we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.” Bernice Johnson Reagon of the group Sweet Honey in the Rock turned these and other words of Baker’s into a song (“Ella’s Song”), and they have been sung, murmured, memed, screenprinted, and cried out many times in these past couple of years in which they have been self-evidently, painfully, all too current.

World women’s suffrage

March 5, 2015 in politics | Tags: , , | 1 comment

So much of women’s history in the United States focuses on a single, exhausting struggle: the fight for the right to vote, finally won in 1920 after several failed attempts to get it through Congress and ratified. It seems unbelievable that women have only been able to vote for president, and for most other offices in most places, for well under half of our country’s history. A global view puts that fact into perspective: modern democratic governments began coming on the scene in the early 17th century, but it was not until almost the 20th century that any of them permitted women the fundamental act of a citizen: New Zealand made history by granting women the vote in 1893, only 14 years after all men attained the vote there (prior to 1869, most men had to own land to vote).

Saudi Arabia includes women in the vote for the first time this year. After that, the only country where the right to vote is restricted to men will be Vatican City, which does have female citizens (a few dozen of its several hundred citizens) but recognizes no voting rights except those of cardinals.

However, like the gap that still exists in the United States between de jure and de facto voting rights, especially for people of African descent, women’s being granted the right to vote does not always equal the ability to exercise that right freely. Afghan women had the vote in 1919, a year before their sisters in our country could vote, but women under the Taliban cannot give speeches or run for office, and they can’t leave the house without a male chaperone: all dampers on their actually putting a ballot into the box to be counted.

The first time I did door-to-door political canvassing, I asked a woman if she’d made up her mind for the Congressional election and was silently shocked when she said, “Oh, no–my husband decides that kind of thing.” Around the world, in places where women have little freedom of other kinds, how many of their votes serve only to give their husbands a double dip in the voting pool?

Happy birthday, Zenzile Miriam Makeba

March 4, 2015 in music | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Before “world music” experimenters like Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and Paul Simon incorporated explicitly African sounds into western popular music, there was Miriam Makeba, a South African singer who had her biggest hit in the US in 1967 with “Pata Pata.” It reached #12 on the Billboard Top 100.

Makeba wrote the song with another South African singer-songwriter, Rhodesia-born Dorothy Masuka. Both were civil rights activists and were exiled for it for decades. Makeba suffered a second exile: having come to the United States (helped by Harry Belafonte), appeared on the Steve Allen Show, signed a recording contract here, and made hit records, she became too controversial for American record companies upon her marriage to Stokely Carmichael. They canceled her contracts and the couple moved to the Republic of Guinea.

She was born on this day in 1932 and died in 2008.

Isabel Allende

March 3, 2015 in books | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

During this third day of Women’s History Month I’ve been reading El Cuaderno de Maya (Maya’s Notebook), by a female writer of historic significance, Isabel Allende. My Spanish teacher was shrewd: he brought the book in one day and together we read the first few pages in the original language. It’s been the bulk of my weekly assignment ever since. I was hooked after the first paragraph, those few lines with which the author somehow evoked Maya’s personality, suggested her recent and risky history, tantalized me about her grandmother’s story, and most of all made me want to read her notebook. In English, as translated by Anne McLean, it reads:

A week ago my grandmother gave me a dry-eyed hug at the San Francisco airport and told me again that if I valued my life at all, I should not get in touch with anyone I knew until we could be sure my enemies were no longer looking for me. My Nini is paranoid, as the residents of the People’s Independent Republic of Berkeley tend to be, persecuted as they are by the government and extraterrestrials, but in my case she wasn’t exaggerating: no amount of precaution could ever be enough. She handed me a hundred-page notebook so I could keep a diary, as I did from the age of eight until I was fifteen, when my life went off the rails. “You’re going to have time to get bored, Maya. Take advantage of it to write down the monumental stupidities you’ve committed, see if you can come to grips with them,” she said. Several of my diaries are still in existence, sealed with industrial-strength adhesive tape. My grandfather kept them under lock and key in his desk for years, and now my Nini has them in a shoebox under her bed. This will be notebook number nine. My Nini believes they’ll be of use to me when I get psychoanalyzed, because they contain the keys to untie the knots of my personality; but if she’d read them, she’d know they contain a huge pile of tales tall enough to outfox Freud himself. My grandmother distrusts professionals who charge by the hour on principle, since quick results are not profitable for them. However, she makes an exception for psychiatrists, because one of them saved her from depression and from the traps of magic when she took it into her head to communicate with the dead.

Allende’s first novel, almost incredibly, was The House of the Spirits, epic in scope and powerful in its emotional and intellectual impact. From my perspective as an adoptive Northern Californian–a status she shares–her novel Daughter of Fortune is particularly interesting, because it moves from Chile to the founding of San Francisco as a modern city, during the Gold Rush. Her descriptions of modern-day Berkeley are so incisive (and funny) that although I’ve never been to Chile, I feel that Santiago, too, must be exactly as her words describe it. She has a stunning command of language, poetic yet straight-shooting, with phrases that can make you laugh out loud and shake your head in sorrow at the same time. In 2010, Allende was awarded Chile’s National Prize for Literature, one of only a few women to have received that recognition.

She was exiled from her native land in 1973 by the military coup and the assassination of Salvador Allende (her father’s cousin, or in Spanish, her tío en segundo grado). In an introduction to a memoir, she writes that the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center made her a U.S. American:

I no longer feel that I am an alien in the United States. When I watched the collapse of the towers, I had a sense of having lived a nearly identical nightmare. By a blood-chilling coincidence–historic karma–the commandeered airplanes struck their U.S. targets on a Tuesday, September 11, exactly the same day of the week and month–and at almost the same time in the morning–of the 1973 military coup in Chile, a terrorist act orchestrated by the CIA against a democracy. The images of burning buildings, smoke, flames, and panic are similar in both settings. That distant Tuesday in 1973 my life was split in two; nothing was ever again the same; I lost a country. That fateful Tuesday in 2001 was also a decisive moment; nothing will ever again be the same, and I gained a country. (“A Few Words of Introduction,” My Invented Country, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)

Not having yet read the book, I don’t know why the ironic twinning of these tragedies led to her feeling that she had gained a country. How does one even make a home in the country that destroyed one’s homeland, much less proudly claim that new nationality as one’s identity? If anyone can trace the complexities of that journey in such as way as to bring us along and make us understand, it’s Isabel Allende.

 

(An earlier version of this post stated incorrectly that the English translation of El Cuaderno de Maya was by Allende herself, and omitted the names of the translators of both books quoted.)

Why . . . ?

March 2, 2015 in gender | Tags: , | 2 comments

Nudged by the death of Leonard Nimoy, and the public appreciations that followed, to introduce Munchkin at last to the original Star Trek, I sat down with her last night to watch The Trouble with Tribbles. She liked tribbles, as we predicted; she thought it was funny; it was a good choice. But, she asked, looking at the actors, “why are they almost all guys?”

I stammered a bit before arriving at the obvious correct answer: because the makers of the show were sexist. When they thought of exciting things like space exploration, their imaginations weren’t up to conceiving of anyone except men carrying them out. It was jarring to see it through her eyes. I’m used to thinking of Star Trek as groundbreaking, and maybe it was even in this respect; the women on the Enterprise had jobs, after all, in space no less, even if they were the well-worn options of secretary (Lt. Uhura), nurse (Nurse Chapel), and, hm, what is a yeoman (Yeoman Rand)? Captain’s P.A.? That makes it a striking, and surely deliberate, departure from Lost in Space, in which the wife and daughters are . . . a wife and daughters. I guess someone has to dust the controls and look pretty.

I didn’t want to make excuses for Star Trek, but in the interests of teaching her some history, I told the munchkin that the show was a leap forward. What chiefly struck me, though, was how far we’ve come since 1968, which is, coincidentally, the span of in my lifetime. There is still plenty of tokenism in entertainment and it bugs me a lot, as I’ve written on this blog before. But an eight-year-old girl in 2015 noticed easily what was invisible even to a pioneer like Gene Roddenberry fewer than 50 years earlier, and that’s cause for gratitude and hope. Also, for this mama, pride.

Helen Keller

March 1, 2015 in socialism | Tags: , | 1 comment

Only three women have been featured on United States currency other than special commemorative coins: Susan B. Anthony on the ill-designed dollar coin; Sacajawea on the better, current dollar coin; and Helen Keller on the quarter honoring her home state, Alabama.

I imagine that the way I learned about Keller was typical: she was the protagonist of an overcoming-adversity tale, cast as a mixture of victim and heroine. What that story obscures, as such stories tend to do, is the fact that her accomplishments would be remarkable regardless of her ability to see or hear. She co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the bulwarks between the radical freedoms promised by our constitution and the many forces (especially internal) that seek to erode them. She worked for the vote for women, pacifism and access to birth control. She was acclaimed in her own time, but when she became an outspoken socialist, critics began pushing back and suggesting that her physical limitations made it difficult for her to reach wise conclusions about such matters.

She wrote to a British newspaper, in 1911:

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. . . . You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?

Women got the vote in the US nine years later, thanks to thousands like Keller. We have not used our millions of votes to redress that inequality, yet.

(I can see that a pleasant hazard of writing a post a day for Women’s History Month will be that I add many must-read books to my list. I have never read Keller’s autobiography, and now want to.)

Enlarging compassion

February 20, 2015 in emotional intelligence | Tags: , | 2 comments

(c) Paramount Domestic Television

(c) Paramount Domestic Television

I had a friend who used to refer to Commander Deanna Troi, ship’s counselor of the Enterprise in Star Trek: the Next Generation, as “the pain lady.” Her main function, he claimed, was to cry out “Pain!” and take on an aspect of agony whenever some entity, on board or nearby, was suffering. (Actually, I think her main function is to state the obvious–“He’s lying, Captain,” about someone they encounter who is so shifty-eyed that only a masochist would buy a used car from him–which is why I’ve dubbed my wife’s phone’s GPS the Counsellor Troi of Navigation Software. As soon as we hit a traffic snarl, the GPS is there to inform us that there’s traffic in our location.)

Troi is in fact an empath, being half Betazoid; the people of the planet Betazed are natural telepaths. She can sense all emotion to an acute degree. And yet it’s her cry “Pain!” that lives in the memory.

In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera muses on the etymology of the word “compassion.”

All languages that derive from Latin form the word “compassion” by combining the prefix meaning “with” (com) and the root meaning “suffering” (Late Latin, passio). In other languages–Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance–this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means “feeling” (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, współ-czucie; German, Mit-gefühl; Swedish, med-känsla).

In languages that derive from Latin, “compassion” means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer . . . . In languages that form the word “compassion” not from the root “suffering” but from the root “feeling,” the word is used in approximately the same way, but . . . . The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion–joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme. (19-20)

Do we actually experience compassion differently depending on the etymology of the word we use? Maybe we do. A native English speaker myself, I tend to think of compassion in the context of empathizing with someone’s suffering, although if asked to define it, I would say it encompasses all feelings, joyful as well as sorrowful.

If we wish to cultivate compassion–for example, in the children we raise or teach–maybe it would be more effective to speak of compassion in this wider context. If we only invite compassion for people when they’re suffering, compassion has a steep hill to climb. It has to conquer our natural desire to avoid pain. That is often what we do: we invoke compassion for suffering: “Oh, he fell down! That knee must really hurt.” “Imagine how she felt when you took the paints she was using.” Partaking of someone’s feelings becomes a chore. But if we invite compassion for all feelings–

“Look at the daddy in this picture. Doesn’t he look like he loves that baby?”

“Mommy’s listening to music on those headphones. You can see how relaxed she is.”

“The kids are laughing! They must be feeling very happy.”

–then children learn that feeling others’ feelings, far from being always painful, can be a source of great pleasure. It’s an act of imagination, engaging and fascinating, which sometimes does carry us into experiences we would rather not have, but also brings us happiness that we would not have experienced had we remained shut in our own minds.

Kundera suggests that love built on the Latin-derived compassion is “an inferior, second-rate” feeling barely deserving of the term love: “To love someone out of compassion means not really to love,” whereas the compassion that is co-feeling, “in the hierarchy of sentiments, . . . is supreme.” I’m less inclined to rank the feelings, but as a pragmatic matter, I’d like to cultivate co-feeling as a form of compassion that is both more complete and easier to embrace.

(c) Paramount Domestic Television

(c) Paramount Domestic Television

Lent, 2015

February 11, 2015 in spiritual practices | Tags: , | 5 comments

Lent begins next Wednesday, and once again, despite not being Christian either by upbringing or conviction, I feel a pull to do something spiritually significant during these seven weeks. It’s important to me that it be challenging, and not primarily for my own health or well-being, but something that helps me to serve others or elevate my purpose in some way. Some practices do double duty, of course. For example, I read this morning about how some people pledge to drink only water, which is healthful for the practitioner and also has an outward focus, because they take the money they usually spend on a daily coffee or whatever drinks they prefer and give it to charity.

That one wouldn’t be enough of a stretch for me, since I mostly drink water anyway. I also already give to charity on a budget I set annually, so shifting some of it to Lent would just be taking it from the rest of the year. I think I will return to a practice I began last month and did for a couple of weeks, but want to do with more discipline: the 40 Bags in 40 Days De-Cluttering Challenge. There is a purely self-care aspect of that: I’m stressed out by the amount of stuff I have, especially papers and e-mails, and I will feel better to lose 40 “bags.” However, it’s deeper than that.

Hoarding living room

(Not actually Amy’s living room.) Credit: Shadwwulf at en.wikipedia; used by Creative Commons license.

Clearing out space and organizing information makes it vastly easier for me to serve my congregation and care for my family. Looking for items that are submerged in the piles wastes time that I would rather devote to them, and to my spiritual practices. I want my church office to be a space that’s harmonious and welcoming to the people I meet there. I’d like our home office to have space for a desk for our daughter, so all three of us can work and create there–that will mean getting rid of a file cabinet’s worth of papers. I have clothes I never wear that I will be happy to take to a community thrift store for people who will benefit from them. And someone who may help me with this job is a young woman who’s struggling with addiction and looking for a useful way to spend a few hours a day, so working side by side with her will be a service to her as well as a way to keep myself on task. And when my space is tidy and well-ordered, I feel a burst of energy that I can put toward any number of more important goals.

What other spiritual aspects this practice may prove to have, I’ll know by Easter.

Loving like Jesus

February 8, 2015 in sermons and writings, Universalism | Tags: | 2 comments

The February Quest for Meaning is out, with this sermon of mine that I gave a couple of years ago. It was almost Christmas, and I was all set to preach about how the heart of Christianity was the simple command to love one another, and why we forget that. Then I turned on Facebook and saw posts like “Oh my God . . . Prayers for the people of Newtown,” and the Universalist message of love for all was severely tested. That’s when the writing got real.

The rest of the issue is here.

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