Why we’re singing for (with) Pete tomorrow

March 7, 2014 in history, music | Tags: , | 4 comments

I’d been braced for Pete Seeger’s passing for years, but I was still very sad several weeks ago when the news came that he had died, at age 94. I was a little stunned when, within 24 hours, a stern warning came over social media from a colleague: if we sang too many Pete Seeger songs in church that Sunday, we’d be alienating Generation X and Millennial congregation members.

The author, who is just about my age, has since stepped back from that rigid recommendation, acknowledging that the 140-character limit of the format she’d chosen had cost her message some nuance. We all know how that is. (A warning to the Twitter generation?) But I was no longer concerned only with that one statement. The chorus of agreement that met it—mixed, to be sure, with many younger-than-Boomer voices protesting that they know and love Pete Seeger’s music—showed how badly these generational concerns can deepen the ruts we get into. We UUs clearly aren’t ready to move beyond our brother UU, Pete Seeger. On the contrary, we’d better run if we’re ever going to catch up with him.

I understand the exasperation with Baby Boomer domination of our culture, especially UU culture. I think the phenomenon is real, and I appreciate people’s reminding us that there are other generations, and not to get stuck in nostalgia for the boomers’ heyday, that is to say, the 1960s. And there are other people who have died in the last month who deserve our honor but don’t get much attention, such as Amiri Baraka and Chokwe Lumumba.

Still, not to lift up Pete Seeger’s work and life would be to cut off our nose to spite our face.

First of all, it’s important to remember that Seeger was not a boomer. He wasn’t even just a bit older than the boomers, like boomer icon Bob Dylan (born 1941). Seeger was born in 1919 and served in World War II. My colleague Dan Harper pointed out exactly why Seeger began playing the college circuit in middle age: because his thriving career as a performer and recording artist was throttled by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) when it blacklisted him for insisting on his, and his associates’, First Amendment right to the freedom of assembly.

Which brings us to another reason we need to memorialize Seeger. No U. S. citizen can understand their country without knowing about the Red Scare. If you don’t know much about HUAC, reading the transcript of Pete Seeger’s testimony is a good introduction.

Seeger was a die-hard union supporter, and we don’t pay much respect to the labor movement in Unitarian Universalism. My congregation has its old lefties of Seeger’s generation, bless their rabble-rousing souls, but on the whole, we UUs have settled into a comfortable liberalism. The demands of the labor movement—now as in the 40s and 50s when his Almanac Singers and (to a lesser extent) Weavers were singing its songs—aren’t liberal, but radical, and they’re not comfortable. They shake up the system. It needs shaking up. Remember working 9 to 5? Weren’t those the good old days? In this and so many other ways, working people are going backwards, and Pete Seeger was one who kept pushing against that tide.

Another trend Seeger’s example helps us buck is that of receiving (consuming), rather than making, music. His concerts were always participatory and he never missed a chance to remind us that we are born to be music makers. He once said,

Once upon a time, wasn’t singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise, and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes, or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece? Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.

I mostly listen to music; my guitar languishes in a closet and my fingers have lost their calluses, and I rarely gather with friends to make music, except in church. I want to change that. He’s a gentle prophet nudging us to make that change.

The most chilling comments in the wake of Seeger’s death were the ones dismissing music of 25, 50, and 75 years ago as ancient history. One way that Unitarian Universalists are totally mainstream, completely in the sway of U. S. American culture, is in our disdain for the past. We revel in our refusal to look back, as if focusing on the future is the secret to being progressive. I don’t buy it. I still think that those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. We’re repeating it now, as those who have been thrown into poverty by others’ mismanagement of the economy are reviled as lazy spongers, as were those of Seeger’s childhood, the Bonus Army. We’re fighting battles that labor organizers of two generations ago thought they had won for us (workplace fatalities, for example, have plateaued after years of welcome decline). We’re struggling to keep our rivers clean—Seeger worked with the Clearwater efforts on the Hudson for almost 50 years—and maybe if we want to prevent poisonous spills such as we’ve seen in West Virginia and North Carolina in the past couple of months, we should look to the environmental strategies of 50 years ago, instead of trying to start from scratch every time. Maybe we give up so easily because we don’t know that we stand in a long heritage of struggle for true progress. As another UU singer, Utah Phillips, said, “The long memory is the most radical idea in this country” (Thanks, Dan Schatz, for that timely quote.)

Pete Seeger never stopped raising his voice, even decades after he insisted that he couldn’t sing anymore. It was never about the quality of his voice anyway—it was about heart and commitment. We still need them, and when I find someone who devoted himself to making a better world long after most people retire or give into cynicism, I’m really happy for his example. So as soon as the news of his death came, I scheduled a Pete Seeger Memorial Singalong Celebration, and we’ll be raising our voices tomorrow, March 8, at 6 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto.

Seeing clouds

March 6, 2014 in art | 2 comments

As an artist who’s been focusing almost entirely on figurative (that is, realistic, not abstract) drawings for the past several years, I sometimes wonder what the point is. Drawing helps me to see the world more clearly, but does it help the viewer to do the same? Doesn’t the most successful realism defeat its own purpose, in that people look at it and say, “Right, that’s a person,” without seeing any differently than they did before? I want to help people to have the experience I have when I draw: to get beyond “Well done, it really looks like her” to “That’s something I never noticed about her before.” I’m not sure realism can get them there.

Photo by Amy Zucker Morgenstern

Photo by Amy Zucker Morgenstern

At least, I wasn’t until recently, when I realized that I am really looking at clouds for the first time in my life. I don’t know how I got to this age without noticing that the clouds are different every day, and every few moments. That they come in an incredible variety of shapes that the nomenclature of cirrus, cumulus, cumulonimbus, stratus doesn’t capture. That their colors are infinitely varied even in simple mid-day light. I do have a pretty good idea what made me finally notice them. It was the paintings of two artists, Diego Rivera and Wendy Miller.

image

Photo by Amy Zucker Morgenstern

Wendy is an artist I know who lives in my neighborhood, and I saw her paintings for the first time when I moved here in 2010. Diego Rivera’s cloud paintings were unknown to me until earlier that same year, when we went to the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City and saw a whole series that he did from the balcony of his patron’s home (Dolores Olmedo herself, if I recall correctly), one evening after another, at sunset. I looked admiringly at both artists’ gorgeous paintings of clouds, acknowledging how difficult it must have been to portray them so vividly, but something beyond that happened inside me. Inside my eyes, I think, or whatever parts of me are needed to perceive clouds, because I see them now.

I do a lot of driving up and down the San Francisco Peninsula. There’s nothing new about that; I did it before 2010 too. Now, though, the clouds up ahead hold wonders for me every day, and now I know firsthand that “merely” painting what we see can open others’ eyes.

Gravity

March 5, 2014 in grief, movies | 5 comments

It’s the first day of Lent and I’ve decided that my practice this year will be to write daily on this blog. I have let it slip, and I miss the discipline of thought that it requires.

I made mental notes about Gravity back last fall when I found the one showing in San Francisco that fit between my drawing class and my time to take my daughter to music, at a small theater that only showed it in 2D. It being Monday afternoon, it was practically a private showing. If you haven’t seen the movie, you may want to skip this post, because here be spoilers.

 

I loved this movie. I know it drives people crazy who know and care what astronauts do. I’m sure I would froth at the mouth about all the mistakes in a movie about ministers, but since I am not particularly interested in astronauts or the proper procedures for maintenance of space telescopes or the International Space Station, I just enjoyed what the movie was really about, to this viewer. It isn’t supposed to be a documentary about space. To me, it’s about grief, and how difficult it is to return to daily life when all you want to do is float away and never feel anything again.

And before I even knew that, at the very first shot, I started to cry. There they were, little tiny people floating in this unimaginably large, indifferent expanse. As the introduction says, life in space is impossible. And then the moviemakers show us people in space. I thought, “That’s us! We’re all floating here in space for a tiny amount of time and then phut,” and I just stayed in that existential crisis for the following two hours. I thought that that was a different emotional issue than grief–me fussing about my own mortality instead of my never-absent dread that my daughter might precede me into death–but several months’ rumination on Gravity have made me realize that maybe they are really the same sorrow.

In the end, ironically enough, it is a very small movie, in the sense that it isn’t epic in scope but about a single person coping with a single event that is not newsworthy or noteworthy to anyone much except her. (I like small movies.) A woman’s young daughter has died. The woman, Ryan Stone, doesn’t know how to go on, or how to want to; she hasn’t touched the ground since. On earth, she achieves this by driving as much as possible, always moving. In space, maybe it’s easier to float, but maybe not; when we first see her, she is fighting nausea, and clearly her distress is not just physical. By the close of the movie, however, she wants to live. She digs her hands into the earth, grateful just to be here, and when she stands up on those shaky legs, the camera looks up at her as if at a colossus. With that shot, Cuarón is saying that Stone is heroic, and she is.

One critic couldn’t resist the pun, and wrote (safely after the winner was announced) about the Academy’s choice between “Gravity and gravitas,” the latter being represented by 12 Years a Slave. I can’t compare this movie to 12 Years a Slave or any of the other Best Picture nominees, because it’s the only one I’ve seen so far, but I cannot agree that Gravity lacks gravitas. The writers named it well. “Gravity” stands for one of the weightiest, most serious losses a person can endure. It is what tethers us to reality and all the pain it brings, rather than our floating in a half-existence. If you wanted to demonstrate gravity in the most prototypical way, you might drop a stone, the main character’s name. And, of course, “gravity” evokes the grave, in this movie about death and coping with loss. The daughter even died of gravity. The writers could have made the cause of her death drowning, or poisoning, or a car collision, but in one of their subtler details, they tell us: she fell. She fell to earth. It is a small movie, as I say, but a grave one, and a joyful one, too, because in the end Stone chooses life and is glad that she has.

In the sideshow tent

March 3, 2014 in uncategorized | 1 comment

I heard lots of good stuff from thoughtful people about Matthew McConaghey’s performance in The Dallas Buyers’ Club, so I have no particular reason to doubt that he deserves the Oscar, but I still wonder about a pattern. I wonder whether anyone who gains or loses a lot of weight for a role, or torments their bodies in some other way, goes into awards season with a head start. For example: McConaughey and Jared Leto this year, Natalie Portman in Black Swan, Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull, winners all. The Academy also loves portrayals of characters it views as deeply Other: transgender (Leto), mentally disabled (Arnie in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, an Oscar-nominated performance), autistic (Raymond in Rain Man, an Oscar-winning performance).

Underneath it all lie two disturbing, related tendencies. One is the Othering of certain kinds of people. The other is a lack of respect for the craft of acting. In my view, Leonardo DiCaprio is just as thoroughly inhabiting a character foreign to his own when he plays a stockbroker as when he plays a person with a mental disability. Isn’t he? He is not those people. He is creating them. That’s what it means to be a fine actor.

Instead of rewarding acting, or at the very least, overlaid on that appreciation, and in my opinion, eclipsing it, in the Oscars we sometimes see the attitude of the crowd at a freak show. Look at the weird autistic guy! Look at Dustin Hoffman being a weird autistic guy! . . . Look at Matthew McConaughey acting!–No, never mind that, this is more amazing: look at him dieting!

A real respect for the craft would regard the acting, and the tremendous discipline and insight that go into creating a character, as more important than the physical exertions that go into a few roles.

The office is open. Whipped cream on that?

February 28, 2014 in uncategorized | 1 comment

This afternoon will be the sixth in an experiment in community office hours: inspired by colleagues such as Jeremy Nickel, I have been going to local cafes for an hour on Friday afternoons, inviting anyone who wishes to to drop by and talk. I solicited café suggestions from the congregation and chose a variety that weren’t chains and covered the core of the geographical area we serve. I published the list in the newsletter along with a column explaining what I was up to, and I also send a day-of reminder by e-mail, tweet and/or Facebook.

The first week, four people came by, and initial awkwardness quickly turned into a lively five-way conversation. When four o’clock arrived and I excused myself, the other four carried on talking. I walked to my car grinning happily. Nothing makes my day like a decaf nonfat mocha and an animated conversation among people who, for the most part,

had barely known each other an hour before. Community office hours as small group. Hm.

Other weeks, the number of church folks has varied from zero to three. One person couldn’t come by, but seeing on Facebook that I was in office hours, instant-messaged me. He was the only visitor that week. I was really glad we’d connected, since we were able to talk, via IM,about something important that was on his mind. Community office hours as pastoral care.

During two other sessions, no one visited intentionally, yet each time someone made a connection with me. One was a member of my congregation who often comes to that coffee shop and had no idea that I was going to be there; another was a member of another congregation whom I’ve met before. In both cases we chatted for a while, and the latter conversation was a deep, clearly much-needed pastoral care session. That raised an interesting question I hadn’t thought of before, because if he had come to my office specifically asking for pastoral care, I would have asked whether he’d talked to his own minister. In the café, it didn’t occur to me.

From church folks’ perspective, is this any different than having drop-in time in my office? I can’t be sure, but it seems so. Since my arrival at UUCPA ten years ago, I haven’t held drop-in office hours, but simply invite people to drop by any day I’m at church, while encouraging them to make an appointment ahead of time in case I’m in one of my many meetings. I think people are coming by the café who would not have come to my office (they certainly never have before). I’ve certainly gotten more drop-in visitors in the cafés than I do in my office in a typical week, driven, most likely, by the informality of the setting. It’s not a pastoral visit, right? We’re just having a cup of coffee. It opens up possibilities. I wonder if people will be more likely to invite a friend from outside UUCPA, something that hasn’t happened yet. Community office hours as outreach.

Some colleagues wear a collar to let everyone know that a minister is in the house. Since I’m not doing that, there’s nothing to tell others in the café that the people at our table share a spiritual community, other than the content of our conversation. I wonder whether we will eventually become known as a fixture and people will begin to realize what we’re doing there. Like everything else about this experiment, it’s something I’m just watching as it unfolds.

We are venturing in various ways into serving the wider community, shifting our inward focus on self-identified UUs to a mission-driven outreach to everyone who might need us. Perhaps this will become a small but key part of that shift.

If you’re on the San Francisco Peninsula, come on by, 3-4 any Friday:

1st Friday Café Borrone, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park (next to Kepler’s Books)

2nd Friday Printer’s Café, 320 S. California Avenue, Palo Alto

3rd Friday Dana Street Roasting Company, 744 W. Dana St., Mountain View

4th Friday Café Zoe, 929 Menalto Ave, Menlo Park

5th Friday Palo Alto Café, 2675 Middlefield Rd, Palo Alto

 

Walking home in the blizzard

January 26, 2014 in memoir | Tags: , | 3 comments

All the snow back east has me reminiscing about New England’s Blizzard of 1978. That may sound like a strangely affectionate verb for a natural disaster that shut down southern New England for three days and took over 100 lives, but I was young, and in my little corner of life, it was a grand adventure.

I was in fourth grade. School closings on account of snow weren’t rare in my hometown (Hamden, Connecticut), but what happened that day was unusual: we were sent home early on account of the coming storm. Buses came early, parents were called to pick up the kids who walked, teachers packed up their papers and went home. We lived just under a mile from school, so I was a walker, and the school called my mom. But Mom couldn’t make it. She was trying to drive the three miles home from work, which proved to be impossible; she ended up staying at the home of a woman to whom she’d offered a ride, unable to get back home for a couple more days. In the meantime, my dad got word that she was stuck and that he’d have to come get me, but he couldn’t drive either (no car).

I don’t think I knew any of this. I just knew that the other kids were getting picked up one by one, and soon there was no one at school but me, my cello, which I was supposed to bring home that day so I could practice, and Jack the custodian, a very sweet elderly man we all loved. (At least, he seemed elderly to me. Knowing how children perceive adults, it’s possible he was about 50.) I’m sure he was assigned to stay with me as all the other staff left. Heaven knows how he got home. I felt special, the last kid there in the darkened, artificially quiet building. It was probably just the way it felt to Jack every morning when he arrived at work to get the building ready for everyone else’s day; for me it was exotic. We waited at the big side doors, watching the snow, waiting for my dad.

Dad emerged from the whirling snow–so strange to see him taking the same route I’d walked for three and a half years, as if that world weren’t inhabited only by us kids but could be negotiated by the grownups too. There he was, in my world; he’d walked against the wind all the way, and the little bit of his face he couldn’t cover with a hat and scarf was dripping with melting snow and cold-reddened. Poor Dad! He said the cello would have to stay–a possibility that hadn’t entered my mind–and we said goodbye to Jack and headed back out into the snow, together. Mercifully, we had the wind at our backs now, but even so, the familiar route had been made strange: a world without traffic or voices, just the two of us and the white wind. I felt safe and brave as we made our way together through suburban streets that had become something out of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s snow-swept plains.

When we got to the drugstore about two-thirds of the way home, Dad suggested we go in, and we had a few minutes’ respite from the storm and shared a chocolate bar: an indulgence for me, but the kind of thing two Arctic travelers would need to gather up their strength for the home stretch. Fortified, we wrapped ourselves up again and trudged the last few blocks to the house, adventurers safely returned home.

The rest of the storm passed routinely. Mom made it back from New Haven. My sister and I enjoyed all the pleasures a week off from school and two feet of snow provide.

Many years later, for a birthday in a hard year, Dad gave me a book about the tiny Buddhist kingdoms of the Himalayas, and inscribed it with an original poem. The poem is named for the book, which I open much more often to read the poem than to read about Bhutan. It’s a lovely poem, expressing a this-worldly theology we share–did he know then that we shared it?–but what was most special about reading it was the affirmation that that memory of walking home together in the blizzard was as precious to him as it was to me.

“So Close to Heaven . . . ”
David Zucker

“Unearthly”–sometimes the named
State for hovering, flying
So close to blessed or unhallowed
Ground, yet above it, looking down.

For me, earth places us where
We should settle, roam, gaze, seek
What we might have found at last
Year’s venturing out . . . as at

A distance, on a snow-blown street–
As out of my own child life–
You met me and we bore the storm
Stinging our faces on the journey home.

The memory, and the poem, still bring me to tears. Thanks, Dad.

To Hear the Angels Sing

December 26, 2013 in sermons and writings, UUCPA | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

A homily given at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, Christmas Eve, 2013

What are we to make of these angels? What are we supposed to think about all these angels?

There’s a lot in this lovely little story of Christmas that is hard for the rational mind to believe. But you can explain most of it away—the miraculous birth, the amazing star. But not angels. They are a whole different kind of creature that populates the Bible, something between the human and the divine. People have invented a whole field of study called “angelology” and explained all the various ranks and types, which only makes it all harder to believe for me.

But the meaning of the word “angel” in the Bible that I was taught as a child and that means the most to me today is something very simple and grounded in our real lives. An angel is a messenger. Someone who comes from God to a person, carrying a message. Someone who tells us something we need to know about the holy.

What is the holy? Well, according to the Unitarian Universalist songwriter Peter Mayer, everything—and I see no reason to doubt him. Which would seem to suggest that everything is or can be a messenger of the holy also. Anything that helps goodness, wisdom, hope, get from out there to inside here, is an angel of a kind. Anything that brings us a message that the holy is the holy is an angel.

It doesn’t have to be a beautiful young woman straight out of a Renaissance painting, with classical features, flowing long hair, and wings. When you’re sick and scared in the hospital, and an overworked, overweight, aging nursing assistant puts a reassuring hand on your shoulder and smiles, and you look into his eyes and feel a flame of hope come to life inside you—he’s an angel.

It doesn’t have to be a human being. When you are filled with despair and there seems to be nothing except barren ground and hard edges, and you stumble home and your cat rubs her cheeks against your ankles, and you remember that there is something soft and loving in the world—she’s an angel.

It doesn’t have to be alive. A shooting star, the Badlands of South Dakota, a sand dollar shell washed up on the beach, the ocean itself . . . these have all been known to whisper messages of hope, harmony, beauty.

Whenever a message comes that reminds you of holiness, you have met an angel.

The messages don’t always have to be pleasant, either. We may hear that people are dying in South Sudan (radio as angel). We may be informed that we have hurt someone’s feelings (angry friend as angel). We may suddenly grasp that we are going the wrong way and have been going the wrong way for years (road sign as angel). If these messages awaken in us compassion, love, greater understanding, or a thirst for justice, then they are the holy speaking to us.

Everything is holy; anyone, anything, can be an angel.

And so the unknown writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us, “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers; for by so doing, some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2).

This, to me, means: be open to the unexpected, the unknown, the apparently uninteresting. It may be the messenger bearing a note for your ear.  And we are reminded in particular to be open to those would-be messengers that we turn away because they bear messages we don’t want to hear. After all, when the holy breaks into our awareness, it can make us have to change our lives. It can turn everything upside down.

A message implies that there is something we now must do. Here’s a text message that says, “Call me, it’s urgent.” Here’s a messenger of God saying, “Joseph, marry your fiancee,” or “Shepherds, go to Bethlehem and look for the baby who will be King of the Jews.” Here’s an angel saying, “I bring glad tidings of peace on earth, goodwill to all people.” Wait a second. As the first carol we sang tonight, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” says, there hasn’t been peace on earth. People have not extended goodwill to each other. What has followed that message has been “two thousand years of wrong.” That’s because the message is never just a point of information; it’s a command. Go and do something. Make this a world of peace. Make goodwill between yourself and your neighbor. Hear the angels sing and take their messages to heart.

So the messages that come our way can be disruptive, reassuring, joyful, scary, exhilarating . . . . it depends on what we do with them. One thing is certain. When the holy speaks to us, whatever form the holy takes, whatever form its messenger takes, that angel is always bearing good news.

Gordon McKeeman

December 18, 2013 in uncategorized | 3 comments

Gordon McKeeman has died. Without our ever meeting, he was a kind of spiritual grandfather to me: a mentor and teacher to many of my mentors and teachers. My conviction that ministry (from the Latin for “service”) is not the private domain of a small number of professionals, but something we all do together, clergy and laity, arose from my own experience, but it was McKeeman who gave it words:

Ministry is

a quality of relationship between and among
human beings

that beckons forth hidden possibilities;

inviting people into deeper, more constant
more reverent relationship with the world
and with one another;

carrying forward a long heritage of hope and
liberation that has dignified and informed
the human venture over many centuries;

being present with, to, and for others
in their terrors and torments
in their grief, misery and pain;

knowing that those feelings
are our feelings, too;

celebrating the triumphs of the human spirit,
the miracles of birth and life,
the wonders of devotion and sacrifice;

witnessing to life-enhancing values;
speaking truth to power;

speaking for human dignity and equity,
for compassion and aspiration;

believing in life in the presence of death;
struggling for human responsibility
against principalities and structures
that ignore humaneness and become
instruments of death.

It is all these and much, much more than all of
them, present in

the wordless,
the unspoken,
the ineffable.

It is speaking and living the highest we know
and living with the knowledge that it is

never as deep, or as wide
or a high as we wish.

Whenever there is a meeting
that summons us to our better selves, wherever

our lostness is found,
our fragments are united,
our wounds begin healing,
our spines stiffen and
our muscles grow strong for the task,

there is ministry.

Amen, may it be so, and may we know it to be so. Thank you for your ministry, Reverend McKeeman, in all its forms.

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013

December 5, 2013 in politics | Tags: | 4 comments

Mandela at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, to receive the Liberty Medal, July 4, 1993

Nelson Mandela was a hero of mine ever since I first heard of him, in the 1980s when I was a teenager growing into political activism. Ending apartheid was just a dream. Sure, we suggested concrete steps, such as divestment, but I for one didn’t think I’d see it end in my lifetime. I thought Mandela would die in prison, his main achievement martyrdom. We’d sing “Free Nelson Mandela” without any real hope that it could happen.

And then it did, and the African National Congress actually took power, and prisoner Mandela was president of South Africa. Of South Africa! And he was a wise, progressive leader who brought tremendous healing to a country that had seemed certain to die of self-inflicted wounds.

Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Mandela is usually mentioned in the context of racial justice, but like him, he was also passionately concerned about economic justice. Having defeated apartheid, he turned to an even larger foe: poverty. One would think that almost 20 years of revolutionary activism, 27 years in prison, and five years as the head of state would entitle him to an honorable retirement, but Mandela never stopped taking on new challenges. In 2005, he went to London before a G8 trade meeting and reminded the leaders and the gathered crowd that the G8 had pledged several years earlier to cut world poverty in half. “Do not look the other way,” he said to them; “Do not hesitate. Recognise that the world is hungry for action, not words. Act with courage and vision.” (Full text)

The statement that poverty is not natural, but a human creation, is so simple and so radical. I hope one day we will look back on his words about poverty and perceive their truth as easily as we now perceive that apartheid was wrong.

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

And overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.

While poverty persists, there is no true freedom. . . .

Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.

Not everyone is born to a life as large as Nelson Mandela’s, but those last three sentences are going up beside my desk to remind me not to live small when it comes to making justice.

A modest pronoun proposal

November 14, 2013 in uncategorized | 9 comments

I admit it: I am picky about grammar. I use the word “whom” when an object pronoun is called for, even in spoken English. I refuse to pass on graphic memes with bad grammar. My mild-mannered Facebook persona occasionally gives way to someone called the Guerrilla Grammarian who issues a public service announcement about some urgent issue such as the correct English spelling of Gandhi. “Irregardless” sets my teeth on edge and I have a carefully-honed argument about why it’s acceptable to begin a sentence with “Hopefully . . . ” I know why one says “15 items or fewer” and “I’ve gotten less than five hours of sleep every night this week,” and I stick to it. From this position of linguistic purity, I feel I have the authority to make the following declaration: “they” is a perfectly appropriate gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. It is, in fact, the ideal word to use when we wish to speak of a person, as well as persons, unknown or indeterminate.

You know the problem I’m talking about, right? Sometimes you can’t say, “He fell right off his broomstick with a thud” because you don’t know whether the person falling was Harry or Hermione, in which case you might say, “In the dark of the midnight Quidditch pitch, Ron heard someone fall off their broomstick.” I see nothing wrong with that. I’d like to call it the Rowling rule, because she does it all the time, to the irritation of other grammar-obsessed nitpickers.

What are some alternatives to “they” in this example?

Use “his/her”: “Ron heard someone fall off his/her broomstick.” Problem: do you have to ask? Slashes are the stuff of bureaucratic documents, not fiction. Except, of course, fanfiction. Also, they’re binary and there are more than two sexes and more than two genders.

Use “his or her”: “Ron heard someone fall off his or her broomstick.” Problem: barely less awkward than “his/her.”

Use a new pronoun: “Ron heard someone fall off zir broomstick.” Or do I mean “hir broomstick”? Or “eir broomstick”? Problem: I appreciate the creativity, but there’s a reason that these haven’t caught on and it isn’t (only) transphobia. I don’t even know how to pronounce that last one, and if you can’t pronounce a word you won’t use it.

Use “his”: “Ron heard someone fall off his broomstick.” Problem: We live in the 21st century, in which women and girls are widely acknowledged to be more than half the population. Please.

Use “her”: “Ron heard someone fall off her broomstick.” Problem: Even in the 21st century, this will make most of your readers think you know it’s a female broomstick rider. Sorry.

Alternate between them: “Ron heard someone fall off her broomstick.” A paragraph later: “Ron heard someone else fall off his broomstick.” Problem: This works very well in a nonfiction text with lots of examples, such as a book on parenting. “Your two-year-old may enjoy playing with containers, so give him a stack of plastic or metal bowls.” Next paragraph: “Two-year-olds have unpredictable mood swings, so she may be very independent one minute, clingy the next.” Great solution in this kind of text, but not in most.

Rewrite: “Ron heard someone fall off a broomstick.” Problem: weak; loses the visual impact of A person falling off THE broomstick THE person had been riding.

In contrast, points in favor of “they” are numerous. It seems to be the natural choice; it’s what we tend to say in spoken language in such situations (“Who’s at the door?” “I don’t know–I can’t see them through the peephole”). It is less clunky and binary than “his/her” or “s/he.” The main argument against it–that it is ungrammatical–is very, very weak. “It’s a plural pronoun!” cry overachieving amateur, and uninformed professional, grammarians. Yes, it is. And I know another plural pronoun: “you.” Is it incorrect to use “you” as a singular because “you” is plural? Of course not.

Singular: You’re wearing my shoes!

Plural: You won’t all fit on this elevator!

We have a strong precedent for using one pronoun for both singular and plural. We have a linguistic problem to which this fact is a solution. So let’s use it. I already use “they” (singular) in written as well as spoken English. I think one neologism is warranted, and again, seems to slide off the English-speaking tongue: a singular version of the reflexive pronoun. “You” has “yourself” (singular) and “yourselves” (plural); when we use “they” as a singular pronoun, its reflexive counterpart would be “themself.”

There is a second linguistic problem that “they” can solve: a polite way to refer to agender, transgender, and genderqueer people–anyone for whom “he” and “she” are not sufficient choices. As Karl Fleischman, the father of Sasha Fleischman, an agender teen who was badly burned last week when someone set their skirt on fire, writes, his child prefers “they” as a pronoun. He adds, “English doesn’t have commonly used gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns yet.” However, I would say that it does. It has “they.”

Whether agender and transgender folk will adopt “they” for themselves is up to them. It’s not up to me, and I will use whatever pronoun a person prefers for themself, but I humbly suggest that it has a huge advantage over “ze,” “hir,” or any of the other neologisms that have been tried. Neologisms do take hold sometimes, but when we already have a word that has worn a path in our linguistic landscape–the way “they” has done for many of us–it’s likely to be the best place to build the road.

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