Seventy Five Years of the Catholic Worker

A few weeks ago I received the 75th anniversary issue of the Catholic Worker.  The Catholic Worker is a progressive Catholic newspaper that was started by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin to apply Catholic Social Teaching to the issues of poverty in American society.  I’ve always been a fan of Dorothy Day from biographies that I’ve read and from hearing of people who really admire her.    I bought a used copy of her book “By Little and By Little:  The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day”  5 or 6 years ago, but only started reading through the whole book last year.  Inspired by the book, I subscribed to the Catholic Worker in December through Amazon and received my first issue in January.  Since then, I’ve looked forward to looking in my mail and finding a new issue to read.

Dorothy Day kept the company of socialists, anarchists and communists in the Greenwich Village while she was young, and she shared their radical views on politics and life.  Her abiding passion was to help the poor, and she converted to Roman Catholicism when she found the same love of the poor in Catholic Social Teaching that she found in the radical politics of her friends.   She did not forsake her radical political convictions, but melded it with a spirituality that nourished her inner self as she worked to help the outer world.  Day’s interpretation of the papal encyclicals caused her to fight the institutions that lead to poverty and war. 

In this fight, she found a ready ally in Peter Maurin.  Maurin was an immigrant Frenchman, deeply influenced by the Christian Brothers in a Catholic populism that was in ferment in early 20th Century France.  He drifted to Canada and eventually the U.S., working for 20 years in hard manual labor.  During that time, he read widely, and he developed a personalist philosophy that emphasized the development of cooperatives and communal farming as an alternative to the urban industrial society of the time.  This society was based on the Gospels, and Maurin felt that this society would be better than the ones offered by capialism and communism.  

One day, Peter knocked on Dorothy Day’s door, and they soon became close friends.  Their shared vision of a better society based on Catholic priniciples lead them to create a newspaper that would be sold for a penny (so that workers and poor people could afford to buy it).  The Catholic Worker was first sold at a communist rally in Union Square on May 1, 1933.  In that first issue was an editorial that stated the purpose of the newspaper.  It wrote:

“It’s time there was a Catholic Paper printed for the unemployed.  The fundamental aim of most radical sheets is the conversion of its reader to radicalism and Atheism.

Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist?

Is it not possible to protest, to expose, to complain, to point our abuses and demand reforms without desiring to overthrow of religion?

In an attempt to popularize and make known the encyclicals of the Popes in regard to social justice and the program put forth by the Church for the ‘reconstruction of the social order’, this news sheet, The Catholic Worker, is started.”

During it’s 75 years of existence, The Catholic Worker, has held a pacifist position against wars from World War II through Vietnam and now the Iraq War.  It has fought for the rights of immigrants and farm workers.   The paper has supported the Civil Rights movement.  In the first 3 Catholic Worker issues that I’ve received, I’ve read about discrimination and hostility faced by undocumented day laborers in Phoenix, Arizona;  the plight of Iraqi refugees in Jordan;  the situation of the Kurdish people in Iraq;  the continued injustices being perpetrated in Guantanamo.  It had obituaries of people like Stephen Spiro, Evelyn Dudley, Ralph DiGia, and Gordon Zahn, activists and longtime friends of the Catholic worker.  The issues documented the work of current activists in the New Sanctuary Movement on behalf of undocumented workers, the civil disobedience of the National War Tax Resistence Coordinating Committee, on protesters in the capital against the unfair incarcerations in Guantanamo.  And it had wonderful art by the likes of Fritz Eichenberg, Rita Corbin, Ade Bethune, Brian Kavanagh, and Gary Donatelli. 

I look forward to receiving the paper.  The current editors of the paper gave a short note thanking its readers for their support.  It’s a wonderful summation on the contributions that the Catholic Worker has given to our society.

“Throughout the ensuing seventy-five years of its existence, friends and allies, brothers and sisters in the peace movement, in the work for the poor, the prisoner, the immigrant- all those who count for naught in our blustery era- have, indeed, been given the opportunity to know Peter and Dorothy.  We can meet them in their writings, in their ‘easy essays’, in their long pilgrimmages.  This legacy is ours to imbibe, for they wrote as they truly lived.  We are privileged to have such primary resources.

There are also the voices of others who enhance the vision of the Catholic Worker with their own memories and understandings.  This anniversary issue includes interviews with Workers past and present who we hope will give us all a better sense of a philosophy ’so old that it looks new’.  and with them we join Catholic Workers everywhere in gratitude for this movement which keeps our greed and our obdurate spirits in check.  Deo Gratias.”

Cardinal Sin and the People Power Revolution

During the 1980s, I thought it was funny, and sadly appropriate, for the head of the Catholic Church in the Philippines to be a man called Cardinal Sin.

Certainly, the crimes committed against the Filipino people at that time was a sin. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos had been ruling the Philippines for 20 years, and they greedily plundered the economy and lived lavishly while much of the economy was mired in poverty. I remember reading news about the Philippines at that time with a certain sense of dread. Benigno Aquino got shot and killed. The Marcos government was cracking down and seemed to have friends in the Reagan administration that would let them get away with murder. The opposition turned to Aquino’s widow, a housewife with no political experience and no desire to lead a country. And the church stood by for 20 years as Marcos terrorized the country. I didn’t have high hopes for the Philippines as Marcos called snap elections in 1986. I didn’t see how things could wind up as anything except tragic.

The events that unfolded that year astounded me. Election officials fighting to make sure ballot boxes were not tampered with. Masses of rich and poor pouring out on the streets with yellow shirts and rosaries, standing in front of tanks with prayers and appeals to their compassion. Cory Aquino, the housewife leader, turned out to have real leadership qualities, as she calmly went about her business with a confidence in God. And Archbishop Cardinal Sin used the power of the Church to insure that the unfolding revolution stay nonviolent and democratic.

I was wrong about a lot of things. I kept the March 10, 1986 issue of Time magazine, that chronicled the People Power Revolution, and learned about how important Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin was in influencing the change in the year 1986. The archbishop encouraged opposition political leaders and quietly aided in Cory Aquino’s run for the Presidency. When opposition military factions broke with Marcos, Cardinal Sin called on the Filipino people to go out to the streets to support them. Radio Veritas, the Catholic radio station, broadcast instructions to the crowds to insure that marches stayed peaceful. I had a stereotype of the higher Catholic officials who supported the rich and the powerful, and were Marx’s opiate of the masses. Cardinal Sin showed me that year that the higher clergy could be on the right side of history, that Marx could be wrong.

The events that year made me very proud of my heritage. I grew up in military bases, so I grew up more American than Filipino and with little first hand knowledge of my Filipino culture. The people who went to the streets and risked their lives to stand in front of tanks armed with only rosaries and flowers really impressed me. So that year I took a course in Asian American history and began reading Carlos Bulosan and “America is in the Heart” and began asking my parents about their lives and the lives of my grandparents.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, so many astounding things happened. The People Power Revolution in the Philippines. The freeing of Nelson Mandela and the peaceful fall of Apartheid. The fall of the Eastern bloc and the dissolving of the Soviet Union. I’m sure there were times that activists in those countries were discouraged, that it seemed like things wouldn’t change and horrible governments would have impunity to oppress their peoples. They didn’t give up, and their activism bore fruit. Evil systems fell. And though each country has had its struggles since then, at least the people have a say on their own destiny.

Moving the Political Center

As the primaries have gone on and the passions of the Clinton and Obama campaigns have gone on, I read an article in the March issue of the Progressive that I thought made a good point. The article caught my eye because it was written by Howard Zinn. As I’ve been on a big Zinn reading kick these past few months, I thought I had to read it. In it Zinn warns Progressives not to expect the election of either Obama or Clinton to unleash any great reform cycle, unless their elections are accompanied by the hard work of Progressives to move the nation to be receptive to reform. In his article, Zinn wrote:

“I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes- the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.

But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhoods, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on maters of war and social justice.

Let’s remember that even when there is a ‘better’ candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.”

Zinn is asserting something that I’ve found many other historians have asserted: that reform legislation happens when the reform movements do the hard work of agitating, arguing, slowly changing public perceptions about their issues. William Lee Miller, who wrote the book “Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress”, wrote of the abolition of slavery:

“These politicians depended upon their predecessors, the evangelistic abolitionists, for the pressure, for the agenda-setting, for the raised consciousness that made their work possible; but the abolitionists depended in their turn on these politicians, to gear their affirmations into the machinery of the real world. Both were necessary to bring about the total result, putting the elements togeter- ending slavery within an enhanced constitutional Union.”

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in an essay on leadership:

“Government by reflection and choice called for a new style of leadership and a new quality of followship. It required leaders to be responsive to popular concerns, and it required followers to be active and informed participants in the process.”

If all goes as progressives and liberals hope and a Democrat wins the Presidency and the Congress, that does not relieve us of the hard work of activism.  It’s good that we have a choice between two good candidates, Obama and Hillary, but they won’t be able to make any significant reforms without us. Zinn ended his article with this disclaimer:

“Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed it responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war.

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which require direct action by concerned citizens.”

Maya Lin and the Vietnam War Memorial

A few years ago I first saw the documentary, Maya Lin:  A Strong Clear Vision.  It was made in 1995 by Freida Lee Mock, and it documents the career of Mara Lin, the architect who designed the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, the Yale Women’s Table and many other wonderful buildings.  Her most famous buildings have  political and well as aesthetic motivations, that elicit strong emotions in people based on how they encapsulate their age.  Maya unexpectedly won the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial while a Yale student, and it threw her into a huge storm of controversy.  The controversy over Maya Lin’s design showed the raw emotional wounds that still had not healed when it erupted in 1980, and Maya Lin’s finished memorial showed the power of art to affect people and touch upon important issues of society.

When Maya Lin won the design contest to build the Vietnam War Memorial at the age of 20, she became the center of a great controversy.  Many people protested that Lin’s design was too simple, that it look like a big black scar on the earth.  Quite a few people were offended that a Chinese American student was the architect of a major American memorial of an Asian war.  Lin was accused of being a communist by conservative political columnist Pat Buchanan.  In one of the angriest scenes in Maya Lin:  A Strong Clear Vision, a Vietnam veteran named Tom Carhart talked about being spit upon when he returned from duty in Vietnam and addressed his anger that the Lin design didn’t fully honor the suffering of the soldiers of the time.  Maya Lin defended herself by saying that any design of a Vietnam War memorial would’ve evoked controversy, that it was only 6 years since the war had ended and the emotional wounds of that war were still fresh.  She testified in a Congressional hearing and defended her design, and eventually she was able to complete her vision of the memorial.

Lin wanted her memorial to evoke tears in the viewers, to act as a vehicle for veterens to begin to heal from their experience.   One of the most touching scenes in Freida Lee Mock’s documentary is the beginning scene, watching the reaction of veterens as they look at the names of their fallen comrades in the black wall.   In a particular scene, two veterans are looking at the name and one veteran exclaims, “Look at all these names!” and he begins to cry.   What most moved about these scenes was how the memorial touched these veterans, how it honored the individuals who were killed by making them more than just a statistic.  A veteran mentioned that a name may not mean much to one person, but it would mean much to another.  Lin put the names in chronological, rather than alphabetical order, to help individualize the names.  If the names were in alphabetical order, then a loved one would be lost in a sea of Smiths or Jones or whatever that person’s last name is, and it would depersonalize that individual.  It would take a person longer to look up the name and find it if the names were in chronological order, but the process would be worth it to a family member or a friend. 

Over twenty years later, the Vietnam War Memorial is the most visited memorial in Washington D.C.   Maya Lin:  A Strong Clear Vision does a wonderful job of showing the gratitude of many veterans towards Maya Lin and her memorial design.  Some people say art is not really important.  When I hear this, I always think they don’t what they’re talking about.  As Vietnam War Memorial shows, art can play a role in pushing people in new directions and in seeing things in a different way.  It can help people to empathize in other people, and it can help heal.  In the middle of Freida Lee Mock’s documentary, we see a march of Vietnam veterans and the appreciation of the crowd towards their sacrifice.  This was an appreciation that Tom Carthart and other veterans deserved upon returning home but didn’t receive because of the controversies of the Vietnam War.  I think Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial helped the public change their attitudes to help appreciate the Vietnam veterans.

American Friends Service Committee

I’ve always admired the Quakers. Over the years, I’ve read about how this group is always in the forefront of social issues in the last 200 years of American history: they were in the forefront of the abolitonist movement, the right of women to vote, the antiwar movement. I attended 2 Quaker services about 3 years ago and was impressed with the spirituality and quietness of their service. The American Friends Service Committee is a group that tries to put Quaker values into action, in our country and around the world. In the area of global poverty, I looked up their website and found them very involved in economic justice issues, especially in the area of debt relief for nations in Africa. In their website http://www.afsc.org/africa-debt/learn-about-debt/debt-faq.htm the AFSC explains why they focus on this area in the effort to combat global poverty:

“According to analysts, Sub-Saharan Africa, economically the world’s poorest region, but carries US$201 billion in debt and pays $14 billion annually in debt servic

Paying billions of dollars a year in debt service takes away from Africa’s already scarce resources to invest in economic development, job creation, education, and health care. With some 300 million people living on less than $1 a day in Africa, approximately 38 million are facing a hunger crisis. Adding to this, with only 10% of the world’s population, approximately 60% of the world’s HIV/AIDS cases (25.8 million) are found in Sub-Saharan Africa.

There is now a clear record of success of debt relief going to fight poverty. Many nations have already put plans into action to ensure the proper use of the released funds. They have demonstrated their commitment to use the funds to fight poverty and illness, and to promote education. Some highlights:

In Ghana, the money saved is being used for basic infrastructure, education, and health care.
In Nigeria, the finance minister Ngozi Ogonzi-Iweala has set up a poverty action fund to channel the proceeds from debt relief with specific expenditures that include training thousands of new teachers.
In Tanzania, debt cancellation allowed the nation to increase education spending and eliminate school fees for elementary school education as well as resources to help with importing vital food supplies for those affected by drought. “

In addition to debt relief, the AFSC has worked for peaceful resolution of conflicts in such areas as Kenya, and the Great Lakes region of Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Christians like Archbishop Desmond Tutu have endorsed AFSC efforts for debt relief and this could be a way to promote interdenominational cooperation in a multi front effort to fight global poverty.

Episcopal Church Groups and Poverty

About a year ago I started attending the Episcopal Church about two blocks from the apartment where I live. I had never taken much notice of the Episcopal Church before, but since joining I’ve enjoyed the company of people and have taken to reading what I can of the church and its history. Stephen Rockwell had a good post on some of the Episcopal Church’s sermons and goals, along with prayers in the Book of Common prayer specifically for the poor. In researching the Episcopal Church’s ministry to help the poor, I did find many Episcopal organizations designed to help the poor at home and abroad (http://www.episcopalchurch.org/8020_59906_ENG_HTM.htm). Among the Episcopalian groups are:

Collective Intelligence
A global group of entrepreneurs dedicated to improving the efficiency of social ecosystems by developing “collective maps,” graphical depictions of the often-complex web of organizations, issues, and gaps associated with key social initiatives. EGR also helps to link together networks in order to aid in more efficient resource-sharing, capital formation and fund-raising.

Ecclesia Ministries and Common Cathedral
A daily street ministry in Boston since 1994, Ecclesia has joined homeless and housed people in worship, pastoral care, street ministry, support and education groups, and other aspects of community.

Episcopal Community Services (San Francisco)
A nonprofit organization started in 1983, ECS helps homeless, disabled and very low-income adult women and men, seniors and families move with dignity toward increased stability and housing. ECS programs include shelters, supportive housing, a skills center (education & vocational training), and senior services.

Episcopal Investments
Challenges corporations to meet a higher standard of justice. They address such issues as the environment, fair lending, equal employment, military contracting, human rights, and board diversity.

Episcopal Network for Economic Justice
This organization serves to strengthen and support those engaged in economic justice ministries and advocate for initiatives within the Episcopal Church.

Episcopal Urban Caucus
A primary commitment of the EUC is to articulate a vision of a Church without racism, a Church for all races. We commit ourselves in all of our worship, programs, and advocacy, to model inclusiveness and embody respect for every person. The primary purpose remains keeping the Church honest on issues of urban ministry and social justice.

Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation
A network of lay and ordained economists, business people, students, social organizers, theologians, attorneys, labor activists, and advocates who commit to giving 0.7% of our personal budgets – and working towards giving 0.7% of our parish, diocesan, Church, and national budgets – to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals overseas.

Five Talents International
An Anglican initiative committed to combating poverty in the developing world by micro-enterprise development. Its vision is to encourage and inspire personal responsibility, wise investment, and service to the community, care for the poor and less fortunate and respect the dignity of all human beings.

Jubilee Ministry
A network of Episcopal congregations engaged in mission and ministry among and with poor and oppressed people. Each program comes out of the history of its community. Through Jubilee ministry people are empowered locally and the church lives out its prophetic role in its respective community.

Along with these organizations, I’ve read of individual Episcopalians who’ve helped the poor. One of my favorite books of last year is Take This Bread, by Sara Miles. Sara Miles is a lesbian left-wing journalist and chef, who walked into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco and decided to become a Christian. In her first year as a Christian, she decided to start a pantry for the poor neighbors who inhabited the area around St. Gregory and hand out groceries so they could make their own meals. In setting up the pantry, Sara Miles learned about the intricacies of donating food to the hungry, and some of the obstacles that are faces by kitchens and local charities. For those interested, you could look up Sara Miles website at www.saramiles.net.

At my own church, there is a ministry to feed the poor in the Sunnyvale area called Our Daily Bread. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, volunteers cook food and serve poor and homeless people in the local neighborhoods. I volunteer once a month, and found it a rewarding experience. I’m not sure how many other Episcopal Churches have services like this, but I’ve found the Episcopal Church very involved in living out the biblical injunction to feed the hungry.

Papal Encyclicals and Economic Justice

Thomas Bokenkotter wrote in his book “Church and Revolution: Catholics in the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice”:

“This book deals with an interesting historical question: How did the Catholic Church- which, on the morrow of the French Revolution, was one of the most conservative and even reactionary of the world powers- become, by the mid-twentieth century, a very progressive force in world affairs? As the well-known journalist Murray Kempton said in 1996, the Catholic Church is today the leading defender of human rights in the world. In its famous document “The Church in the Modern World” (Gaudium et Spes), the Second Vatican Council ranged over the whole gamut of contemporary social issues and put itself on record as totally committed to the struggle for greater social justice in every sector of human life. The council transformed the Church into a principled supporter of the institutions, practices, and principles of the free society.”

Bokenkotter noted that the Catholic Church, along with other Christian churches, has led in the fight to alleviate the sufferings of the poor and to battle for a more equitable system for the marginalized peoples of the world. The author traces this focus by the Catholic Church on Vatican II, but I believe that the Church’s involvement in promoting social change can be found much earlier, in the papal encyclicals starting with Pope Leo XIIIs Rerum Novarum. Since the time of Rerum Novarum, the papal encyclicals have been an inspiration for Catholics to engage in movements of social change.

Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, a time of vast social and economic changes in the world. Europe and the United States were industrializing at a rapid rate, which created a prosperous middle class in both areas. Along with the benefits of the rapid industrialization were the faults: the exploitation of the working class through long hours, poor working conditions, low wages, and the use of child labor. These workers were excluded from the benefits of their labor, and it created an unhealthy society. Many thinkers and radicals offered solutions to this problem, among them Karl Marx and his Das Kapital. While Marx was proclaiming religion as being the opiate of the masses for neglecting the plight of the poor and the workers in the emerging industrial society, Pope Leo XIII offered Rerum Novarum as a response. Rerum Novarum was deeply influenced by the medieval philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas and his ideas of a just society. It advocated the organization of workers into unions or guilds, the right of a “just wage”, the right of private property, and the obligation of the government to intervene for the “publilic good”. Here is a link to Rerum Novarum http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/l13rerum.htm.

Forty years later, Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, which amplified the themes found in Rerum Novarum. Issued in 1931, during the worldwide Great Depression, Quadragesimo Anno stated that the right of property must be subordinate to the common good and it delineated the idea of subsidiary, the idea that a greater and higher association should not do what a lesser and subordinate organization should do. At a time when communist, socialist and fascist movements were making headway in the troubled economic times, Quadragesimo Anno pushed for Christian workers associations to help workers conditions. Here is a link to Quadragesimo Anno http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius11/P11QUADR.HTM.

Pope Paul VIs encyclical Populorum Progressio built upon the achievements of Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, and it was also influenced by the liberal ideas of the 1960s. Issued in 1967, Populorum Progressio focused on the responsibilities of former colonial powers to its former colonies, the need of the state to help the poor, and a continuation of a critique of the previous two encyclicals of the pursuit of profit without any attendant social responsibilities. Pope Paul VI calls for a more equitable relationship between industry and labor: “But it is unfortunate that on these new conditions of society a system has been constructed which considers profit as the key motive for economic progress, competition as the supreme law of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right that has no limits and carries no corresponding social obligation. This unchecked liberalism leads to dictatorship rightly denounced by Pius XI as producing ‘the international imperialism of money’. One cannot condemn such abuses too strongly by solemnly recalling once again that the economy is at the service of man. But if it is true that a type of capitalism has been the source of excessive suffering, injustices and fratricidal conflicts whose effects still persist, it would also be wrong to attribute to industrialization itself evils that belong to the woeful system which accompanied it. On the contrary one must recognize in all justice the irreplaceable contribution made by the organization of labor and of industry to what development has accomplished. ” Here is a link to Populorum Progressio http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul06/p6develo.htm.

Pope John Paul II is known as a firm anticommunist who was instrumental in the downfall of the Iron Curtain in the 1980s. What is less known is his critiques of capitalism in the tradition of Rerum Novarum. His encyclical, Laborem Exercens, in 1981, extolled work as dignifying people and thought of work as the basis for family life since it gives subsistence for families to thrive. John Paul’s concern was in making sure workers adjust to the changing technologies and how it changed the industries. He wrote: “We are celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the Encyclical Rerum Novarum on the eve of new developments in technological, economic and political conditions which, according to many experts, will influence the world of work and production no less than the industrial revolution of the last century. There are many factors of a general nature: the widespread introduction of automation into many spheres of production, the increase in the cost of energy and raw materials, the growing realization that the heritage of nature is limited and that it is being intolerably polluted, and the emergence on the political scene of peoples who, after centuries of subjection, are demanding their rightful place among the nations and in international decision-making. These new conditions and demands will require a reordering and adjustment of the structures of the modern economy and of the distribution of work. Unfortunately, for millions of skilled workers these changes may perhaps mean unemployment, at least for a time, or the need for retraining. They will very probably involve a reduction or a less rapid increase in material well-being for the more developed countries. But they can also bring relief and hope to the millions who today live in conditions of shameful and unworthy poverty.” Here is a link to Laborem Exercens http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_….

Of these encyclicals, Populorum Progressio is my favorite because it is the easiest to read. These encyclicals have influenced Catholics to engage in social action and involve themselves in social movements to help the poor and marginalized. In the 1920s, Dorothy Day found a lot of sympathy for social justice for the poor in the encyclicals that coincided with her socialist views, and she converted and founded the Catholic Worker movement. In the 1960s, Catholics involved themselves in the Civil Rights and antiwar movements. Howard Zinn noted in his book A People’s History of the United States, “The antiwar movement, early in its growth, found a strange, new constituency: priests and nuns of the Catholic Church. some of them had been aroused b the civil rights movement, others by their experiences in Latin America, where they saw poverty and injustice under governments supported by the United States.” Priests and nuns like Father Philip Berrigan, Jesuit Daniel Berrigan, Mother Theresa, Father Eugene Boyle, and others worked to help the poor, worked for peace, worked to help the oppressed. A new book has come out called The Greatest Gift by Binka Le Breton about Sister Dorothy Stang, who worked in an Amazon town to protect poor farmers and their land from loggers and land developers until she was killed by gunmen in 2005.

Christians from other denominations have their own rich history of helping the poor and marginalized. We can learn from the experiences of Baptists, Episcopalians, Quakers, Lutherans, Evangelicals and other denominations, from our different traditions. I focused on the Catholic encyclicals because of the influence it had on my young life as a former Catholic. The book A People’s History of the United States respected the Catholic contributions to the poverty and peace movements, and it got me interested in researching a little on the roots of Catholic social activism. I learned a lot of things about the encyclicals that I didn’t know before. As an Episcopalian I am planning to read up on their history of activism.

Debating with Conservative Friends

One could say that my life has been a series of debates.  This is not to say that I’m argumentative.  I’ve just been lucky in my life to have had friends with whom I could talk about issues and debate politics and religion.   Although I’m fairly liberal in my politics, I’ve had in my life a fair amount of conservative Republican friends with whom I used to be able to debate on points of disagreement and while still maintaining a sense of respect for each other.  Somehow, though, those type of talks have become less frequent in the past couple of years.  I’m not sure if people in the past few years have just become more polarized along certain positions and are no longer tolerant of differing opinions.  It’s become rare to meet that kind of friend, that friendship of opposites, and I miss those type of conversations. 

When I was a kid, I used to always argue with my friends about our favorite basketball players and teams.    People looking back to the 1980s always think of the Lakers and the Celtics, but in the playgrounds I played in, most people liked Doctor J and the Philedelphia 76ers.  My brothers and I were Celtics fans, so it was natural that we’d wind up getting into arguments with our friends about who was the better player:  Bird or the Doc.  Bird had a greater outside shot and was a great passer.  Doc drove better to the basket and was the greater leaper.  Bird was the rebounder, Dr. J was the greater individual defender.  We never convinced anyone to change their minds about anything, but it was fun to just argue things out and gab. 

This extended to politics.  One of my best friends was a guy named Eric.  He was a Reagn Republican, but he was not the typical Reaganite.  Eric was an agnostic who didn’t like the religious right, but he felt that anything was better than Carter.  We talked a lot about politics at that time, especially when Reagan decided to ship nuclear missiles to Europe.  Considering the vehemence of some of our debates, it’s ironic that years later, Eric went out of the closet and is now farther politically to the left than I am.  Whenever I see him, I always tell him that my arguments finally got through to him.  In reality, his experiences coming out as a gay man changed his perspective on politics and the way he saw the world. 

Three houses down from my parents house were our friends Rollie and Rick.  My brothers and I would hang out with them and play basketball every Friday, Saturday, and sometimes Sunday.  When I visited their house, I’d sometimes talk to their father about politics.  He knew I was a Democrat, so he’d talk about how we’re always taxing and spending with little regard on how that affects the working guy.   During the 1984 elections we’d talk about the merits of Mondale and Reagan, and it was nice that he talked to me even though I was not old enough at that time to vote.  When Reagan won in a landslide, I congratulated Rollie’s father and he was fairly gracious. 

I was lucky in my young life to be around people who respected differences of opinions and didn’t try to coerce me to agree with them.  During my college years, I didn’t really talk much politics as my college girlfriend and our circle of friends were relatively apolitical.   My classmates in the art building were more focused on improving their art than in talking much politics, although a few fine arts students that I knew were fairly radical, more so than I was at the time.   It was odd, but the best political conversations I had at the time were in the basketball courts.  I’d  just drop by a court for a pickup game, and after the game, we’d sometimes talk politics.  Most of those people were not that ideological, but they had definite opinions about  government doing too much to help the poor or government bureacracies running amok.     

Things began to change in the mid 1990s.  I had started attending an Asian American evangelical church and the first few friends that I made, I was able to be free in my opinions and engage in some fun conversations.  As I became more of a regular member and I started making emotional attachments to the community, things began to change.  The views of the people at that church are fairly diverse, but the vast majority of the evangelicals that I met tend to be conservatives, basing their politics on a literal interpretation of the Bible.  They were a different brand of conservatives than the ones I knew outside of the church:  while the nonchurchgoing conservative friends tended to be a bit more tolerant of differences of opinion and were able to enjoy the give and take of a fun debate, a lot of the conservative churchgoers were a lot more dogmatic and you could tell they didn’t approve of liberal positions like the right to choose an abortion and homosexuality.  The people in that church who were moderate or liberal tended to be quiet about their views, and I learned to be quiet in my opinions too.  They were nice people and I made many a lot of friends with them, and I just didn’t want to rock the boat.    I saw how they would often use peer pressure to get individuals to conform, or else ostracize those who didn’t conform, and I just slowly learned to keep any differences of opinion to myself. 

This was during the Clinton years, and a lot of the conservatives hated Bill and Hillary with the same vehemence that progressive nowadays hate our current President.  I learned at that time to be free with my political opinions only with other like-minded liberals or moderates.  I’d meet young conservatives straight out of colleges and universities during the late 1990s and early 200s who were very dogmatic about the free markets being the cure to all our ills, and disdainful of any government aid to the poor.  I’d always be annoyed at them, until I reflected that I might have been that way coming out of college as well, only from the liberal view of things.  Eventually I was enmeshed in a few conflicts in the evangelical church that got me to start thinking for myself again, and I left the church in 2002.

I don’t know if the Clinton and Bush years just polarized the left and the right wings more, leaving less room for friendly debates.   I sometimes even got in trouble with liberal friends, as when I supported Joe Lieberman in his run for the presidency in 2004.  I don’t agree with Lieberman’s position in Iraq, but I do agree with his positions on the environment, on most social issues, and I admire his strong advocacy of labor rights.  On these issues he’s actually more progressive than Howard Dean and especially John Murtha.  And I thought his plan for a progressive tax structure was better for redistributing wealth than any candidate except Dennis Kucinich’s.  No one really listened to me though.

A few years ago, I decided to research friendships between people with opposite political opinions.  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were best friends, even though Adams was a strong Federalist and Jefferson was a passionate Republican.  Their friendship was rocky at times, and they had a falling out in the 1790s, but their friendship was recovered in the 1800s with the assistance of their mutual friend Benjamin Rush, and they had a wonderful correspondence that lasted till the end of their lives.  Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart were best friends, even though Fonda was a New Deal liberal and Stewart was a conservative Republican.  They stayed friends all their lives, agreeing that their friendship was more important than their differences in political views.   Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill were friends, and O’Neil was at Reagan’s bedside offering support to Ronald and Nancy after the assasination attempt in 1981.  One of Ted Kennedy’s closest friends in the Senate is Orrin Hatch, and it was Hatch’s urgings in the 1990s that helped lead Kennedy to finally deal with his alcohol problem.

I don’t have as many conservative friends anymore as I once did.  One conservative friend that I do have though, is my brother-in-law, Erik.  Erik is a fiscal conservative, thought his views on social issues are rather liberal.  I enjoy visits with him, because he’s one of the few people nowadays that I can talk politics freely with.  Though he’s a social liberal, he feels it’s a mistake for the courts to rule for issues like homosexual and abortion rights to be imposed on the land, feeling instead that activists should do the hard work of changing the electorates’ opinions on these issues so that these issues are resolved the legislature.  We clash mostly on the free market and the role of government.  From Erik’s point of view, the government does more harm than good when it tries to put its reach on the economy and alleviating poverty, and that the unfettered free market would better alleviate many of society’s problems.  I, on the other hand, believe the free market has basic flaws that only the government can resolve. 

I enjoy these conversations, and I think it’s good for me that my progressive viewpoints get challenged.  It forces me to articulate why I believe the things that I believe, and it makes me see the strengths and weaknesses of my political beliefs.  In my many years of arguing with conservative friends, I’ve never been convinced of the rightness of their ideas.  But it’s helped me to see that they have a valid point of view, and hopefully it helps them see that my own left wing beliefs have some validity as well.  Instead of two monologues going passed each other, which has been my experience with a lot of more adverserial conversations have gone with more hostile conservatives, my talks with conservative friends have been actual dialogues.   And in this polarized political atmosphere, more dialogue is needed.

Liberals and Radicals Part 2

I’ve been left of center all my life.  My early politics was influenced by my admiration of Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedys, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and the social teachings of the time I was in the Catholic church.  In the mid 1990s, I attended an evangelical church for 8 years, and I learned to keep quiet about my political views.  SInce leaving that church due to conflicts, I’ve been on a mission to rediscover myself, to revisit my liberal roots.  I’ve written in a Christian progressive site, and discovered the divide between liberals and progressives, and it got me interested in knowing where I stand in the liberal/radical spectrum.  I’ve been reading a lot of books in that time and found a beneficial relationship between liberals and radicals.   Though the two groups have at times been hostile to each other, they both were needed to instigate needed social changes in American society.

From what I read, it seems that a basic difference between the liberal reformer and the radical is the extent of the changes that they hope to bring to society.  Liberals seem to want to make reforms to the existing system, but they do not want to replace the economic and political system.  I found a good definition of liberalism in the book American Reform and Reformers, edited by Randall M. Miller and Paul A. Cimbala. They write in the book’s introduction:

“This dictionary’s interest rests on reform rather than on radicalism- on the reshaping and redirecting of society rather than on its uprooting. In emphasizing reform over radicalism- indeed, in distinguishing between the two- the dictionary borrows from Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, 1976) in recognizing that such terms as “reform” and “radical” are fluid and sometimes interchangeable, and that their meanings are rooted in particular historical contexts. However much American reformers might not deserve the label “radical,” many of them were regarded (and in several instances regarded themselves) as radicals in their own day and proposed substantial changes in social structure and the redistribution of power. In fact, the lines separating reform from radicalism have remained blurred and porous, so that clear distinctions between reformer and radical have often proved problematic. One generations;s radical outcast might be embraced as another generation’s reformer hero or heroine. The abolitionists, for example, were so transformed in Northerners’ collective extimation from the 1830s through the 1860s.

From Thomas Paine’s day onward, radical ideas have inspired reform efforts, and reforms have become radical. Antislavery, for example, moved from the cautious, gradual abolition strategies of the Quakers and the Revolutionary era generation to the immediatism and moral certainty of the evangelicals and Garrisonian abolitionists…

Still, reform and radicalism were (and are) not wholly synonymous. They have sought and have achieved different outcomes. One of the striking common characteristics of American reform over time has been its combination of idealism and realism. Reformers expected to change society by argument and action. Understanding American society and beliefs, adapting to political realities, and appealing to public conscience and self-interest forced reformers to consider the practical aspects of how to enlist popular support for their ideas and programs… They were not just writers or advocates; in most cases they were also builders and coalition seekers. Where true radicals were alienated from the larger American society, which they considered beyond redemption, reformers commonly sought alliances with powerful elements and the general public in a culture they hoped to redeem.”

Radicals, on the other hand, believe the system is so irredeemably flawed that it has to be replaced with a more equitable economic and political system.  The best definition that I found for today’s sort of radicalism is in Howard Zinn’s book Postwar America: 1945-1971. He wrote:

“The American system has allowed enough change to ease discontent, but not enough to change the fundamental allocation of power and wealth. That which can be termed progress has taken place within the narrow boundaries of an economic system based on profit-motivated capitalism, a political system based on the paternalism of representative government, a foreign policy based on economic and military aggressiveness, and a social system based on a culture of prejudices concerning race, national origin, sex, age, and wealth.

So far, the major political conflicts in the United States have stayed within these boundaries. The American Revolution itself, while winning independence from a foreign ruling group, substituted the rule of a native group of slave owners, merchants, lawyers, and politicians; the new Constitution legitimized the substitution and created a larger arena for the elites of race and class that already dominated the colonies. With the Civil War, the nation outlawed slavery, while maintaining a general climate of racial subordination. Farm and labor movements succeeding in achieving reforms, but mostly for privileged minorities within their constituencies, and inside a larger framework of corporate control of the nation’s wealth. The political fluctuations, even the violent clashes represented by the farm and labor upheavals, had the look but not the reality of a choice between radically different alternatives.

All that I have said here supports the ‘consensus’ interpretation of American history, which states, I believe, a profound truth about our society, that its great ‘progress’ and its political clashes have kept within severe limits. What is missing in the consensus analysis is the persistent strain of protest that shows up repeatedly in American history and should not be ignored- the voices, the ideas, the struggles of those who defy the American working creed, who will not let the nation forget the rhetorical promises, who keep alive the vision, the possibility of a society beyond capitalism, beyond nationalism, beyond the hierarchies that are preserved in a man-eat-man culture. The existence of this strain justifies the work of the ‘conflict’ school of American history, which insists that Americans not forget the black abolitionists, the Wobblies, the Socialists, the anarchists, that we keep in mind Tom Paine, John Brown, Emma Goldman, Eugene Debbs, Malcolm X.”

I looked into history and found that social movements have always had that conflict between how far liberals and radicals wanted change in society.   The fight to end slavery in the 19th Century found the division between the radical abolitonists like William Garrison and Frederick Douglass, who fought for the immediate end of the institution, and gradualist Republicans like Abraham Lincoln, who hated slavery but felt inhibited by the Constitution and were fighting for the exclusion of slavery in any new territories and states that entered the Union.  The women’s rights movement had the divisions between women’s suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, who fought for the right of women to have the right to vote and to participate in the political and social system as equals, and radicals like Emma Goldman, who felt that the economic system placed too many barriers for poor and working class women to gain any meaningful equality and felt that the economic system needed to be replaced.  In the 1930s, there was the division between the New Deal liberals, who enacted legislation to alleviate the suffering of the millions in the Great Depression, and socialists and radicals, who appreciated the achievements of the New Deal but felt the New Deal programs did not go far enough to fight the racism that forced African Americans into second class citizenship, the economic hardship of farmers and dwellers of city slums, the power of corporations had to exploit their workers.   

Though they were divided on how far to change society, these two forces often influenced each other.   In the 1860s, Frederick Douglass met with Abraham Lincoln, and he influenced Lincoln’s decisions to incorporate African Americans and freed slaves into the Union army, fought discrimination against African Americans, and lead to his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.   Franklin Roosevelt incorporated various ideas espoused by Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party into his New Deal, legislation like Social Security for the elderly, and the Wagner Act for workers to organize into unions.  The Freedom Rides and the civil rights marches in Birmingham and Selma pressured Kennedy into introducing the Civil Rights Act and it produced a favorable atmosphere for LBJ’s civil rights legislation.  It’s the radical agitation that forces society to take notice of a problem, and the liberals and the sympathetic politicians who do the necessary compromising and reaching out to make the changes palatable to the rest of the society.   James Russell Lowell, the abolitionist, summarized this idea:  “The reformer must expect comparative isolation, and he must be strong enough to bear it.  He cannot look for the sympathy and cooperation of popular majorities.  Yet these are the tools of the politician….  All true reformers are incendiaries.  But it is the hearts, brains, and souls of thier fellow-men which they set on fire, and in so doing they perform the function appropriated to them in the wise order of Providence.”

In my own personal exploration of the radical/liberal spectrum, I find myself synpathetic to both views.  By temperment though, I lean more towards the liberal reformer end of the spectrum.   I look at today’s America, after 8 years of President Bush, and I see a nation that’s far worse off than it was before he became President.  Over 100,000 American troops have been in Iraq for 5 years now because the administration mistakingly believed the nation had weapons of mass destruction, and it did a bad job of planning the occupation of the country after Sadam fell.  I see a country with illegal immigrants being demonized despite working at jobs that no one else will do, average citizens who are struggling with rising gas prices and food prices, an environmental catastrophe in the making, a growing health care crisis.   And in response to all of these problems, activist have been on the streets and in protest marches for the past 6 years to try to bring to light to them.    The pressure of these activists, and the general sense of unease of the American populace has forced the Presidential candidates in the primaries to promise more substantial changes in our economic and our foreign policies if elected. 

The great social changes in American in the rights of African Americans and other minorities, in the rights of women, the rights of workers and the poor, and the rights of gays and lesbians, would not have occurred if the radicals and the liberal reformers hadn’t worked to agitate for change and worked to change public attitudes.  I end this with a quote from I.F. Stone.  I.F. Stone was a great independent reporter who published his own journal, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which chronicled news that other news sources ignored, and it became a repected source of progressive news and opinion during the 1950s and 1960s.  Stone was a radical of the 1930s, and he had a unique view of the college radicals of the 1960s.  His comment on them encapsulates the ambivalence of the radical’s techniques, but states the reinforces the importance of their role in making social change.  The book The Best of I.F. Stone reproduces an article In Defense of the Campus Radical that ran on May 19, 1969.   Here is a two paragraph excerpt:

“This is what the campus rebels are trying to tell us, in the only way which seems to get attention.  I do not like much of what they are saying and doing.  I do not like to hear opponents shouted down, much less beaten up.  I do not like to hear any one group or class, including policemen, called pigs.  I do not think four-letter words are arguments.  I hate hate, intolerance, and violence.  I see them as man’s most ancient and enduring enemies and I hate to see them welling up on my side.  But I feel about the rebels as Erasmus did about Luther.  Erasmus helped inspire the Reformation but ws repelled by the man who brought it to fruition.  He saw that Luther was intolerant and as dogmatic as the Church.  ‘From argument,’ as Erasmus saw it, ‘there would be a quick resort to the sword, and the whole world would be full of fury and madness.’  Two centuries of religious wars without parallel for blood-lust were soon to prove how right were his misgivings.  But while Erasmus ‘could not join Luther, he dared not oppose him, lest haply, as he confessed he might be fighting against the spirit of God’.  I feel that the New Left and the black revolutionaries, like Luther, are doing God’s work, too, in refusing any longer to submit to evil, and challenging society to reform or crush them.

Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat.  It has made me suspicious of victory.  I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement.  I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party line.  Those who set out nobly to be their brother’s keeper sometimes end up be becoming his jailer.  Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.  But these perspectives, which seem so irrefutably clear from a pillar in the desert, are worthless to those enmeshed in the crowded struggle.  They are no better than mystical nonsense to the humane student who has faced his draft board, the dissident soldier who is determined not to fight, the black who sees his people doomed by shackles stronger than slavery to racial humiliation and decay.  The business of the moment is to end the war, to break the growing dominance of the military in our society, to liberate the blacks, the Mexican-American, the Puerto Rican, and the Indian from injustice.  This is the business of our best youth.  However confused and chaotic, their unwillingness to submit any longer is our one hope.”

Indigo Girls and Activism in Music

My wife has given me many things that I’m grateful for since she came into my life.  One of the nicest things she’s given me is a whole new range of music that I never listened to before.   When we first dated, one of the first places she took me to was an Indigo Girls concert in Berkeley.  I had heard the name of Indigo Girls, but I never really listened to their music before.  Ever since that concert, I really started listening to them, and found out they are deeply involved in progressive activism and promoting issues of peace and sexual equality. 

One of the first things I noticed during the concert was the desk in front of the entrance promoting various LGBT and leftist causes.  At first I thought this was just because I was in Berkeley, but as I looked for our seats to listen to the concert, I noticed that a large proportion of the audience were lesbian women.  I asked Lisa about it and she told me that Indigo Girls were strong activists in gay and lesbian causes.  When the concert started, I really enjoyed the music and the two women that made up the group.  They talked to the audience and asked for requests for songs, they brought up on stage a student to play accordion to one of their songs, and everyone had a wonderful time.  I really liked the songs.    It was the first time I heard songs like “Closer to Fine” and “Galileo” and they were catchy and fun folksy songs.

After the concert Lisa lent me her CD “All That We Let In”, which I instantly liked.  The cover was by Jaime Hernandez, one of my favorite cartoonists who did the 1980s alternative comic book “Love and Rockets”.    I liked every song on the CD, and my favorites were “Free In You”, “Perfect World” and “All That We Let In“.    I liked the joy in the Indigo Girls singing, the crisp harmonies, and the catchiness of the songs.  The lyrics have a strong social consciousness, but it’s not in-your-face. 

Indigo Girls consists of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, two high school friends.  A look in Wikipedia shows that they were a part of the Atlanta, Georgia college rock scene of the 1980s that included such bands as the B-52s and REM.   They started producing CDs in the 1980s, starting with the CD “Indigo Girls” and they were nominated for Best New Artist in the grammies, losing out to Milli Vanilli.   Amy and Emily wrote most of their songs separately, and my wife tells me they have a sort of Lennon/McCartney type dynamic in their songs.  One songwriter tends to write edgier songs while the other writes more optimistic songs.  i’m not sure which one writes which, but like John and Paul, Amy and Emily’s songs really work well together, complimenting each others strengths.

A month ago my wife purchased the Indigo Girls latest CD, Despite Our Differences.  It’s an edgier collection of songs,  with lyrics that mine some of the same stories of economic misery that Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar Mellancamp mine in their populist songs.  In “They Won’t Have Me” Amy Ray sings,

“They won’t have me, but I love this place. 
The rural life is broken, the farmlands gone to chaff.
My hands are idle, my mind needs rest,
the toil of the decent and the sleep of the best.
I sit in diners with  the old men.
they talk of work cause it’s all they ever did.
They gave their hearts to Jesus and got serious
They gave up their drinking and worked for this-nothing.”

In my ears, I sense a sadness at the lives of people left out of the economic benefits of the Bush years.  Amy and Emily have instilled the sense of social concern that make up their entire career.  In the back of their CD sleeve, they have a list of groups whose goals they support:  the Carter Center (www.cartercenter.org), Women’s Action for New Directions (www.wand.org), WITNESS (www.witness.org), Honor the Earth (www.honorearth.org), Native Wind (www.nativewind.org), the National Biodiesel Board (www.biodiesel.org), the National Youth Advocacy Coalition (www.nyacyouth.org), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Foundation (www.thetaskforce.org), and Indymedia (www.indymedia.org). 

My last time seeing Indigo Girls was in the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California a few years ago.  A nice folk group called Girlyman opened for them and it was a nice afternoon in the lawn listening to good music.   The Indigo Girls weren’t as intimate in their banter with the crowd as the concert that I saw in Berkeley, but it was an energetic and entertaining show nonetheless.  I see Indigo Girls in the same spirit of music and activism as Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger in the 1940s, and Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary in the 1960s, and Bruce Springsteen, Public Enemy and John Cougar Mellencamp in the 1980s and 1990s.  It’s good company to be in.  Music may not be able to change the world but it can change attitudes and cause people to think.  Indigo Girls is doing its part to change people’s attitudes for a better world.