Going to a vigil

Over the years, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve been somewhat of an arm chair liberal. I’ve talked a lot with my friends about politics and social change, and I’ve complained a lot about the things that are wrong with our society. Yet I haven’t really volunteered much to try to make any changes in our society. My brother and his wife put me to shame in this sense. Over the years, they have taken part in protests for immigrant rights and to fight the invasion of Iraq, and they are now working with the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports to reduce pollution in the Ports of southern California. Right now they are working on a postcard campaign to persuade local politicians and Congress to support the Clean Trucks program. Attached is the copy of the postcard and here is the website for more information about the Coalition: http://www.cleanandsafeports.org/. I deeply admire them for their activism and willingness to get involved to try to improve their community and their country. I did a cartoon for Everyday Citizen about my cartoon character Jasper taking part in a protest.

Last week I decided to attend my first vigil. It was a vigil on health care reform on September 2, 2009 at the corner of Stevens Creek Boulevard and Winchester Road in San Jose, California. I went with my friend Dave, who officiated my wedding with Lisa 4 years ago, and is a passionate liberal and a former nurse. When I was researching health care reform to try to form an opinion, I would ask people that I knew in the health care field what their opinions were. Dave has definite opinions of the health care debate.

It was a fun vigil. Several people were there for the first time, and I think everyone was invigorated to meet other people who shared the same passion for health care reform. During the vigil, a large group of people lined themselves at the corner of the street and waved signs at passing cars. If the cars approved of the message of universal health care, they would honk their horns. At the same time, the organizer of the event would allow various individuals to go to the microphone and tell of their own individual stories about their experiences being sick and the financial toll that they suffered. As the night encroached, we lighted candles.

I was amazed at how many cars honked their horns in support of health care reform. A lady next to me, who participated in past vigils protesting the war in Iraq, mentioned that there were far more cars honking their horns for health care reforms than honked their horns for peace. The people who were participating in the vigil were very diverse, with many different nationalities, age groups, and an even mix of men and women. Dave and I met unexpectedly met some friends whom we hadn’t seen in over a year.

A highlight for me was in meeting Father Bill Leininger. When I first talked to him, he mentioned that in the past he had marched with Cesar Chavez and had met Dorothy Day, and I was really impressed with him. After the vigil was over, I mentioned this priest in my facebook site and a friend told me that Father Leininger is a pioneer clergy in the social protest movements of the past 40 years. I went on the internet and found that in recent years, Father Leininger has joined in vigils in support of protests in support of janitors at Cisco System, to support WalMart employees, and to fight for immigrant rights. Last May, SIREN (Services, Immigrant Rights, & Education Network), 2nd Annual Fundraiser gave Father Leininger their Advocate Award for his years of support of immigrant rights. After finding this out, I wish I had gotten a chance to talk to Father Leininger more.

If you want to know more about what activists are doing around the country, this website, Crossleft, is a good source of information. The Crossleft bloggers are all activists in various progressive Christian causes and are good sources for progressive action. Two magazines are also excellent sources. One is the Catholic Worker. Founded in the depths of the Great Depression by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker chronicles the work of a progressive Catholic movement founded by Day and Maurin to help the poor and fight for peace.

In the August-July 2009 Catholic Worker, Jenny Thomas wrote an article about a group of Catholic Workers who went to a Gaza border crossing to deliver $17,000 of medical supplies to a hospital in Gaza. The members of the Catholic worker team, Beth Brockman, Mark Colville, Brenna Cussen, Colin Gilbert, Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, and Jenny Thomas, went to the Dheished Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, the Palestinian farmers cut off from any water supply, and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

Ric Rhetor wrote an article about the New Sanctuary movement and a vigil they held on July 7 outside the Federal Court in New York. It was for Roxroy Salmon and his appeal to stay in the country. RoxRoy is an organizer at Families for Freedom and a member of the New Sanctuary Coalition. Because of minor drug convictions from over 20 years ago, he is facing removal proceedings. The court gave Roxroy an order of deportation, but his lawyer has filed for a deferred action.

Z Magazine is an independent magazine based in Boston. Z Magazine has a radical point of view and chronicles the efforts of activists to make this world a better place.

In the July/August 2009 issue of Z Magazine, there was an article mentioning the closing of Northland Poster Collective after 30 years of creating art, slogans, posters, bumper stickers, t-shirts, poems and quotes for unions, grassroots activists, and social justice movements. The organization was an activist organization and art group, and it provided such slogans for picket lines as “The Labor Movement: The Folks That Brought You The Weekend”, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Cross Picket Lines”, and “Unions: The Anti-Theft Device For Working People”. The troubles that Northland Poster Collective have faced are being faced by all left wing media center.

In the September 2009 issue of Z Magazine, nine activists were arrest in August in Fort McCoy in Tomah, Wisconsin, for protesting U.S. wars in Iraq and Afganistan and for the continuing U.S. possession of nuclear weapons. These nine activists were also commemorating the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima in August 6 and Nagasaki in August 9. Four members of the group were taken to Madison where they faced federal trespass charges.

One of my favorite books is Grace Paley’s book, Just As I Thought is chronicles her years of activism against war and racism, and for her years of teaching. I’ve admired the humorous and down-to-earth perspective that Paley brings to her recollections of protesting the Vietnam War and the various vigils against nuclear weapons. In an interview with Meredith Smith and Karen Kahn, Paley talked about the importance of Americans to use their privileges to fight for social causes.

“But we were just talking about civil disobedience. Some people think it’s an elite act because some of us have privileges of white skin or maybe jobs we won’t lose the minute we are arrested. Well, it’s true that people of color are treated worse in prison than white women. They are. (Of course, the great civil disobedience movements- King, Gandhi- were not exactly white). When white women (or men) use the argument- therefore nobody should do it- I don’t understand them. It seems to me that privilege is obligation, that if it’s easier to go to jail, so to speak, or more possible, then direct actions that may lead to arrest are exactly what we ought to undertake when that is what’s called for.

It’s sort of like having democratic rights and not using them. It’s a totally different subject but people will always come to you when you’re giving out leaflets and say, ‘You wouldn’t be able to do that in Russia.’ So therefore you shouldn’t do it here? Well, of course you have an obligation to push the privileges of democracy, to push and extend them everywhere. And people who can should do so. We also have to be willing to divide up the work without feeling that some folks are being snotty about it or braver. They’re not braver. For instance, when my children were babies, I was a lot more cautious. We much investigate, imagine, press the limits of nonviolent action.”

My favorite book of activism is Howard Zinn’s recollection You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train. Zinn’s book chronicles his life of activism, from the time he was a teacher at an black women’s school in Spellman College in the 1950s, and his work in the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement. He wrote something that describes the importance of vigils and protests and petition writing in the cause of social change. He wrote:

“Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people’s consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that homosexuals are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military interventions despite the brief surge of military madness during the Gulf War.

It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment we will continue to see. We forget how often in this century we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

The bad things that happen are repetitions of bad things that have always happened- war, racism, maltreatment of women, religious and nationalist fanaticism, starvation. The good things that happen are unexpected.

Unexpected, and yet explainable by certain truths which spring at us from time to time, but which we tend to forget: Political power, however formidible, is more fragile than we think. (Note how nervous are those who hold it) Ordinary people can be intimidated for a time, can be fooled for a time, but they have a down-deep common sense, and sooner or later they find a way to challenge the power that oppresses them.

People are not naturally violent or cruel or greedy, although they can be made so. Human beings everywhere want the same things: they are moved by the sight of abandoned children, homeless families, the casualties of war; they long for peace, for friendship and affection across lines of race and nationality.

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zig-zag towards a more decent society.

We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

The Founding Fathers and Slavery Part 2

As Flag Day and July 4 approach, it is wise to consider the Founding Fathers and their accomplishments and failures. One of the things that these men have been criticized for in recent years, and one that many in the Left make about them, is that many of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders and that they did not eradicate slavery. Though I agree that the existence of slavery is one of the great stains in this nation’s history, I think it is wrong to stereotyp the Founding Fathers as being uncaring towards slaves. I wrote a previous blog about the Founding Fathers grappling with the issue of slavery and thought I’d write a followup. Though I am to the left of the political spectrum, the criticisms of many of the Left towards the Founding Fathers has bothered me. The early leaders did try to abolish slavery, but their fears of Southern secession eventually doomed those efforts.

From the 1770s to 1780s, several people developed plans as possible ways of abolishing slavery. Thomas Jefferson developed a plan of gradual abolition that featured an end to the slave trade, the prohibition of slavery, and the establishment of a date in which newly born children of slaves would be free. Prominent Virginians Fernando Fairfax and St. George Tucker submitted plans on the freeing of slaves: Tucker presented “A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of It, in the State of Virginia” to the Virginia Legislature in 1796 and Fairfax developed his “Plan for Liberating the Negroes within the United States” in 1790. All of these plans were similar in that they wanted the abolition of slaves to be gradual, they wanted the government to compensate the slave owners for the lost property, and they wanted to colonize the freed slaves in a seperate place from the white society.

One of the great criticisms of the gradual abolition plans that Southern critics pointed out is that the federal government didn’t have enough money to compensate the slaveowners and transport the freed slaves to other lands. Ellis notes in his book Founding Brothers though that a gradual abolition plan would spread the cost of freeing the slaves over several decades as only a percentage of slaves would be freed over one time. St. George Tucker’s plan would spread the cost of freeing the slaves over a century, making a gradual abolition plan more financially feasibly.

The great problem of any abolition plan would be the threat of Southern secession. John Adams felt that any abolition plan would have to be led by enlightened Virginians like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington who were against slavery and might be able to press their fellow Southerners to adopt an abolition plan. Joseph Ellis wrote in his book American Sphinx that in the mid 1780s and before, Jefferson was a strong advocate for the abolition of slavery. In 1769 Jefferson proposed unsuccessfully that the Virginia House of Burgess emancipate the slaves of Virginia. In 1778 he successfully passed a bill through the Virginia legislature for the banning of future slave importation to Virginia. Jefferson authored on April 1784 a proposal to the Continental Congress that would’ve abolished slavery in the Northwestern Territory of the U.S. that failed to pass by a single vote. When Jefferson’s 1784 proposal failed to pass by one vote, he wrote, “the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, heaven was silent in that awful moment!”

If any politician had enough prestige to possibly get the South to go along with a gradual abolition plan, it might’ve been George Washington. Washington had stated that he wanted “to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees.” Henry Wiencek, in his book, “Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America”, notes that Washington was contemplating the freeing of his slaves during his Presidency as an example for the nation, but backed away from those plans. Washington’s wife and relatives did not share his distaste for slavery and were fiercely against any abolition plan. Wiencek felt this was a great missed opportunity for Washington and the nation.

Washington did eventually free his slaves in his will. George Washington wrote his will in secret in July 1799, to conceal his emancipation plans from the disapproval of his family. Henry Wiecker notes in his book that Washington owned only 123 of the 316 slaves in Mount Vernon. The rest were Martha’s slaves. He put in his will that the slaves that he owned would be freed upon the death of Martha Washington, as a way to appeal to Martha to follow his lead and emancipate her own slaves. The old and the infirm freed slaves would be taken care of until death by their heirs. The freed children would be bound by the Court until they reached 25 years of age, and they would be taught to read and write and be brought up to some useful occupation. To ensure that the executors of the will would not try to find some way to evade his wishes to free the slaves, Washington wrote:
“…and I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. And I do moreover most pointedly, and most solenmly enjoin it upon my Executors hereafter named, or the Survivors of them, to see that this clause respecting Slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled at the Epoch at which it is directed to take place; without evasion, neglect or delay…”

On February 3, 1790, Benjamin Franklin and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society had a petition in the House of Representatives to abolish slavery and stop the slave trade. The petition challenged the idea that the Constitution prohibited legislation against the slave trade until 1808 by suggesting that the “general welfare clause” (Article 1, Section 8 ) allowed the Congress to eliminate the slave trade and abolish slavery. It is written in the petition, “Your Memorialists, particularly engaged in attending to the Distresses arising from Slavery, believe it their indispensable Duty to present this Subject to your notice. They have observed with great Satisfaction that many important & salutary Powers are vested in you for ‘promoting the Welfare & Securing the blessings of liberty to the “People of the United States.’”

Many of the other Founding Fathers were against slavery. John Adams was an outspoken foe of the institution. Alexander Hamilton founded the New York Manumission Society, which was instrumental in abolishing slavery in that state. Some enlightened Virginians that were financially well off did free their own slaves, especially after the Virginia legislature passed a law permitting slave owners to free their own slaves at their own discretion. Robert Carter III, the richest man in Virginia, freed his 452 slaves and gave up his plantation. The book The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves by Andrew Levy chronicles the influences of the radical Baptists in his views on race, where he worshipped side by side as equals with his slaves, in Carter’s enlightened views on race. In 1791, Carter filed a Deed of Gift in his home town of Williamsburg, Virginia, that led to a gradual manumitting of his 452 slaves. He did this inspite of his opposition of his sons and neighbors, which eventually led Carter to move to Baltimore to move away from their disapproval. In 1803 the year before his death, Carter wrote his daughter Harriot L. Maund, “My plans and advice have never been pleasing to the world”

The inability of the Founding Fathers to find a solution to the problem of slavery is one of their greatest failures. In spite of that, however, it is wrong for the Left and for many others to stereotype them as just being rich white men who were just interested in empire and business. Many of the Founding Fathers did care about abolishing slavery to square with the principals of liberty that was at the heart of the republican ideas of the Declaration of Independence. In this instance, radicals like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison were need to provide the grassroots agitation to prod the nation to change. At heart, most of the Founding Fathers were liberal reformers who wanted to work within the system they created, and abolition needed radicals to provide the push from outside the system. Among the Founding Fathers, only Thomas Paine and perhaps a young Jefferson had that radical mindset. Abolition required a radical change in the South’s economic system away from the plantation system and the Founding Fathers were not willing to take that radical step.

African America Civil Rights Leaders and Gay Rights

“Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma, in Albany, Georgia, and St. Augustine, Florida, and many other campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute their contributions.”

Coretta Scott King, 25th anniversary luncheon for Lambda Defense and Education Fund, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, April 1, 1998

Recently a friend informed me that in the state of Maine, a proposition is on the ballot to try to outlaw gay marriages. Last year, I spent a lot of time researching arguments against Proposition 8 and found in the website by the gay evangelical group Soulforce several quotes from leaders of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and I will use them for this blog. All speak powerfully of the injustice of discrimination in any form, whether it be because of race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. As the above quote by Coretta Scott King notes, many gays and lesbians participated in the great Civil Rights battles from the 1940s to the 1960s. Among them were Bayard Rustin, who organized the March on Washington in 1963, and James Baldwin, the famous writer.

Coretta Scott King was the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. and a strong advocate of civil rights in her own right. In 1964 Coretta lobbied hard for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King’s activism focused on womens’ rights, LGBT rights, economic issues, world peace and various other issues. In the 1980s King participated in a series of sit-in protests against apartheid in South Africa. An advocate of peace, King was one of the founders of The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. She was also vocal in her opposition of capital punishment and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Talking about her advocacy of LGBT rights, Coretta Scott King noted in a speech at the 13th annual Creating Change conference of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Atlanta, Georgia, November 9, 2000:

“We have a lot of work to do in our common struggle against bigotry and discrimination. I say ‘common struggle,’ because I believe very strongly that all forms of bigotry & discrimination are equally wrong and should be opposed by right-thinking Americans everywhere. Freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation is surely a fundamental human right in any great democracy, as much as freedom from racial, religious, gender, or ethnic discrimination.”

John Lewis was a leader of the Civil Rights Movement who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington. He organized sit-in demonstrations at lunch counters in Nashville, Tenessee and he volunteered in the Freedom Rides, where he went on desegregated bus rides to protest the segregation of interstate travel in the South. From 1963 to 1966 Lewis was the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and through that group, organized the voter registration drives and community action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. Lewis was elected to Congress in November 1986 and has served as U.S. Representative of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District since that time.The October 25, 2003 Boston Globe quotes Lewis:

“From time to time, America comes to a crossroads. With confusion and controversy, it’s hard to spot that moment. We need cool heads, warm hearts, and America’s core principles to cleanse away the distractions.

We are now at such a crossroads over same-sex couples’ freedom to marry. It is time to say forthrightly that the government’s exclusion of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters from civil marriage officially degrades them and their families. It denies them the basic human right to marry the person they love. It denies them numerous legal protections for their families.

This discrimination is wrong. We cannot keep turning our backs on gay and lesbian Americans. I have fought too hard and too long against discrimination based on race and color not to stand up against discrimination based on sexual orientation. I’ve heard the reasons for opposing civil marriage for same-sex couples. Cut through the distractions, and they stink of the same fear, hatred, and intolerance I have known in racism and in bigotry.

Some say let’s choose another route and give gay folks some legal rights but call it something other than marriage. We have been down that road before in this country. Separate is not equal. The rights to liberty and happiness belong to each of us and on the same terms, without regard to either skin color or sexual orientation.

Some say they are uncomfortable with the thought of gays and lesbians marrying. But our rights as Americans do not depend on the approval of others. Our rights depend on us being Americans.

Sometimes it takes courts to remind us of these basic principles. In 1948, when I was 8 years old, 30 states had bans on interracial marriage, courts had upheld the bans many times, and 90 percent of the public disapproved of those marriages, saying they were against the definition of marriage, against God’s law. But that year, the California Supreme Court became the first court in America to strike down such a ban. Thank goodness some court finally had the courage to say that equal means equal, and others rightly followed, including the US Supreme Court 19 years later.

Some stand on the ground of religion, either demonizing gay people or suggesting that civil marriage is beyond the Constitution. But religious rites and civil rights are two separate entities. What’s at stake here is legal marriage, not the freedom of every religion to decide on its own religious views and ceremonies.

I remember the words of John Kennedy when his presidential candidacy was challenged because of his faith: “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

Those words ring particularly true today. We hurt our fellow citizens and our community when we deny gay people civil marriage and its protections and responsibilities. Rather than divide and discriminate, let us come together and create one nation. We are all one people. We all live in the American house. We are all the American family. Let us recognize that the gay people living in our house share the same hopes, troubles, and dreams. It’s time we treated them as equals, as family.”

Rev. Bob Graetz was the only white minister to march with Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and 1956. Their participation in the boycott made them targets of much harassment, as their house was twice the target of firebombings. Reverand Graetz and his wife Jeannie served an all-black Lutheran congregation in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. Today Rev. Graetz and his wife serve as instructors at The Soulforce Institute for Nonviolent Change. Rev. Graetz said:

“We are a retired Lutheran pastor and spouse, whose oldest son was born gay, and who at the age of 37 died with AIDS. Having spent years coming to grips with and trying to understand the concept of homosexuality, we have ultimately come to recognize this condition as a special gift of God conveyed to some of his carefully selected daughters and sons. We have come to know personally thousands of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons. And we have also become convinced that this condition is part of the ‘creative given’ rather than a personal choice by those individuals.”

“We have spent most of our lives struggling against the oppression of African-Americans and other groups within our society who are the objects of discrimination and prejudice. And we consider our ministry with and for the GLBT community to be an extension of that life-long commitment.”

Rev. Dr. James Lawson is a distinguished United Methodist pastor who worked side-by-side with Dr. King training the activists who participated in the lunch counter sit-ins and the Freedom Rides of the 1960s. He has continued to train activists in nonviolence and to work in support of a number of causes, including immigrants’ rights in the United States and the rights of Palestinians, opposition to the war in Iraq, and workers’ rights to a living wage. In 2004, he received the Community of Christ International Peace Award. Rev. Lawson said of the plight of many homosexuals:

“Gays and lesbians have a more difficult time than we did. We had our families and our churches on our side. All too often, they have neither.”

Julian Bond was a founding member of SNCC in 1960. While a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, he helped organize a sit-in movement at Atlanta University. In 1965 Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, but the members of the House would not seat him because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. Bond was elected two more times before the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia House had violated Bond’s rights in refusing him his seat. Since 1998, Julian Bond has served as Chairman of the Board of the NAACP and is on the board of directors of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Julian Bond said at the 2008 Creating Change Conference:

“That’s why when I am asked, ‘Are gay rights civil rights?’ my answer is always, ‘Of course they are.’”

“Rights for gays and lesbians are not ’special rights’ in any way. It isn’t “special” to be free from discrimination — that’s an ordinary, universal entitlement of citizenship.”

“No parallels between movements for rights is exact. African-Americans are the only Americans who were enslaved for more than two centuries, and people of color carry the badge of who we are on our faces. But we are far from the only people suffering discrimination — sadly, so do many others. They deserve the law’s protection and they deserve civil rights too. Sexual disposition parallels race — I was born black and I had no choice. I couldn’t and wouldn’t change if I could. Like race, our sexuality isn’t a preference — it is immutable, unchangeable, and the Constitution protects us against prejudices based on immutable differences.”

In 1963, Richard and Mildred Loving, an African American and white interracial couple, decided to challenge the miscegenation laws of Virginia and this eventually lead to a Supreme Court ruling that overturned the ban on interracial marriages in the United States. The Lovings married in Washington D.C. to avoid Virginia’s miscegenation laws, but when they returned to their home state, they were arrested in their bedroom for living together as an interracial couple. The judge suspended the case as long as the Lovings left Virginia for 25 years. They eventually took their case to the Supreme Court and in 1967, the Court unanimously decided that miscegenation laws was against the Fourteenth Amendments’ goals of equality.

Richard Loving died in 1975 when he was struck by a drunk driver. Mildred Loving survived and lived until May 2, 2008, when she died on pneumonia. On June 12, 2007, the 40th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, Mildred Loving issued a statement which said:

“My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone, they have a right to marry.

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the ‘wrong kind of person’ for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight, seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

Favianna Rodriquez and the Political Poster

One of my favorite programs is SPARK, a Public Television station that profiles artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. A few weeks ago, SPARK showcased the political posters of Favianna Rodriguez. Rodriquez makes posters and graphics that support social movements and grassroots activism, much in the same way that past political artists like Honore Daumier, Jose Guadalupe Posada and Kathe Kolliwitz created graphic works that commented on the ills of society.

Favianna first learned about silk-screening in her teens when she took free art classes offered in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California. Rodriquez was deeply influenced by the Chicano arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and with her collaborator, Jesus Barraza, Rodriguez has designed posters to raise awareness on issues ranging like genetically modified foods, day laborers in the U.S., mothers of disappeared women in Juárez, Mexico, immigration rights and globalization. She helped found the EastSide Arts Alliance, an organization that supports Oakland neighborhoods through arts programs and trains young artists in the tradition of muralism.. In 2003, Rodriquez co-founded the Taller Tupac Amaru printing studio to foster resurgence in the screenprinting medium.

In Rodriquez artist statement in her website, she writes:

“Now more than ever, our protest culture is being coopted by the mainstream. Counter-culture is in style! But the requirement of study, political debate and practice is absent. We the artists of the people have a responsibility to expose our truths so that we don’t become maintainers of this corrupt sytem. In this age of extreme capitalism, we are surrounded by corporate media that influence our decisions about everything we wear, everything we eat, and everything we buy. We are constantly fed messages to be consumers. I am not in the business of crass commercial advertisement. I am in the business of education and liberation. My subjects are Black, Latino, Asian and Native communities that have been ignored and smashed by this government.

It is in this spirit that I has created artwork: to translate the messages of the frontlines into works of art that can be used to educate and mobilize. I am part of a long tradition of political artists who have used their art to dismantle and expose this fascistic culture. I send a shot out to Rini Templeton, Malaquias Montoya, Victor Jara, Emory Douglas, Paul Robenson, Juan Fuentes, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Ester Hernandez, Rene Mederos, and Rupert Garcia ­ political artists that inspired and informed my work and set the stage for political graphics in the 20th century. “

Favianna Rodriquez is collaborating right now with renowned stencil artist Josh MacPhee on the book Reproduce and Revolt which has more than 600 black and white illustrations for royalty free use in noncommercial activist purposes.

Before I watched this particular SPARK episode, I had never heard of Favianna Rodriquez. I loved her posters and admired the social conscience behind her works of art. As her artist’s statement attests, Rodriquez is working in a long tradition of political artwork. In the nineteenth century in Mexico, Jose Guadalupe Posada was making etchings and engravings for the newspaper El Jicote and prints about the songs, fables, ballads and social commentary about Mexican society. Posada’s most famous prints were his Calaveras (spanish for skeletons), which he used to depict the follies of human nature. These images were used to satirize the upper classes of the Porfirio Diaz era in Mexico.

Honore Daumier was French printmaker and caricaturist who created many prints that satirized the French middle class and government in the 19th century. Daumier worked in journals like La Caritcature and Le Charivari, where he made fun of the French bourgeoisie, the corruption of lawyers, and the incompetence of the French monarchy. His caricature of the king in his cartoon Gargantua led to Daumier’s imprisonment for six months at Ste Pelagic in 1832.

Kathe Kollwitz was famed German printmaker of the early twentieth century who created works that told of the suffering of the less fortunate members of society. Her drawings, lithographs, etchings and woodcuts depicted the plight of those trapped in poverty, extolled the fight of workers to be treated more equitably, and attacked the concept of war. Kollwitz’s husband was a doctor who tended to the poor, and this greatly influenced her political views. The death of her youngest son in the battlefields of World War I made Kollwitz a fervent pacifist, and she made a series of political posters in the 1920s that decried war and poverty. In the 1930s, Kollwitz was replaced from the faculty of a major art institution and her work was banned by the Nazis. Her fame, though, helped protect Kollwitz from too much harassment from the Nazi authorities, although she and her husband were threatened by the Gestapo in 1936.

The graphic artword of Rodriquez, Posada, Daumier and Kollwitz shows that art can have a positive influence upon the attitudes of people and it can move some viewers to take a more active role in correcting some of the flaws in our society. These posters take stands on important issues of our time, and they argue with passion and intelligence for people to be engaged in the problems of our community. For that, I think Favianna Rodriquez should be commended. To see more of Favianna Rodriquez’s work you could go here.

Try Out Z Magazine

One of my favorite magazines to read is Z Magazine. It is a leftist magazine of essays, accounts of activists and great cartoons that offers a point of view that I don’t see in any other magazine. In my latest issue that I got in the mail, they are going to push in these next few months to fundraise and get more subscribers. I like Z Magazine because it covers the work of activists from around the world who are trying to protect the environment, work for human rights, aid in peace effors, help the poor, and expose the wrongdoings of corporations and of government. As a website of ordinary citizens who have many of the same concerns and interests, I thought many of you who read wordpress might be interested in giving Z Magazine a try.

Z Magazine was founded in 1987 by two of the founding members of South End Press (http://www.zmag.org/zmag/zmagabout.htm). It was inspired by the movie Z, by Costa-Gavras, that tells the story of repression and resistance in Greece. At the end of the movie, instead of listing the cast and crew, Costa-Gavras list the things banned by the Greek junta in the movie. They include: peace movements, labor unions, long hair on men, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Aeschylus, strikes, Socrates, Ionesco, Sartre, the Beatles, Chekhov, Mark Twain, the bar association, sociology, Becket, the International Encyclopedia, the free press, modern and popular music, the new math, and the letter Z, which in the movie symbolized “the spirit of resistance lives.” In the spirit of the movie, Z Magazine is dedicated. In each issue, Z Magazine begins with this statement:

“Z is an independent monthly magazine of critical thinking on political, cultural, social, and economic lie in the U.S. It sees the racial, gender, class, and political dimensions of personal life as fundamental to understanding and improving contemporary circumstances; and it aims to assist activist efforts for a better future.”

Z Magazine highlights writers as diverse as Lydia Sargent (co-founder of Z Magazine), Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Jack Rasmus, Harvey Wasserman, Margaret Kimberly, and various activists and freelance writers. I am a big fan of the various cartoonists who regularly populate the Z pages. Ted Rall , Keith Tucker , Carol Simpson , Tom Tomorrow, Andy Singer, Matt Wuerker and various other cartoonists create scathing political satire that is difficult to find in more mainstream magazines.

You could check out Z Magazine and their online counterpart Z Communications at www.zcommunications.org.

Or you could write to them at
Z Magazine
18 Millfield Street
Woods Hole, MA 02543

I’m giving this plug because I’m a big fan of this magazine. I hope no one minds this plug.

Music and the Social Conscience

Whenever we think of socially conscious music, the folk music of the 1960s instantly comes to mind for many people. Along with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary participated in many civil rights martches and anti-war events. Recently, Mary Travers died after battling leukemia for 3 years. They sang the Pete Seeger song “If I Had A Hammer” at the March on Washington in 1963 and they popularized many of Bob Dylans songs. Here is a performance of the trio singing the Dylan song “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”.

My school years were during the 1980s and though it doesn’t have the same reputation as being a political time as the 1960s, I remember a lot of political movements during that time. It was the time of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and there was a lot of opposition to their policies of military buildup and cutbacks on government social programs. The AIDs epidemic was killing many of the gay population. People were working to fight apartheid in South Africa and fighting to stop aid to the Contras in El Salvador. Average Americans in the rustbelt and in farming communities were suffering from declining economies. I remember many people being involved to try to fight for just causes.

The punk, new wave, ska and reggae music during that time had many political messages. I used to borrow friends’ tapes and when I listened to musicians like the Specials and the Clash, the lyrics protested against Margaret Thatcher and the struggles of British working class people. In my math class, I sat next to a really nice girl who dressed in punk outfits and talked to me about the different bands and their messages of subversion and protest. One of the most memorable political songs of that time was “Free Nelson Mandela” by the British ska group, the Specials. The Specials were formed specifically to fight racism, and its members integrated black and white musicians. The anti-apartheid cause fight nicely with their political stances and the song became popular with activists in South Africa.

Two really great musicians who wrote songs for working class people were Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp. I came about admiring Bruce Springsteen rather late, not listening to anything by him until his “Born in the U.S.A.” album. I really liked John Mellencamp’s “Scarecrow” album and it’s still one of my favorite albums to listen to. When I listened to both albums, I noticed that Springsteen and Mellencamp are singing about slightly different subjects: Springsteen seems to be singing about blue collar workers while Mellencamp seems to be singing about rural farm communities. Both groups of people suffered heavily during the Reagan years, as the economy seemed to be moving away from the products that these two communities relied upon for their economic livelihoods. Both Springsteen and Mellencamp are still active in social causes, as Springsteen is currently helping out with World Hunger Year to help fight hunger and Mellencamp regularly participates in FarmAid.

Many of the best social conscious music were coming from musicians with a decidedly folk tinge. In 1988 Tracy Chapman released the album “Tracy Chapman” with songs about unemployment lines and poverty and she toured that year in the Amnesty International Human Rights tour. The Indigo Girls came out of Atlanta, Georgia, and have fought for gay rights, the rights of Native Americans, for the environment and to abolish the death penalty. They are continuing the folk tradition of political activism that was forged by Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie.

I have never really been a fan of rap music, but I’ve learned that rap music has had some of the most trenchant political commentary in music in the past 20 years. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, rap had its most political phase, as it commented on the poverty of the African American poor and the tribulations of people trapped in the inner cities. One of the most influential rap groups was Public Enemy, whose albums “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” and “Fear of a Black Planet” had strong social stances. Public Enemy and the more political rap groups influenced later activists and artists like Boondocks cartoonist Aaron McGruder. In an interview with R.C. Harvey for the September 2003 Comics Journal, McGruder noted:

“My political perspectives as a young adult was shaped by hip hop’s political era, which was 1987 to 1992, roughly when I was in junior high and high school. We had Public Enemy, KRS-One, X-Clan, Brand Nubian and all of those very overtly political groups… It was actually Black Nationalism; it was radical socialism. There was no black leadership supplying these political ideals to the next generation, and what few people there were, a lot of us- discovered that through hip hop.”

After the mid 1990s, I no longer kept in touch with what is popular in music. So sometimes I feel like an old fogie because I don’t know what the latest group or top ten song. So my wife and my nieces and nephew sometimes let me listen to their CDs and I find out the newest songs. I think there is probably great music being made by socially conscious musicians today. I end this blog with a quote from Howard Zinn’s book “Conversations on History and Politics”. Zinn wrote:

“It was people in the arts who perhaps had the greatest emotional effect on me. Singers such as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Paul Robeson. Writers like Upton Sinclair and Jack London. I was reading the newspapers and Karl Marx. I was reading all sorts of subversive matter. But there was something special about the effect of what artists did.

And by artists I mean not only singers and musicians but poets, novelists, people in the theater. It always seemed to me that there was a special power that artists had when they commented, either in their own work or outside their work, on what was going on in the world. There was a kind of force that they brought into the discussion that mere rose could not match. Part of it had to do with a passion and an emotion which comes with poetry, which comes with music, that comes with drama, which is rarely equaled in prose, even if it is beautiful prose. I was struck by that at an early age.”