Can't Fix Everything?

What Do We Do Now, Dr. King? part 3

A Few Questions Not Entirely Political, Jeanne Lohmann, 1990s

Slamming into us, the wind
pushed our placards off the iron railing
outside the federal building

Wanting words I could stand by
these made me uneasy; a strident facile blame,
the public appeal to guilt.

After the vigil, riding home on the bus
I try to resist a temptation to sadness.
The precarious balancing act of our lives
leave much undone. By not so much as the weight
of one raindrop could we lessen the misery of the world.

A fat passenger settling into the next plush seat
squeezes me close to the window. I feel like a fugitive,
the questions from my faithful and radical friends
spinning the tires on the rainslick freeway:
what rouses us, finally? Why choose Bosnia
and fail Guatemala? Why no attention
to years of massacre in El Salvador?
Why relief for Somalia and not the Sudan?
Chechnya? China? Cuba?

We could name other places always.
And closer home there's politics to consider.
Choices. The terrible complex dilemmas.

We can't fix everything.

But how do we answer each other
or the starving and tortured,
the broken and passed-over, the children
whose cries didn't reach us
or came from the wrong place, wrong time
and were never loud enough?

* * *

We need not fight about what is really the main issue that needs attention.

My issue is the important one!

No, MY issue is more important!

We don’t have to do that, because we share one vision. In this vision, we love our Earth, protect its resources, live harmoniously and sustainably. In this vision, we also share those resources equitably. Everyone gets health care, quality education, food, and adequate housing, access to jobs. In this vision, diversity is honored and respected: cultural diversity, ethnic diversity.

In this vision, freedoms are cherished and protected from discrimination against their exercise: freedom to choose pregnancy and parenthood, freedom to marry who you love, and live with who you like, freedom to go to the bathroom that corresponds to your gender identity.

We may differ in the details, but that general vision represents the consensus of Unitarian Universalists and a lot of other people. Some people might focus on environmental and climate issues, others on LGBT issues, or income inequality and poverty and class issues, or housing, or education, or war and peace, or species extinction and animal abuse, or issues affecting blacks and women. But we all working for the vision.

The injustices that we seek to dismantle are interlinked. We need not reach agreement on the one keystone injustice and go after it because systems of oppression intersect and overlap, and opening up the space of justice in any area makes it easier to open others. This is the insight that goes by the name intersectionality. When congregations feel torn between whether to focus on racial justice or climate change, military drone use or affordable housing, it is helpful to remember the intersectionality.

Peace requires justice, and justice requires peace. Peace and justice help enable environmental stewardship just as environmental stewardship helps enable peace and justice. Neighboring colleague Rev. Peggy Clarke, who serves the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Hastings, wrote in the Huffington Post a couple years ago:

"The rationale that led to slavery and colonization and the deprivation of humans at various times in history is the same thought process leading to the destruction of earth. It is the framework that suggests everything is in service to the dominant class.... Our current American paradigm allows one group to exploit another. The paradigmatic assumption is that women are in service to men, that the poor are in service to the rich, that people of color are in service to white people, that Earth and all her species are in service to humans. Privilege has been conferred on the dominant group and that dominance is maintained by our legal, cultural, religious, educational, economic, political, environmental and military institutions. It is this same assumption of dominance that created and supported slavery, that committed genocide on the indigenous people of this continent, that institutionalized the repression of women for centuries and that has also approached Earth with a power-over mentality." (Rev. Peggy Clarke, Huffington Post)

Ultimately there is a single wound: the disconnection and pain of dominance and inequality. Thus, whether we are marching for peace, for racial justice, or for reducing carbon emissions, we are marching for the same healing vision of a fair and caring world.

It's true that a single human being can't attend all the meetings of all the activist groups, so follow the calling of your heart. What is your passion?

If your passion is organizing for action on climate change, you’re working for the vision. If you feel good lobbying legislators for Planned Parenthood, you’re working for the vision. If you’re at the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday, you’re working for the vision. If you write letters for Amnesty International, you’re working for the vision. If you advocate for reforms to reduce the corruption of our democratic process, you’re working for the vision. If you march for raising the minimum wage, you’re working for the vision. Your friends who choose other activities than you do are -- if it’s part of dismantling any form oppression, replacing any form of dominance with equality, reducing violence anywhere -- also working for the vision. We don’t have to all do it in the same way.

Here at Community UU at White Plains, we’ve got 7 Social Justice Teams – and sign-up sheets are in the foyer. Economic Justice, Environmental Practices, Hunger & Homeless, LGBTQIA, Racial Justice, Refugee Resettlement, Women’s Issues. If you’re not in one, pick one and sign-up. We don’t have to all do it the same way.

In fact, we need to NOT do it all the same way. We need to diversify our efforts, think about picking lesser publicized causes. A lot of us were shook up by the Paris bombing in 2015, and it got a lot of attention. Meanwhile, other terrorist attacks of a similar magnitude in browner parts of the world got less attention. Those were real people, too.

Just work for justice, all the time.

The poet asks:

“How do we answer each other
Or the starving and tortured,
The broken and passed-over, the children
Whose cries didn’t reach us
Or came from the wrong place, wrong time
And were never loud enough?”

Just work for justice, all the time. You won’t get caught caring about today’s crisis but not yesterday’s if you were out caring about ending dominance and violence in some way every day. Each of these activities supports the others. Keep your lamp trimmed and burning, and bring your light to the areas that aren’t getting so much. Let others take their lamps to places you can’t get to. Together we can approach the vision. And anyway: What else you gonna do with your life?

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "What Do We Do Now, Dr. King?"
See also
Part 1: What Do We Do Now, Dr. King?
Part 2: MLK: Feeling Our Way

MLK: Feeling Our Way

What Do We Do Now, Dr. King? part 2

Tom Rosenbaum (CUUC member) suggested to me that we might learn something from looking at the ways that King himself discerned to which threats and goals to devote his attention. A review of King's career shows the focus shifting through the years.

Young Martin’s public life began when he was 26, in 1955, the year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, which led to the Montgomery Bus boycott.

Then in the early 1960s there were the lunch counter sit-ins and the Freedom Rides.

In 1963 April, King was arrested in Birmingham for violating a state circuit court injunction against protests. In solitary confinement, he read an advertisement taken out by white ministers that derided his efforts in Birmingham, calling his actions "unwise and untimely." Using the margins of the newspaper and toilet paper and a pencil, King wrote the "Letter from Birmingham Jail," portions of which were our responsive reading today.

Later the same year he instigated and organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which he delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech.

In 1964-1965, voting rights was the focus of Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. The 1965 Selma to Montgomery March contributed to passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1967, the war in Vietnam was a large part of Dr. King’s focus. What was the basis for this shift?

The grounding of the bus boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and marches had always been nonviolence. Nonviolence was not merely his strategy for civil rights goals. Nonviolence was itself the goal. The reason for nonviolence was to achieve civil rights, and the reason for civil rights was to achieve nonviolence. For him, the two were equally true, for discrimination is a form of violence. He cared about humanity.

(I like to imagine that had he lived to be 88 today, he’d have come to care for all animality, human and otherwise, and the unconscionable violence wreaked especially upon cows, pigs, and chickens. It could have happened: King’s son Dexter is a vegan and says he sees this as an extension of his father’s ideals.)

King’s dream was for beloved community, community without violence. He wasn’t limited to the violence of racism. His aim was nothing less that the eradication of all violence -- understanding that violence is any thought word or deed that treats a being like an object or diminishes a being’s sense of value or security, whether it includes bodily injury or not.

King had studied Gandhi, and embraced the concept of ahimsa, the principle that all living things are connected and form a unity requiring respect and kindness. To bring ahimsa into his own faith, King cast it in terms of Christian teachings on love – the Latin caritas, or the Greek agape: a spiritual love. Agape, as one theologian put it, is “an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being.” King saw ahimsa in agape, and in Jesus’ admonition to, “love your enemy,” and answer hatred with love. As King said,

“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.”

It was natural and logical, then, that Dr. King would devote energies to opposition to the Vietnam war. The United States, he said, is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. He saw violence as interconnected. A government willing to commit mass and bloody violence in Vietnam was also a government willing to countenance the breaking of people through race discrimination, or through poverty. Violence in one area breeds violence in other areas.

For not keeping his focus on civil rights, he faced criticism from close associates and political allies, including President Johnson.

By 1968, King's attention was on poverty. In April that year, King went to Memphis, where he would be shot. He went on behalf of striking sanitation workers as part of the Poor People’s Campaign. The Poor People’s Campaign, organized by King and the SCLC, focused on economic justice, not racial justice – which cost them support from those who wanted to the focus exclusively on civil rights. The Poor People’s Campaign was based on the principle that all people should have what they need to live. It brought together African-Americans, whites, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans—to alleviate poverty regardless of race.

The changing emphases of King’s career reveal a man wrestling with identifying and working to repair the most torn parts of the fabric of society, both African Americans and whites. He was feeling his way both intellectually and politically.

What do we do now, Dr. King?

If we do what he did, we feel our way. We keep our eyes and our hearts open to discern where people are most hurting, and where our action can have the widest effects.

Police reform is such a linchpin issue because what President Obama called the “simmering distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color” limits effective policing and is a key component of the oppression of whole communities.

That's a big and an important issue, but it is not the only one. There’s also the plight of immigrants and refugees, both in our country and refugees abroad. There’s health care, the aftermath of the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid and Medicare. There’s climate change. There’s reproductive justice, facing down the threats to access to abortion, including the defunding of Planned Parenthood. There’re issues of respecting and protecting LGBTQIA folk.

Dr. King found it hard to unify, or even coordinate with, disparate groups: for instance, SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, pronounced "snick") on the one hand, and Malcolm X on the other. In our time, we face challenges sustaining common cause among environmentalists, immigrant rights advocates, health care advocates, and all the others.

Next: The Common Cause

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "What Do We Do Now, Dr. King?"
See also
Part 1: What Do We Do Now, Dr. King?
Part 3: Can't Fix Everything?

What Do We Do Now, Dr. King?

What Do We Do Now, Dr. King? part 1

"Keep your lamps trimmed and burning."

Sometimes it's hard to keep shining the light of justice. There’s just so much darkness we cannot illuminate it all. No, you can’t. We can’t fix everything. No, you can’t. But WE can. You just illuminate your part. Let others illuminate other parts. Bring your small lamp. The darkness is overwhelming, but what else you gonna do with your life? Keep your lamp trimmed and burning.

Martin Luther King, Jr, was born on this day in 1929. Were he still alive, he’d be 88-years-old on Jan 15, 2017. What would he have done in the 49 years since his death in 1968? What would he be counseling us today? How would he assess the areas of greatest need, given where we are now?

And where are we now? The Justice Department report this week found that in the Chicago Police Department “excessive force was rampant, rarely challenged and chiefly aimed at African-Americans and Latinos.” Also this week, the Justice Department and the Baltimore Police Department finalized a consent decree for reform, flowing from the Justice Department’s blistering report last August of systemic racial bias in Baltimore’s policing. Two years ago, a Justice Department investigation into the Cleveland Police Department found a pattern of “unreasonable and unnecessary use of force” – “insufficient accountability mechanisms, inadequate training, ineffective policies, and inadequate community engagement.” That report led to a consent decree approved in 2015 June.

Earlier Justice Department investigations led to consent decrees in Albuquerque, in Detroit, in New Orleans, in Seattle. In all, the Justice Department under Eric Holder – continued by Loretta Lynch -- have investigated nearly two dozen police departments, usually leading to consent decrees: court overseen mandates for reform.

So far, the consent decrees haven’t done much. Last April, a Fault Lines investigation of Albuquerque, for example, found that a year and a half after that city’s consent decree was issued, “change was only scratching the surface and that the corrupt and violent culture of the police department continued unabated.”

Change was never going to come that fast. The habits are too deep, attitudes too entrenched. Still Justice Department pressure for compliance with consent decrees offered our best hope. Yet our president-elect and his pick for Attorney General are both seen as hostile to police oversight agreements.

What do we do now, Dr. King?

Starting Friday, our president will be a man whose company the Justice Department sued ― twice ― for not renting to black people. In 1992, his Hotel and Casino company in New Jersey was fined $200,000 because managers would remove African-American card dealers at the request of a certain big-spending gambler.

Well, that was a long time ago.

During the recent campaign, he was supported by white supremacists.

Maybe that doesn’t mean much.

That he refused to condemn the white supremacists who advocated for him means more.

His rhetoric, while often inconsistent, is consistent in treating racial groups as monoliths –

“treating all the members of the group ― all the individual human beings ― as essentially the same and interchangeable. Language is telling, here: Virtually every time Trump mentions a minority group, he uses the definite article the, as in ‘the Hispanics,’ ‘the Muslims’ and ‘the blacks.’" (Lydia O'Connor & Daniel Marans)

Well, maybe these linguistic tell-tales are just quirks, verbal ticks.

He encouraged the mob anger that resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five. At a 2015 November campaign rally in Alabama, he condoned the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester.

Then came the election. In the 10 days following November 8, there were nearly 900 hate incidents across the U.S.:

“vandals drew swastikas on a synagogue, schools, cars and driveways; an assailant beat a gay man while saying the ‘president says we can kill all you faggots now’; and children telling their black classmates to sit in the back of the school bus. In nearly 40 percent of the incidents, people explicitly invoked the president-elect’s name or his campaign slogans.” (O'Connor & Marans)

Is that his fault?

His campaign gave license to those hate acts, and if his supporters were misinterpreting him, he could have made clear that he regards this hate as serious, as damaging to the victims and to our social fabric, and issued a full-throated denunciation. Instead, he downplayed the incidents, and his denunciation was half-hearted.

The president-elect “has picked top advisers and cabinet officials whose careers are checkered by accusations of racially biased behavior.”

Whatever debates we may have about the advisability of most of his policy ideas, I do believe it is fair to say, our country is entering a phase where the concerns of racial justice will receive even less attention from the federal government.

What do we do now, Dr. King?

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "What Do We Do Now, Dr. King?"
See also
Part 2: MLK: Feeling Our Way
Part 3: Can't Fix Everything