Seeking A Homeland

Hoovervilles

Wednesday night my wife and I watched Cinderella Man, Ron Howard's 2005 biography of boxer James J. Braddock starring Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger. Howard will never have an reputation as an avant garde pioneer, but it was a well made and entertaining movie and I'd recommend it if you haven't seen it yet.

I don't think that anyone involved with the movie or anyone watching it in 2005 could have anticipated how resonant its themes of suffering, perseverance and solidarity in the face of economic crisis would seem in 2009. I really made that connection now, though. One of the scenes that took the troubles of the time beyond one family's struggle was Braddock's visit to Central Park's Hooverville. While I don't have a clip of that segment, the following brief video gives some idea of what Hoovervilles must have been like. (It also shows, by the way, that Bing Crosby wasn't always the sentimental, avuncular type people today think of him as. Both his attitude and his voice are a little sharp and bluesy here.)

Of course there were homeless people when Cinderella Man was made, but I don't think it was as bad then as it is now. When I'm at work and I want to go out for lunch I go to the pedestrian mall a block away. Years ago it had a lot of homeless people, but they mainly fell into two categories, the long-term homeless who seemed to have substance abuse problems and teenagers who often seemed to have skateboards. Then Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper introduced a 10 Year Master Plan to reduce homelessness, and it seemed to be working. Lately, though, as you might expect, it's been getting worse again. What was just the occasional person looking for help now feels like a gauntlet to be run. The demographics have changed, too. There seem to be a lot of adults in their prime years who are new to the streets.

Across the country tent cities have been springing up. The one that has had the most publicity in in Sacramento, as seen on Oprah and in this clip from MSNBC:

These tent cities and these panhandlers on the streets are just the visible edge of a much larger problem, too. According to a recent report (web site  summary pdf full report pdf) by the National Center on Family Homelessness that has received a lot of attention 1 in 50 children faces homelessness. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean in the streets or in a shelter. It appears to include situations like having to stay with someone else.Still, It is shameful that things have come to such a pass in a country that has been so richly blessed. They are likely to get even worse, too, before they get better.

Today's Daily Office, the Bible readings appointed for today, includes this from Psalm 76: "From the heavens you uttered judgement; the earth feared and was still when God rose up to establish judgement, to save all the oppressed of the earth," and this jeremiad from Jeremiah 5: "For scoundrels are found among my people... they have become great and rich, they have grown fat and sleek... and they do not defend the rights of the needy. Shall I not punish them for these things? says the Lord, and shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this?" This Lent, I need to focus more on what my role is in creating homelessness and what more I can do to help to end it.

Ears atingle

This past Sunday one verse in the Old Testamen lesson appointed in the liturgical calendar caught my attention. It was part of a reading aboutGod's replacement of the corrupt family of Eli with the young Samuel. The translation I have with me at the moment has this for Samuel 3:11, "The LORD said, "Soon I shall do something which will ring in the ears of all who hear it." The translation read Sunday put it a little differently, "...something that will make everyone's ears tingle."

Today my ears are really tingling.

Often a piece of music gets stuck in my brain and won't get out. Lately it usually has been one song or another from an album I picked up recently, a bootleg of Bruce playing at the Agora in Cleveland that had been broadcast on WMMS, the station I was always listening to back then. One day it would be Badlands, another day She's the One, a third Promised Land, and so on. Today, though, a different song keeps playing over and over in my head:"America, America, God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea!"

Evidence of things unseen

This morning Barack was on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. If you missed it you can watch it or read a transcript here. Those who have felt since the election that Obama is moving too far toward the center will probably not be reassured by some of the things he said today.

For one thing, people who thought Guantanamo would be closed right away are in for a disappointment. Now we're talking about some time beyond the first 100 days. It is true that among the many hapless Muslims who have done nothing worse than to have an Arabic name there may be a few genuinely dangerous people. Of those who had done nothing wrong we may have made a few into terrorists by keeping them locked up without a trial for years, too. If one of them were to be released and then were to go on to participate in another 9/11 style attack, it would be terrible. Not only would it be terrible to lose more lives that way, but the effect on the Obama presidency would be devastating and irreversible. His enemies, who will remain legion, would jump on that and never let up. So closing Guantanamo will have to be done carefully. He even is thinking about what to do with "some of the evidence against them may be tainted even though it's true." I thought tainted meant unusable, but I guess that in the real world, where struggles take place and people really die, you still have to take it into account.  Still, Obama's commitment to closing it in due course remains firm and unambiguous.

If you had hope that there might reckoning and accountability for Bush and his henchmen for their crimes (see the column I linked to in my post below for some examples), I don't think there's a lot to be expected there, either. The This Week headline for the story about this part of the interview, "Obama Leaves Door Open (a Bit) On Prosecuting Bush Officials," seems to want to say that the glass isn't quite empty. My take on what Obama said is that it's about as empty as it could be. Despite a nominal nod to the Attorney General's independence, it's hard to imagine that Eric Holder (who Obama says is sure to be confirmed) will try to prosecute the neo-con criminals when the boss says, "We have to focus on is getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."

The discomfort I admit to feeling with Obama's stand on these particular issues shouldn't be taken as a sign that my support for Obama and my elation at his election have gone away. After This Week I watched some of Meet the Press before we left for church. They showed about one second of that moment when Barack, Michelle, Malia and Sasha walked out onto the stage in Grant Park. Even now, more than two months after that great night, such a slight clip made the tears start to well up inside me again.

During the end of the campaign I was in charge of all the canvassers in my area, about two thirds of my state House district, so for the last month or so I couldn't go out and canvass myself, which I love to do. I had to stay in the office managing canvassers instead. On election night, though, for the last hour or two our field organizer sent everyone out canvassing, trying to round up every last vote we could, right up until the minute the polls closed. (Well, OK, I quit about five minutes before, but at that point I don't think I could have talked anyone into getting dressed and rushing out into a chilly night to try to get in line in time.)

I had planned my canvassing out so that at that time I was just a couple hundred yards from my house. I went in for a while, got a little to eat and talked with my wife and daughter, and then took my car back to our field office. The local Democratic party had planned a big returns watch party at a cavernous restaurant nearby, but our leadership team was congregating in our field office, and I wanted to watch the results with them, because we had become quite close over the last several months.

Before long it became clear that this was not only not going to be a death watch, as in the last two elections, but that it wasn't going to drag on into the wee hours of the morning, either. The election was going to be called quickly. I realized that besides wanting to watch it with my fellow organizers, I really wanted to watch it with my family, too. Sharing events this momentous is part of what families should do. I hurried home, packed them into the car, and went back to the office.

I should explain here that my daughter is now 13 years old. The sweet child who was always Daddy's girl has been replaced this moody, unpredictable, and often angry stranger. The kid who once in a school paper said I was her hero now seems to take the attitude, "Eeew, yuck, you're an adult. And what's worse, you're my parent! I don't want to have anything to do with you!" I accept it because I know it's pretty much inevitable and because I know it's temporary. In fact, it's a necessary part of a positive good, her maturation and separation from us to have her own life. Still, I have to admit that it hurts sometimes.

I go into that because it's the context of the picture that follows below. At the very moment that whatever channel we were watching announced that Obama was the victor, someone there in the office happened to have her camera pointed toward my daughter, my wife and me. (I trimmed some other people off.) You'll notice that my daughter has put her arm around my neck and lifted herself off the ground, swinging her feet around. That's a moment I will always, always remember.

But all that is a diversion from where I was headed, talking about this morning. At church one of the hymns we sang was "Morning Has Broken." I certainly don't want to seem like I am deifying Obama, but it still seemed to resonate with my feelings in this interim, which seems endless, between the election and the inauguration. You may know the melody from the version recorded long ago by Cat Stevens, which you can listen to here. I'll stick its lyrics in here, too, although the ones in ours hymnal are a little different.

Morning has broken /Like the first morning, /Blackbird has spoken /Like the first bird. /Praise the singing! /Praise for the morning! /Praise for them springing /Fresh from the Word! 

Sweet the rain's new fall /Sunlit from heaven, /Like the first dewfall /On the first grass. /Praise for the sweetness /Of the wet garden, /Sprung in completeness /Where His feet pass.Mine is the sunlight! /Mine is the morning. /Born of the one light /Eden saw play! /Praise with elation, /Praise ev'ry morning, /God's recreation /Of the new day!

Despite the obvious and many problems facing our country and the world, and despite knowing Obama will not solve them all, I still believe that this can be the beginning of a new day.

Resolution

Today I was looking at RJ's fascinating blog When love comes to town and found a link to a similar blog, songs for the journey, by a guy in London named Nick Coke. Both explore the meaning of popular music and relate it to a progressive, experiential, non-dogmatic form of Christianity. Nick had embedded this YouTube video of Dylan singing "Pressing On" from his album Saved. There are no specifics about where and when it was filmed, but it seems to have been somewhere in the U.S. sometime in the 1980's.

The cinematography isn't great, but the performance is. I love the way he starts out alone, and then soon the backup singers join him, but the band doesn't kick in until three minutes into the song. This may have been the last song in the set--not only because the audience is thoroughly worked up, but also  because for the last minute or more he walks away looking tired and lets the singers and band wrap it up. The way they end it is one of the many meanings of the word "resolution." They finish with "the progression of a voice part or of the harmony as a whole from a dissonance to a consonance."

The fuzziness of this video is an example of another kind of "resolution," which is "the fineness of detail (or in this case the lack of detail) that can be distinguished in an image, as on a video display terminal."

Still another kind of resolution is the meaning you may have been expecting in the context of today's date, "a resolve or determination: to make a firm resolution to do something...the act of resolving or determining upon an action or course of action." This post will eventually get around to making that kind of resolution.

The song "Pressing On" is about another meaning of this versatile word, "the mental state or quality of being resolved or resolute; firmness of purpose." As Bob sings, "Shake the dust off of your feet, don't look back/Nothing now can hold you down, nothing that you lack/Well I'm pressing on/To the higher calling of my Lord." That is the kind of resolution I need, and I think the progressive movement needs, in the lee of the great wind that swept Barack Obama into the presidency two months ago.

The temptation now--I feel it myself--is to kick back, relax, and recuperate after months of strenuous campaigning. Lots of people worked really hard to get Obama, Biden and their local candidates elected. I worked harder than most, although not by a long shot as hard as some folks I know. To lay off for too long, though, would be a huge mistake. As I found out late in 2004 and early in 2005, taking a bit of a break can feel so good you just keep on doing it. Now, 2008 is obviously different from 2004. Winning is not as dispiriting as losing, but on the other hand losing does not lead to complacency and to an attitude of, "OK, now we can let the guy we elected to take care of things take care of things." Barack has said often though that what we built last year was not really about him. It was a movement, and as long as that movement's goals are unachieved, it has to keep moving forward.

That is my New Year's resolution, then--to keep working for change. In the liturgical calendar, today is the Second Sunday after Christmas Day, and the Psalm appointed for today was Psalm 84. One verse of it goes, "Happy are the people whose strength is in you! whose hearts are set on the pilgrim way." My heart is set on its pilgrim way. It always has been, and with God's help it always will be. I stumble, I get diverted, I lose faith, I get way off track, but I somehow keep finding my way back onto it. Let me recommend it to you. That is, let me recommend your way to you. Your pilgrimage need not and probably will not be the same as mine. In fact, maybe each person's way is as unique as her or his DNA. Just keep moving on it. As Dylan said in another song, "May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung." 

Gone-zales

From Psalm 5 in today's lectionary:

You destroy those who speak lies;
   the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful.
For there is no truth in their mouths;
   their hearts are destruction;
their throats are open graves;
   they flatter with their tongues.
Make them bear their guilt, O God;
   let them fall by their own counsels;
because of their many transgressions cast them out,
   for they have rebelled against you.

Well, it's surely about time, or long past time. Our perjuring enforcer of the law, execution loving guardian of life and torture enabling  protector of human rights has decided, as they sometimes say, "to pursue other career directions." In other words, although the administration won't admit it, he became as expendable as ballast on a sinking ship, so he was tossed overboard.

I strongly suspect the timing is no coincidence, either. One of his last friends even in the GOP was Karl Rove, and when Rove bailed, to "spend more time with his family," in another I-was-fired-but-won't-say-so cliché, Alberto's days were numbered.

(Tin hat warning: conspiracy theory approaching)

This is purely speculation, but consider it briefly anyway. Suppose you were a king who had done something clearly wrong like, say, executing some of the people's attorneys without good reason, and your enemies' armies were encircling your castle. If you had two armies, one tough and strong, and one really questionable, might you not array them with the stronger one close to the castle walls, and the feckless one defending the outer perimeter? That way, the weaker one could wear the attackers down some before the real force had to face them. But then, if the strong army decided to abandon the battlefield, what would you do? You know this bunch of bumbling toadies can't stop a people committed to vengeance. Possibly you would decide to sacrifice that army, hoping your attackers would say to each other, "Well, we got both his armies. That's good enough. Let's go home and kick back a few beers." If those insurgents are smart though, they would say instead, "We've got him where we want him. Now's the time to keep pressing on with our plan."

Just a thought.

In Memoriam: Erick Hernandez

You've never heard of Erick Hernandez. He wasn't famous or rich, like Lindsay Lohan or Michael Vick. Even within the limits of local news, his story was no more than a passing blip. Although he had the courage and honor needed to do whatever he could to care for his family, even if it took him far from them, he probably wasn't a scholar. Like many a good man before him, he was a ditch-digger.

From what I've gathered so far, which is incomplete, and from what I've inferred from that, he came to the United States not long ago from Honduras. He hoped to earn enough money to support his wife and three children back home. It would be hard to say now whether he was documented or not, but that really doesn't matter. He was 26 years old when he died.

According to news reports, yesterday afternoon he was working about a block and a half from the Colorado Governor's Mansion on a sewer line, one of those essentials of modern urban life we prefer not to think about, much less see or smell, and still less to climb into. He was working in a hole twelve feet deep when he dropped his shovel. When he went to retrieve it, the sides of the hole, which didn't have the required support, collapsed and buried him. He died quickly, although not immediately. His co-workers struggled desperately to unearth him, even using a backhoe, and when they had uncovered his head he was still moving, but it was too late.

What, if anything, did he think of in those last moments? Did he think of how it ennobled him to die so that people like you and me could casually flush unpleasantness out of their lives? Not likely. Did he wonder what would happen to his little ones? Very possibly, but we'll never know.

The Bible readings we heard in church this morning were, as it happened, about work, wealth and death.

The first reading was the familiar beginning of Ecclesiastes, a meditation on the ways everything is in vain, or in the word used there, vanity. First the author reflects on the meaninglessness of wealth and pleasure and then on how the rich man's heirs will enjoy what he has accumulated. He asks, "What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? for all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest." Long ago I had a job as a dishwasher at a cheap restaurant. When I went to bed at night I could see trays of dirty flatware inside my eyelids. Maybe Hernandez dreamed at night of sewers. Again, we'll never know.

The gospel lesson was Jesus' story about the rich man who invested in larger barns to hold his riches and figured he was set for life. "But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God." As it was being read I also thought of the story of Lazarus and Dives, in which Jesus also brought out the other side of that coin, the blessedness of the poor man who suffered in life, but, in the kind of inversion characteristic of the Kingdom of God, was rewarded in death. I also thought of the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.  Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."

Erick Hernandez has inherited his small portion of the earth sooner than he hoped--or in a way, the earth has taken him. I pray that his family will be comforted.

In the meantime, though, I will continue to follow this story, as much as I can replacing my suppositions above with facts. And I will see if anything can be done to ensure that the employer who illegally and carelessly exposed him to danger compensates his family for their loss. Check back here for updates.

You may need it some day, and right now it needs you

Habeas corpus, that is.

A few days ago the lectionary's gospel for the day was one of the most fundamental passages for my understanding of what the gospel is all about, Matthew 25:31-46. It's a little too long for me to want to quote it fully here, but it's fairly widely known anyway. It places compassion and justice for the oppressed squarely at the center of the call of God's Kingdom on us. It has the Son of Man as judge accepting those who succored the hungry, sick, aliens and the imprisoned, and rejecting those who didn't give succor, explaining that "whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me."

I don't want to twist this great passage too violently to suit my needs, because it clearly has in mind direct acts of compassion--what Bush might call "feet on the ground" charity. Still, the neighbor I will never come into personal contact with is my neighbor nevertheless, and so I think I'm safe in thinking of the prisoners at Guantanamo too when I read this passage.

At least 500 men have been held for years, often on the flimsiest of pretexts and without being charged with any crime. They are thousands of miles from their families, with little access to legal counsel, and suicide has become common among them. On top of all that the Bush administration, following both their natural inclinations and the legal profundity of Alberto Nose-a-foot-and-a-half-long-by-now Gonzales, is denying them what has been for almost 800 years the last resort of free men resisting power: the right to demand that the body holding them bring them before a judge and either show reason why they should be held or release them--the writ of habeas corpus.

I understand that the challenges presented by the attacks of 9/11 and similar attacks before and since are unlike anything we have faced before and require different responses, but I believe abandoning the freedoms that make us better will in the long run be counter-productive.

Without going into too much detail on the history, last year courts said they couldn't continue to do that, so just before the elections the GOP rushed through legislation to overcome the court's objections. Now there are bills before Congress to restore the right of habeas corpus, H.R. 1416 and S. 185, The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007. (There are others, but these seem to have the widest public attention and Congressional support.)

I urge you to contact your Representative and Senators to show your support for these bills. If they co-sponsored them or have come out in support of them, thank them. If they are non-committal, and especially if they serve on the committees where the bills are now languishing, urge them to stand up for freedom and tell them you will be watching what they do.

Here are several resources on this issue from among the many on the internet. To keep from driveling on too long, I'll just summarize them briefly.
The Brennan Center for Justice's excellent white paper, “Ten Things You Should Know About Habeas Corpus.”
A good op-ed piece by Nat Hentoff on Guantanamo and the restrictions on habeas corpus.
Amnesty International USA and the ACLU on the situation.
One lively blog among the many that have weighed in on this.
The members of the House Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, which has the House version of the bill now.
The Library of Congress THOMAS officially tracks the progress of H.R. 1416 and S. 185 and has lists of co-sponsors.
There's more information on washingtonwatch.com for the House and Senate versions.

Finally, there are widgets on govtrack.us that are supposed to update one's web site continually with news of the bills' progress toward becoming law. Come back here often to see how these vital measures are faring.

"...oppression and fraud"

From Psalm 55, in today's lectionary:

Confuse, O Lord, confound their speech; for I see violence and strife in the city.
Day and night they go around it on its walls,
and iniquity and trouble are within it; ruin is in its midst;
oppression and fraud do not depart from its market-place...
My companion laid hands on a friend and violated a covenant with me
with speech smoother than butter, but with a heart set on war;
with words that were softer than oil, but in fact were drawn swords."

Oppression and fraud are unlikely to have been eliminated in this or any other city, but today they suffered at least a momentary setback. Joe Nacchio is going to prison.

This is significant news all over , but probably nowhere more than in Denver, where Qwest has its headquarters, as did the company it bought out, former Baby Bell US West. The story's importance here can be seen by the coverage given to it both in the Post  and in the Rocky.

Many people around here lost their retirement nest eggs and they blame Nacchio. He lied when he said the company was in good shape and he quietly sold his stock, making millions of dollars in profit. The people who believed him, though, people who were operators, linemen, clerical workers and so on, were ruined when their stock went from a peak of about $60 per share down to about $1 per share.

Nacchio can be "smoother than butter" when he wants to be, but he has been confounded. The judge in the case cited his "overarching  greed" in denying him bail while he appeals. His lawyers may pull a trick out of their sleeves, but as things stand now he should report in about a month to begin serving a sentence of six years. We'll see what happens.

God: "Bush & Cheney will be impeached."

Whew, it's been longer than I realized since I last posted here. It's been a rough couple of weeks here.

Pat Robertson's latest prediction is ancient history now, a week and a half later, but I'll comment on it now because I was reminded of it again when I read these words from yesterday's Daily Office, one of the most striking of many great passages in Isaiah:

"Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
   my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
   he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
   or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
   and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
   he will faithfully bring forth justice."

This quiet, gentle servanthood hardly sounds like the kind of role Robertson hopes for. No, he wants to stand on his TV pulpit and shout as loud as he can to draw as much attention to himself as he can, and he'll say any damn fool thing he thinks will achieve that for him. Fortunately, though, this may have backfired on him. It's predictable of course that he would be lampooned in the godless Northwest, but he seems to be running into opposition even in his core market, the Deep South. Maybe he just agrees with that profound theologian Paula Abdul that "any publicity is good publicity."

Most people, when they want to amuse themselves with lurid fantasies, turn to sex, or maybe money. Not Pat: his wet dreams run to mass murder. Well, if he can indulge himself in public, so can I, so here goes: Tell everyone you know--God told me that Bush and Cheney will be impeached. Remember, you heard it here first. And maybe I should set up a Paypal account, so you can send me money the way people send it to Pat.

Cords of falsehood

In today's reading from Isaiah 5:

    "Ah, you who drag iniquity along with cords of falsehood,
       who drag sin along as with cart-ropes"

I had to laugh despite myself when Shakespeare's Sister called Colorado a "Hotbed of Gay Evangelical Pastor Sex." It certainly seems that way lately.

According to today's Denver Post Ted Haggard isn't the only pastor of a mega church who led a secret life: "In a tearful videotaped message Sunday to his congregation, the senior pastor of a thriving evangelical megachurch in south metro Denver confessed to sexual relations with other men and announced he had voluntarily resigned his pulpit." There are some significant differences though between Haggard and the newest scandal, Paul Barnes.

For one thing, there is no reason so far to think that Barnes was flirting with meth while he flirted with men. (Westword, the local free weekly entertainment rag, has a good article, Of Meth and Men, about the  "party and play" scene locally and what it can do to some.) For another, there's no indication so far that he used prostitutes. Barnes also comes closer to acknowledging his being gay as part of his nature when he admits to having struggled with it since he was 5 years old--something Haggard wouldn't do.

More important, for me, was the fact that unlike Haggard, Barnes doesn't seem to have turned his need to repress a part of himself into a campaign to oppress others. He wasn't cozying up to Bush or helping to organize to deny gay and lesbian couples the minimal dignity of civil unions. His ministry has been markedly apolitical, a nice change these days.

Haggard and Barnes share one telling point in common, however. Neither decided on his own to come out of the closet. Both 'fessed up when they had been or were about to be outed. They had bound themselves for so long with such powerful cords of falsehood, deceiving their churches, their wives, and everyone but their Maker that they could never have owned up on their own to who they are.

I suspect that in their most private moments they now have a sense of real relief. It must have been exhausting and terrifying, decades of pulling behind them the iniquity of their hypocrisy like a sledge loaded with boulders while trying to look light-footed and fleet.

May they now find peace.