Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042813/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-10-17_Cultivating_Relationship.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042747/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/10-17-21-audio.mp3

"Right Thinking, Right Feeling and Right Relations" (October 17, 2021) Worship Service

Twins and co-authors of a recent book "Burnout", Emily and Amelia Nagoski talk about patterns of thinking and dealing with stress that lead to burnout. However, they also go deeper, to patterns of thinking, feeling and being in relationships that undermine our own and one another's health, joy and, I'd say, derail us on the journey to Beloved Community. In our work to hold ourselves accountable for the proposed 8th Principle of Unitarian Universalism, they offer some very tangible ways we can untangle from problematic habits of heart and mind! 

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Mari Ramos Magaloni, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, Organist; UUSF Choir; Mark Sumner, Music Director; Laurel Sprigg, soprano; Wm. García Ganz, Pianist; Jon Silk, Drummer

Eric Shackelford, Camera; Shulee Ong, Camera; Jonathan Silk, Communications Director; Joe Chapot, Live Chat Moderator; Thomas Brown, Sexton; Athena Papadakos, Flowers

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042708/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20211017VRSSermon.mp3

We all know that endings and beginnings are a part of life, and yet change often leaves us with feelings of grief and loss. Join me in exploring the complexity of emotions that comes with times of transition and change.

Our prior guest speaker, Jenny McCready was married in August and returns to our pulpit today with a new last name, Jenny Amstutz. Jenny is currently serving as the minister of a small church in Littleton, Colorado, Columbine Unitarian Universalist Church, where she serves part time. Her part time schedule allows her to return to our pulpit. Jenny is the mother of five, ages 21 to 8 years and lives in Lakewood, Colorado, with her new husband Jason and a menagerie of pets. She is grateful to continue to be a visiting presence in our church and looks forward to a continued relationship with UCLA.

SERVICE NOTES

WELCOME!

New to our church community? Sign our guestbook and let us know if you’d like to get more connected.
For more information on our church community, visit us on the web at http://www.uulosalamos.org or call at 505-662-2346. 
Connect with us on Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/uulosalamos
If you would like to submit a joy or sorrow to be read during next week’s service, we invite you to write it in our Virtual Prayer Book.
Have questions? While our minister, the Rev. John Cullinan, is on sabbatical, contact our office administrator at office@uulosalamos.org.

MUSIC CREDITS

• “It Is Well with My Soul” by Philip P. Bliss, arranged by Mark Hayes. (Yelena Mealy, piano). Permission to stream the arrangement in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-730948. All rights reserved.
• “For All That Is Our Life,” words: Bruce Findlow, music: Patrick L. Rickey. Piano and singing by Jess Huetteman. Video used by permission of Jess Huetteman, song used by permission of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA).  
• “Find a Stillness,” words: Carol G. Seaburg, music: Transylvania hymn tune, harm. Larry Phillips.  (Nylea Butler-Moore, piano).  Used by permission of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA).  
• “Open the Window” by Elise Witt, inspired by the Georgia Sea Islands spiritual “Heist the Window, Noah.” (Tina DeYoe & Nylea Butler-Moore, vocals; Eric Schaller, cajon.) Permission to stream ASCAP song #150066363 in this service obtained from CHRISTIAN COPYRIGHT SOLUTIONS with license #10770.
• “Landslide” by Stevie Nicks.  (Tina De Yoe, vocals & Nylea Butler-Moore, piano). Permission to stream BMI song #420196809 in this service obtained from CHRISTIAN COPYRIGHT SOLUTIONS with license #10770.
• “My Favorite Things” (from The Sound of Music) by Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein. (Tina DeYoe, vocals & Nylea Butler-Moore, piano).  Permission to stream ASCAP song #430114253 in this service obtained from CHRISTIAN COPYRIGHT SOLUTIONS with license #10770.
• “The Way,” text: unknown author, music: Nylea L. Butler-Moore. (UU Virtual Singers with Larry Rybarcyk, acoustic guitar & Nylea Butler-Moore, piano; Nylea Butler-Moore, Music Director; Rick Bolton, AV Engineer.) Used by permission.

Permission to stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-730948. All rights reserved.
Permission to stream music in this service obtained from CHRISTIAN COPYRIGHT SOLUTIONS with license #10770.

OTHER NOTES

“The Mystery of Life” by Robert G. Ingersoll.  Use under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License.
*permission granted through the UUA

OFFERTORY

Our Share the Plate partner for October is the Roadrunner Food Bank. 
100% of all offered this month will be given to our partner.
We are now using Givelify.com to process the weekly offering: https://giv.li/5jtcps

SERVICE PARTICIPANTS

• Jenny Amstutz, Guest Speaker 
• Sue Watts, Worship Associate
• Nylea Butler-Moore, Director of Music
• Tina DeYoe, Director of Lifespan Religious Education & Vocalist
• Yelena Mealy, piano
• Eric Schaller, cajon
• UU Virtual Singers: Alissa Grissom, Kelly Shea, Nylea Butler-Moore, Rebecca Howard, Anne Marsh, Kathy Gursky, Mike Begnaud, & Skip Dunn, with Larry Rybarcyk, acoustic guitar  
• Renae Mitchell, Mike Begnaud, and Rick Bolton,  AV techs

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042621/https://www.uulosalamos.org/ucla/pulpit/2021/20211017-Letting_Go.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042537/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/211017.mp3

“May we call forth from each other vitality and tenacity.
May love rest in us. May justice live through us.
May we have the touch to call others back
to life and love, justice and peace.
May we sing back their songs, and add the alleluias.”
-Paul Beedle

How and where does love rest in you today?

Please join us on Sunday (17 October 2021) at 11:00 AM “The Enemy of the Good” by Rev. Barbara Jarrell.

Our service will be livestreamed on Facebook Live here.

Watch for our weekly email announcements for info on the next in-person worship service and other opportunities to gather in smaller groups in person.  You can sign up for these announcements using this link.

Our October 2021 give-away-the-plate recipient is Together Louisiana.

We will have a  virtual coffee hour after the service on Zoom.

While we are remaining physically distant, we want to know how you are doing, what you need, and what you are interested in.  You can let us know using these online surveys.

And you can contribute to All Souls using this online resource.

I woke to a crash of thunder about 7 a.m. this morning, with a driving rain pounding against the wall and window near the head of my bed. What a beautiful sound to start the day! The rain only lasted about an hour, and then the skies were gray, but the air was lit by leaves of gold and orange encircling our back yard. We’ve had no frost yet, and the October transformations are unfolding with beauty and grace.  

I’ve been surprised by how low in the sky the sun travels at this time of year—even at noon it is lurking behind the tree canopy shading the back half of the yard. You’d think after all these years I would be used to it by now. I’ve also been surprised by new raspberries ripening fat and delicious. Usually our “everbearing” raspberries don’t ripen in the fall—there is not enough sun and warmth in their spot to bring them to completion—but perhaps taking out the (invasive) Norway maples near the fence helped them to get more morning light. They taste better than any of the summer raspberries.

October is also a month for ancestors, leading up to Samhain on the 31^st. I have continued to search for more information about Marie-Madeleine, my Innu great-great-great grandmother. I’ve been lucky that I emailed two people who seemed to have some resources, and they both replied and sent information. Magic! One told me that, from looking at his records, Marie Madeleine Manitukueu could not be my ancestor, because she married someone else in 1815, and then that person remarried in 1825 after her death. So that was incredibly helpful. Most of the work will be eliminating the women who cannot be my ancestor.

Then he also sent me a list of 17 “Marie Madeleines” or “Madeleines” recorded births from 1790 to 1818 at the Postes du Roi, from the databases he had access to, and agreed with me that it seemed most likely that she would be born closer to 1800, rather than 1789, since her last child (Marie Sylvie) was born in 1846. (The 1789 date is based on her death record stating that she was about 60 years of age at her death in 1849.)

I believe that going by child-bearing years is the best guide. A late baby in her 40s is more possible than in her 50s. The child before the one in 1846 was born several years earlier in 1839 (Sophie)—so it seems also more likely that 1846 was a late baby. Her prior children were about 3 years apart. Her first documented child was born around 1828, but it is possible that she was the mother of earlier-born children of her spouse Peter McLeod.  (Most sources say that he had an earlier Montagnais woman spouse, but there is less agreement about which children had which mother.) To go by a childbearing age of about 16 to 50, it seems like her own birth would be between 1796 and 1812.

This leaves 11 women on the chart—stretching slightly to include Marie Madeleine Katshisheiskuet (born 11/11/1795). So, the next thing I did was explore GénéalogieQuebec.com, to see if I could do research on each of the women. But I ran into a problem immediately. The records of the Postes du roi included on that site seem to be missing many of these vital years, not yet indexed, and none were available in direct images. I could not seem to find access to the databases to which my email correspondent had access. To complicate things a bit more, the parents listed for Marie Madeleine Katshisheiskuet in GénéologieQuebec are different from my earlier resource, and I think the only way to clear that up would be to look at an original record.

So, I feel stuck again—there is such a distance between Quebec and the United States—so much knowledge does not cross the border. I would like nothing better than to pore over these old records looking for the lives of these 11 women, seeing if I could find other marriage and death records that would steer me away from some, and toward my own ancestors. I don’t know why I think I can succeed where prior genealogists have not found a link. But maybe they didn’t have the same motivation. I’ve sent an email to the GénéologieQuebec site asking about the Postes du roi records. I also think I found some at the Catholic Archdiocese of Quebec, but not published or indexed.

It’s like the detective stories I’ve been reading—so many mysteries, so many clues. Why do I write about it here? I’m putting some magic out into the universe, hoping that some kind of thunder might open the cloudy skies between me and the past, between me and the place my ancestors are from. I’ve learned a lot in the process. It has been my experience that when I reach out to my ancestors, they reach back—more so when I have actually traveled to Quebec, but since that is not possible, I hope they will reach across the border.

For those of us who grew up in North America, the Monarch was the most recognizable of all butterflies.  Large and brilliantly marked with a rich orange/gold and black pattern they could be seen by the millions twice a year in their migrations between Canada and a single Mexican forest region.  Their metamorphosis from a milkweed munching caterpillarspinning their cocoons to emergenceas a regal flyer was a staple of grade school science curricula.  But all of that is under a dire threat as populations collapse with the rapid alterations in their critical Mexican nesting grounds due to global climate change and threat to their essential milkweed due to dramatic climate change all along their long migration routes. 

Nearly ten years ago a report on the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) explained:

Monarch butterflies appear headed for a perhaps unprecedented population crash, according to scientists and monarch watchers who have been keeping tabs on the species in their main summer home in Eastern and Central North America.

There had been hope that on their journey north from their overwintering zone in Mexico, the insect’s numbers would build through the generations, but there’s no indication that happened. Only a small number of monarchs did make it to Canada this summer to propagate the generation that has now begun its southern migration to Mexico, and early indications are that the past year's record lows will be followed by even lower numbers this fall. Elizabeth Howard, the director and founder of Journey North, a citizen-scientist effort that tracks the migrations of monarchs and other species, says one indicator for the robustness of the monarchs is the number of roosts they form in late August and September, something Journey North monitors throughout the migration periods. “During migration, monarchs form overnight roosts in places like Point Pelee or Long Point [in southern Ontario], where the monarchs are congregating before crossing the Great Lakes, places where people generally see huge overnight clusters of monarchs gathering.” Howard told CBC News that at this time in 2011, Journey North had already received 55 reports of roosts, followed by just 25 in 2012. This year, only 17 reports of roosts came in. “This is really a proxy for peak migration because this is where people see really large numbers of monarchs and we’re just not getting the reports, it’s looking pretty bad,” she says.

The monarch butterflies that are now flying south are the fourth generation of those that left the few hectares in central Mexico where millions of monarchs spend the winter.

Several years ago, while I was working as a school custodian in Cary, Illinois, the visit of a lone Monarch on its southward migration, a pioneer, inspired a poemthat was included in my 2004 Skinner House Books collection We Build Temples in the Heart and was also anthologized by Edward Searl in his compilation In Praise of Animals A Treasury of Poems, Quotations, and Readings.

Some of the science is fuzzy—a single insect does not make the whole epic journey, it takes four generations—but the sense of awe and wonder remains. 

And to think we may be the last generation to experience it…

Migrations

Later they will come,

            the legions of Canada

            on the edge of cutting cold,

            backs scraping stratus slate,

            arrayed in military majesty,

            dressed in ranks and counting cadence,

            squadron after squadron, an air armada,

            single minded in their migratory mission.

But now,

            when September sun lingers and

            lengthened shadows hint ferocity to come,

            the first glints of gold and black flit

            with seaming aimlessness,

            pushed here and there by the faintest zephyr,

            the pioneers of a nation,

            descended from Alberta prairies

            and Minnesota Lakes.

One will linger

            briefly on my shoulder

            if I am blessed, then be off again.

Then, if she is lucky

            she will pause to rest with

            the millions along the bend of the Rio Grande

            before finding a winter’s respite of death

            amid deep Mexican forests.

And it will turn again next spring—

egg to larva,

            larva to silken slumber

                        pupa to Monarch

                                    Monarch to migration.

            Oh ye proud Canada,

                        mute your boastful blare—

the mighty bow before true courage.

—Patrick Murfin

Eastern chipmunk (Tamias striatus) (picture source)

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation 

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

—o0o—

The Czech philosopher and writer Erazim Kohák (1933–2020) asks us to imagine this little scene (“The Embers and the Stars”, University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 35):

A small group of us are gathered together in a wood on the edge of a clearing when a chipmunk suddenly darts across the open space before us. One of our number quickly identifies the creature and labels it for us: “a chipmunk” they say out loud. Another, knowing about such things, then explains the chipmunk’s behaviour to us in biological and physiological terms. Within a few minutes, a consensus has formed and it is easy to feel that somehow, and entirely unproblematically, we now know and understand what it is that we have just seen and experienced. 

Kohák uses this story to point out that “[w]hen two or three are gathered together, they seldom have the patience of letting be, of listening and seeing. All too eager to speak, they constitute in their consensus, a conventional image which they interpose between themselves and the living world around them.” And he concludes that, “[d]eafened by consensus, we lack the humility to watch the chipmunk, busy at its tasks, to let him present himself.” 

Kohák’s basic point here is that “the consensus of a crowd can constitute a conventional world far too readily, far too soon.”

Kohák realised that to see the chipmunk as it presents itself — or, indeed, to see anything else in this world as it presents itself — we need to find ways to suspend this consensus making by bracketing it off in some fashion. An obvious and important way to do this bracketing is actively to seek moments of solitude away from the crowd. 

But it is also true that we need to find ways of bracketing off an all too easy and swift consensus making whilst we are gathered together in small groups. The question is then, how, together, might we let things present themselves? How might we better collectively develop the patience of letting be, of listening and seeing?

One way is, of course, regularly and silently to spend time sitting alone together in a time of mindful meditation such as the one we share each week, becoming aware, paying attention and being mindful of what is coming and going just as it presents itself to us. 

Any community that can genuinely and regularly do this is likely to be one which has a reasonable chance of reaching the kind of gentle, ever-developing and ever-revisable consensus that can heal rather than harm and bless rather than curse this extraordinary world we share with all other things — not chipmunks only or, as the poet Gary Snyder observes, “plum blossoms and clouds, or lecturers and [honoured teachers],” but also all manner of other unexpected things including “chisels, bent nails, wheelbarrows, and squeaky doors” (“Blue Mountains Walking”, in “The Gary Snyder Reader”, Counterpoint, Washington, 1999, p. 206). All of these things, when they are truly allowed to present themselves to us, are, astonishingly, always-already teaching us how the world is and our place in it. 

Our weekly adult religious education class is taking a break this Sunday (17 October 2021).

We will resume our Sunday morning classes next Sunday (24 October 2021) at 9:00 AM.

At that time, the group will review and reevaluate the anti-racism work we have done so far and determine how we want to move forward.

And — for those who wanted them — copies of the book Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad should be after 25 October 2021.  Watch for information on how and when you can pick one up.

Families — we hear you and realize how done you are with Zoom.

We will continue to watch the local COVID numbers and we feel encouraged by the cooling weather and the possibility of comfortable outdoor activities.

We hope to have news about some outdoor activities for children and youth soon.

Keep the faith.

Please join us next Wednesday (20 October 2021) at 12 noon for our weekly Zoom lunch.  Our host for this week’s lunch will be Susan Yellott.

Bring your lunch and meet up with your All Souls friends, have lunch, and just catch up.

Please join us on Saturday (16 October 2021) at 10:30 AM for our weekly meditation group with Larry Androes.

This is a sitting Buddhist meditation including a brief introduction to mindfulness meditation, 20 minutes of sitting, and followed by a weekly teaching.

The group is free and open to all.

For more information, contact Larry via email or phone using (318) 272-0014.

“Hold me accountable so I may bring honor to you,
amplify love and compassion to those around me,
and make the way easier for those yet to come.
I ask this because you are mine
and I am yours.
You live in me
and I live in you.
Amen.”
-Tandi Rogers

What values and actions do you need to be held accountable to and for?

A Q&A with Ruth Behar

Author photo: Gabriel Frye-Behar

Award-winning anthropologist Ruth Behar’s groundbreaking book, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart, turns twenty-five this year! Eloquently interweaving ethnography and memoir, Behar offers a new theory and practice for humanistic anthropology—an anthropology that is lived and written in a personal voice. She did so with the hope that it would lead us toward greater depth of understanding and feeling, not only in contemporary anthropology, but in all acts of witnessing. (Spoiler alert: yes, it has!) For Hispanic-Latinx Heritage Month, Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with her to chat about the book’s anniversary.

Christian Coleman: The Vulnerable Observer was pioneering when it first came out in 1996 because it proposed the concept of vulnerability in social research. Why was this concept so novel at the time?

Ruth Behar: So much has changed in the last twenty-five years that sometimes we forget how different were the paradigms we worked with before. Anthropologists were taught that they had to approach their research from a distance. This meant silencing the story of your entanglement with a specific set of people, in a specific place, in a specific moment in time, and how knowledge gets produced in this messy, haunting, unrepeatable process. By concealing your presence, your feelings of vulnerability as an observer, and how the social world you observe connects with your own life, you would supposedly be “unobtrusive” and “neutral” and “more objective.” But that stance asked that you deny any self-positioning regarding gender, race, class, nationality, and other markers of identity, that you somehow be an invisible observer.

I felt extremely uncomfortable attempting to pursue research from this perspective. I questioned it from the start. In The Vulnerable Observer, I gave voice to the alienation I had felt about the detachment I was supposed to maintain when carrying out social research and writing about my experience. But that detached approach to social research was so ingrained that, when the book came out and I spoke of being vulnerable, some academic readers were taken aback. The word “vulnerable” wasn’t in wide circulation. Scholars weren’t supposed to be emotionally invested in social research, and if you were, that was not something you’d ever write about.

Over time, a paradigm shift took place, and now anthropologists, social researchers, and writers embrace their vulnerability and describe their self-positioning and speak openly of the emotional consequences of their work. The Vulnerable Observer has been part of this sea change. Since the publication of the book, the usage of the word “vulnerable” has gone through a boom in the English language. In anthropology alone, its usage has increased by 400%. The Vulnerable Observer played a role in spurring the word—and the concept—into our lexicon.

CC: Where did the idea of bringing vulnerability to anthropology come from? How did you find yourself developing this concept for your work?

RB: In the late 1980s, early 1990s, several scholars of diverse backgrounds challenged the norm of writing in third person, unwilling to accept self-erasure, and they wrote their scholarship in their unique personal voices. This was a dramatic shift. Much of the academic world rejected it, dismissing the idea of writing personally as “self-indulgent.” In anthropology, it was taboo, because the discipline prides itself on turning its gaze on the lives of those being observed, not on the observer; and we study and advocate for people in the plural, as collectives, communities, cultures. To call attention to yourself was not just distracting but shameful. Arguments arose as to whether work that incorporated the story of the anthropologist into the story of those being studied was “really” anthropology. I was so vexed about this that I ended up writing an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1994 that was called precisely, “Dare We Say ‘I’?”

The shift in the academy was a response to the late 1960s rallying cry: “The personal is political.” It was such an obvious assertion and yet so radical. Feminist scholars and African American and Latinx poets and writers began to tell stories about their lives in first-person voices that had never been told before, raising awareness about sexism and misogyny, racism, and inequality. Autobiographical writing was embraced across the disciplines, in medicine, law, and art. In anthropology in this era, there were calls to decolonize the discipline and do away with the idea of the “other” as the focus of our studies. This led to self-reflexive work that connected the personal with the ethnographic, and eventually, to the notion of autoethnography. And then the “literary turn” took place, which drew attention to the fact that anthropologists are writers constructing narratives of their journeys and so are always implicated in how they represent the people they are observing.

Allowing the personal voice into scholarship, into anthropology, was crucial for letting vulnerability come through the gates, too. Once you are writing as “I,” you can address your own vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of those who’ve let you into their lives. For me, writing as “I” made me want to know what it means to observe others and write about them. Who am “I” to have the right to do that? The concept of vulnerability grew out of my need to try to answer that fraught question.

Through experiences carrying out research in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba, I came to realize that the psychic state of the observer, the reality of what was going on in my life at the moment of observation, had consequences for what I could and couldn’t see, what I could and couldn’t understand. And this knowledge needed to be worked through in the writing, because it is in the retrospective act of writing that you process the multidimensional and sensorial experience of doing anthropological research. To do that research, you enter into relationships with people who are kind enough to let you into their lives. In the course of getting to know about their dreams and struggles, you come to care about them greatly. You form deep attachments to both the people and the places where you’ve lived, often for many years, returning over and over. In the end, as I’ve said in the book somewhere, what we’re enacting is our shared mortality. That’s the deep core of the concept of vulnerability.

CC: Have you seen the effect the book has had on readers over the course of twenty-five years? Do you have any favorite stories about people who have connected with it or use and recommend it as a reference?

RB: It’s been humbling to learn that The Vulnerable Observer is a widely-cited book, with thousands of citations. The book is described as a “classic,” as a book that sparked “an epiphany.” The Vulnerable Observer has influenced scholars not just in anthropology and sociology (where it is included in many qualitative research guides, handbooks, scholarly reflections, and ethnographies), but also across many disciplines well-beyond anthropology, ranging from psychology to education to health to rhetoric (and even to management studies). Readers say that the book poignantly put a label on something anthropologists and other scholars had been grappling with but had not coalesced around a fitting term for the practice of thinking through and laying bare one’s subjectivity and personal connection to research. Even academic readers who are critical describe the book as “the right way” to do vulnerable work, incorporating only those personal disclosures that add to the ethnographic account and analysis, rather than distract from it. I’ve been struck by how many scholars and writers borrow the book’s title for their own work, writing about “Trying to be a Vulnerable Observer,” or “Reflections of a Vulnerable Observer” or “When Collecting Data Can Break Your Heart.”

Beyond the academy, the book has engaged journalists, writers, and general readers. I was delighted to see The Vulnerable Observer included in a list of “The Best Books That Capture the Complexities of Writing About the Real World.” Travel writer Tim Hannigan, the author of that list, described my work as offering “a recognition of the way your own personal and cultural baggage colours your way of seeing, and of the way that you, the writer, are always part of the story.” A reviewer on Goodreads noted, “This book is introspective, passionate, and raw. Ruth Behar crafts a masterpiece of authenticity in this autoethnography.”

Throughout the years, I’ve received many kind letters and emails praising the book. I’ve met students and colleagues all over the world who’ve been influenced and inspired by the book. That has been so moving, and totally unexpected. I admit it’s a little scary when someone tells me they decided to go into anthropology after reading The Vulnerable Observer. That’s actually happened several times, and it’s a lot of responsibility to bear. I mean, what if they’re not happy once they’re pursuing a career in anthropology? But it’s consoling to know that people bring their own desires and needs to their reading of the book and draw the energy they’re seeking from it. Just two days ago, I received an email from a young professor who’s teaching a seminar on ethnography, and they said, “Your work and words often serve as a reminder for me to feed my soul. . . Every time I re-read or read anew your work, it reminds me of who I want to be when I ‘grow up’ someday. Thanks for what YOU gave us—both my students and me.” 

CC: And lastly, what surprised you about The Vulnerable Observer that you didn’t foresee or anticipate when it was first published?

RB: I didn’t expect that The Vulnerable Observer would end up on many course syllabi. I’ve learned that numerous students read it each semester. Or at least they’re assigned to read it. I hope they actually read it! Evidently, they are often asked to write about it. You can even purchase a student essay about the book online.

About Ruth Behar 

Ruth Behar, ethnographer, essayist, poet, and filmmaker, is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellows Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Behar is the author of several books, including The Vulnerable Observer. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Follow her on Twitter at @ruthbehar and visit her website.

I’ve just returned home from the People vs. Fossil Fuels Week of Action in Washington, D.C., deeply inspired by the bold direct actions taken by Indigenous leaders, multifaith clergy and lay leaders (including 40 UUs), youth, and hundreds of people who are putting everything on the line for climate justice. We engaged in civil disobedience and witness at the White House, at the Army Corps of Engineers, at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Interior, and Congress.  Now, we need to keep up the pressure and build our power as Congress works to pass the Build Back Better legislation and the US sends representatives to the UN COP26 Conference on Climate Change next month. 

This coming Sunday and Monday, Oct. 17-18, Unitarian Universalists are joining the global Faiths 4 Climate Justice mobilization hosted by GreenFaith and co-sponsored by the UUA, UU Ministry for Earth and many other faith partners.

Take Action With US

1. See if there is a local event you can participate in: check out the action map
   

2. Join Side With Love’s virtual, national action rally “UUs 4 Climate Justice” on October 18th at 7pm ET / 6 CT / 5 MT / 4pm PT
   Join this online #Faiths4ClimateJustice offering for any UUs with no local or online action accessible to them. UUs around the country will gather to celebrate today's actions around the world, witness, and take action ourselves. Featuring Rev. Amy Brooks Paradise of GreenFaith, Rev. Ranwa Hammamy of Side with Love, and more. RSVP for this national climate action!

   
   

3. Amplify the voices of Indigenous peoples in the struggle for sovereignty and climate justice. Between now and November 30th, host a community viewing and discussion of The Condor & The Eagle, a powerful and award-winning documentary that offers a glimpse into a developing spiritual renaissance as the film's protagonists learn from each other’s long legacy of resistance to colonialism and its extractive economy. Click here for details.

It’s incredibly important to put pressure on President Biden right now, as we approach the COP 26 UN climate talks. Together, we can Side With Love and Create Climate Justice by showing up for this movement moment in solidarity with frontline leaders who have spent the past week risking arrest in Washington, D.C. to call on President Biden to reject false solutions and commit to a rapid and just transition away from an extractive economy. Will you Side with Love for climate justice?

In faith and solidarity, 

Aly Tharp,

UU Ministry for Earth Co-Director of Programs

and

Partnerships and  the Side With Love Organizing Strategy Team

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042510/https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5449513ee4b025f84fddfa72/1634331242641-YIYSSU6OCBRCTDVQ9AVW/bit.lyUUs4ClimateJustice-square-graphic.png?format=1500w

All right everybody let’s all gather ‘roundand sing a rousing happy birthdayto Abe Lincoln’s Beard.  On October 15, 1860 an 11 year old girl wrote the famous letter that got Lincoln to put away his razor making this the anniversary of the most famous whiskers since Jesus.

Grace Bedell was the daughter of a supporter from Westfield, a western New York village on the shores of Lake Erie now best known as the home of the Welch’s Grape empire.  Grace wasn’t too impressed by a picture of the candidate that her father brought home.  She wrote:

Dear Sir

My father has just home from the fair and brought home your picture and Mr. Hamlin’s. I am a little girl only 11 years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you won’t think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are. Have you any little girls about as large as I am if so give them my love and tell her to write to me if you cannot answer this letter. I have got 4 brother's and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s to vote for you and then you would be President. My father is going to vote for you and if I was a man I would vote for you too but I will try to get every one to vote for you that I can I think that rail fence around your picture makes it look very pretty I have got a little baby sister she is nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be. When you direct your letter direct to Grace Bedell Westfield Chatauque County New York

I must not write any more answer this letter right off Good bye

Grace Bedell

When the presidential candidate received the letter he was in a quandary.  In the whole history of the Republic there had never been a President with a beard.  Martin Van Buren and his impressive muttonchops had come close, but then he had been run out of Washington after one term for being a dandy and a fop.  And if there is one thing a self-proclaimed Man of the Peoplecannot afford to be it is a fop.  And he had to remember that it was the very first log cabin candidate, William Henry Harrison—who had not really been born in a log cabin at all—that sent the Red Fox of Kinderhook packing back to Albany.

On the other hand, facial hair was becoming all the rage back East, and not just the sign of an ignorant backwoodsmanwho couldn’t afford arazor. 

But if he grew one, what sort should it be?  A stylish Imperial like Louis Napoleon and his old client the President of the Illinois Central Railroad George McClellan? Neck whiskers like Horace Greeley?  The full patriarchal bush a la John Brown? No, none of those would do.  And Lincoln wasn’t even sure he could raise a decent beard at all.  Still, the girl had a point.  He wrote her back:

My dear little Miss

Your very agreeable letter of the 15th is received—I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughters—I have three sons—one seventeen, one nine, and one seven years of age—They, with their mother, constitute my whole family—As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?

Your very sincere well wisher

A. Lincoln

Despite the non-committal nature of the letter, Lincoln decided to give growing whiskers a try.  By the time he left Springfield for his train trip to Washington, he was sprouting a semi-respectable stubble.

The train made a whistle stop in Westfield.  As was his custom the President-elect stepped to the rear platform to address the crowd.  He asked if Grace Bedell was present and called her forward.  He gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek and told the crowd that she was the inspiration for his new look.

Lincoln and his beard were photographed many times over the next few years.  He settled on a middle-ground kind of beard—a strip of hair that hugged his jaw and chin but still required the attention of a razor to his upper lip, cheeks, and neck.  It aged with him.  Sometimes it was a little longer, sometimes he let the fuzz on his cheeks fill in.  At least once he shaved a little between his sideburns and chin. 

Grace was right, by the way.  He did look better with it. 

“God of many names,
you who have searched what is hidden within us
and who knows us to our core:
Our intentions, our wounds, our aspirations and our dreams.
You who is familiar with all our ways,
even before a word is on our tongue
you know it completely.
Where can we go from your Spirit?”
-Tamara Lebak

What are the intentions you need to be made known today? How can a practice of prayer help you set those intentions for yourself?

Fall nights are getting cooler and rain is on the way.  Compassion for Campers, the programthat provides camping gear and equipment to the homeless, will have what is needed by those who are sleeping outdoors including warm clothing at the Community Empower Shower event this Friday, October 15 at Willow Crystal Lake, 100 S. Main Street from 10 amto 2 pm.  The following distribution will be held there on Friday, November 5 during the same hours.

Compassion for Campers also has gear available at Warp Corps, Benton Streetin Woodstock, for daily walk-up availability. 

Community Empower Shower provides wide-ranging services for the homeless and those who are facing housing crisis and are held on the first and third Fridays of each month.  

This week and on every third Friday Algonquin Township if providing shuttle bus service to the event from the Fox River Grove Metra Station at 9:30 am and the Crystal Lake Jewel/Osco at 9:45. The shuttle will leave Willow Crystal Lake for the pick-up spots a 1:30 pm.

This week showers will be offered inside the building.

Organizers have included even more groups, agencies, and services for the homeless population.  The Empowerment Shower is a collaborative effort of many organizations and agencies including the Crystal Lake Food Bank, Consumer Credit Counseling, Family Health Partnership Clinic, Home of the Sparrow, Live 4 LALI, McHenry County Housing Authority, Pioneer Center, Prairie State Legal Services, Salvation Army, St. Vincent DePaul Society, Veterans Path to Hope, Willow Crystal Lake, and Warp Corps.

Services offered at no cost include:

Showers

Laundry Facilities

Camping Supplies including Tent, Stove, Sleeping Bags

    Toiletries/Personal Care items

Clothing

Onsite Meal

Food

Haircuts

Transportation

Assistance obtaining IDs, birth certificates, Social Security cards

Assistance with SSI/SSDI (Disability)

Assistance with Medical coverage, SNAP, TANF

Medical Access—Doctor care, Covid-19 vaccine

Debt Management Services/Advocacy

Shelter and Housing Referrals and Linkages

Domestic Violence support

Veteran’s Services

Substance Use/Harm Reduction Tools and Support

Mental Health, Spiritual, and Social Support Referrals

Contributions to support Compassion for Campers are urgently needed to continue to purchase supplies for both of the locations sending a check made out to the Tree of Life UU Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road, McHenry, IL 60050 with Compassion for Campers on the memo line. The donations are placed in a dedicated fundand not used for any other purpose.  Tree of Life also donates all the administrative expenses of the program so 100% of all donations go directlyto client assistance.

For more information contact Compassion for Campers coordinator Patrick Murfin at 815 814-5645 or email pmurfin@sbcglobal.net.

Sunday, October 17, 10:30 a.m.
When Memory Fails: Lessons of Love
An Online Service with Rev. Alice Anacheka-Nasemann

When a loved one has dementia, family members and friends navigate a changing relationship that requires new skills. Join us this Sunday, Oct. 17, for a Zoom worship service led by Rev. Alice, exploring the   [ … ]

The post Sunday, October 17 ~ When Memory Fails: Lessons of Love ~ 10:30 a.m. appeared first on Unitarian Church of Marlborough and Hudson.

https://www.shorelineareanews.com/2021/10/duwamish-plaque-dedication-at-shoreline.html

This past Sunday my congregation dedicated a plaque. Set on our grounds as a reminder that the Duwamish, Chief Seattle’s people, are still here and that the area of Shoreline and Eliot Bay were not given the land they were promised in the treaty of 1855, nor in later agreements. In my sermon I talked about their dispute with the Muckleshoots and the US Federal government. I also encouraged people to visit the Duwamish Long house on Marginal Way, get to know the Duwamish and the Muckleshoots, pay Duwamish Real Rent, and encourage our legislators to help heal old wounds.

On October 13, 1792 the cornerstone of the President’s Palace was laid in the virtual wilderness of the Federal District designated as the future Capitol of the infant United States.  President George Washington was in the temporarycapitol of Philadelphia and did not dignify the occasion, as he had when the cornerstone of the Capitol Building was laid by presidingin his Apron for a full Masonic ceremony.  Indeed there was no ceremony at all.

With the cornerstone in place the workforce of mostly slaves hired from their Virginia masters, Black freemen from the Georgetown area, and a handful of immigrant artisans began digging the foundations.  FewAmerican citizens with full rights were ever employed on the project which took eight years to complete at a cost of $232,372—$ 2.8 million in 2007 dollars.  To save money, common brick was used to line the exterior walls which were then faced by sandstone blocks.  The stone masonry was largely the work of Scottish craftsmen employed by the architect, Irishman James Hoban.

Although some interior workand details remained unfinished, the house was deemed habitable when the Capitol was transferred to Washington City.  President John Adams and his dismayed wife Abigail officially moved in on November 1, 1800, just days before the election that would send him packing the next year and leave the building to his archrival, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson, an amateur architect of some accomplishment, may have had mixed feeling about the building himself.  He had anonymously submitted one of nine designs competing for final selection for the building.  He was disappointed when Washington selected Hoban’s design.

Of course, that competition would not have been possible without the delicate political maneuvering that located the future capitol city on the banks of the Potomac instead of the bustling commercial centers of New Yorkor Philadelphia.

 It was also a tribute to the enormous prestige and influence of the first President.  The authority to establish a federal capital was provided in Article I,Section Eight of the Constitution, which designated a “District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States.”

In what later became known as the Compromise of1790, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Jefferson with the benign approval of Washington, came to an agreement that the federal government would assume war debtcarried by the states, on the condition that the new national capital would be in the South.  The precise location, personally selectedby Washington, was designated in the Residence Act on July 19, 1790.

Washington commissioned French military engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant to lay out the future city.  He envisioned the spokes-of-a-wheel plan with broad ceremonial avenues and the Capitol Building and President’s house on opposite ends of one such grand boulevard. 

At the site selected by the President, L’Enfant sketched in the footprint of a truly grand palace on the European scale for the President.  His building would have been five times larger than the one that was eventually built.  Those plans quickly proved to be impractical—both too expensiveand too difficult to acquire the necessary amount of building stone.  It was also politically unacceptable to those who demanded that the new government be housed in edifices of sensible republican simplicity.

As Secretary of State, Jefferson advertised the architectural competition which he entered anonymously.  The final selection was to be made by the official commission overseeing construction of public buildings in the new capital, but in fact it was Washington who personally selected the design submitted by Hoban.

Hoban was one of the few—some say the only—trained architects in the county.  He had emigrated from Ireland after the Revolution and first established a practice in Philadelphia.  But after moving to North Carolina, he began to get commissions for important public buildings, like the Charleston County Courthouse which Washington saw and admired on his presidential tourof the Southern states.  He personally invited Hoban to submit a design to the contest.

For inspiration, Hoban drew on the Georgian country houses of the Anglo-Irish aristocracyand particularly on Leinster House, the Dublin seat of the Duke of Leinster and destined to become the home of the Irish Parliament in the 20th Century.  Despite winning the competition, Washington demanded substantial changes from his architect.  He ordered the elevation changed from three to two floors, but that the dimensions of the building be expanded by 30% and include a large ceremonial space for balls and public receptions—the commodious East Room. Hoban’s surviving drawings reflect these changes—the originals submitted for the competition having been lost.

Upon completion the porous sandstone was sealed with a whitewash consisting of a mixture of lime, rice glue, casein, and lead.  This belies the popular story that the building was only painted white to cover the scorch and smoke damage from the burning of Washington by the British during the War of 1812.  Informal references to the building as the White House have been found as early as 1811.  It is possible that the original whitewash was fading or dirtiedby the time the British put a torch to the building.  At any rate, the fresh white paintapplied during the restoration undoubtedly contributed to the informal use of the name.

Jefferson rejected the name Presidential Palace preferred by Adams as too aristocratic.  Under his administration it was commonly simply called the President’s House and for the next century the house was officially named the Executive Mansion.  Theodore Roosevelt changed the official designation to the White House in 1901.

The building has undergone many modifications over the years, starting with the colonnades that Jefferson had constructed out from each side of the house to screen the stables, greenhouses, and domestic outbuildings—including slave quarters—from view from Pennsylvania Avenue.  The southportico was constructed in 1824 during the James Monroeadministration and the north porticowas built six years later.  Both followed plans originally drawn by Hoban. 

In 1881 Chester Arthur ordered a significant remodel of the building’s interior.  Theodore Roosevelt added the West Wing, which his successor William Howard Taft expanded, and the Oval Office was added.  Herbert Hoover added a second floor to the West Wing following a fire there and added extensive basement office space for an expanding staff. Franklin Roosevelt moved the Oval Office to its present location by the Rose Garden.  Harry Truman added the still controversial balcony to the South Portico.

During Truman’s administration the building was found in danger of collapse from neglect.  The President moved to near-by Blair House for two years as the interior was gutted and reconstructed.  In 1961 First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy began her interior restoration of the building to its French Empireinspired appearance during the later Madison and Monroe years.

The White House now routinely undergoes modifications with the coming of each administration.  President Barack Obama ordered the instillation of solar panelsto replace those put up by Jimmy Carterand taken down by Ronald Regan.  His wife Michelle built extensive vegetable gardenson the grounds which had not been used for agricultural purposes since sheep were kept browsing the lawn.  Of course, among the former Resident first fits of spite and revenge was to remove the solar panels and obliterate the gardens.  He also trashed up the interior with his beloved gaudy gold bling wherever he could, and Melania famously maimed the Rose Garden.

Joe Biden has so far been too busy undoing the Cheeto’s disastrous policies and trying to get his ambitious agenda through Congress to spend much time re-doing the official offices and dwellings beyond hangingand displaying art and making the private residence rooms more modestand comfortable.

There is continual work expanding or improving the vast underground complex that now extends below much of the White House lawn and houses offices, communications centers,and, reportedly, a hardened bunkercapable of withstanding a nuclear attack. 

But the core of the building remains as Hoban and Washington imagined it more than two hundred years ago. 

Erika A. Hewitt

Continue reading "The Question"

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Over the past year, I’ve talked to quite a few UU professionals who are thinking about changing jobs. Mind you, this happens every year. If you have a professional job in a small nonprofit, the typical path for job advancement is to find a job at another, slightly larger, nonprofit. This is obviously true for part-time directors of religious education — the quickest path for a part-time professional to advance in their career is to find a similar position elsewhere that’s full-time. There’s also the classic career path for full-time senior ministers — stay in a small congregation for about seven years (until you get your first sabbatical), then move to a larger congregation that pays more.

The result of all this is a constant movement of professional employees — directors of religious education and parish ministers — among UU congregations. This kind of movement is actually a good thing, because it helps spread best practices and new ideas from one UU congregation to another. It also provides an obvious upward career path, which means we all can continue to attract the best talent into our congregations.

Problem is, there are too many UU congregations who do a lousy job of hiring new employees. I’m going to give three examples of lousy hiring practices by UU congregations. I’m going to change details to protect the innocent — and by “protect the innocent,” I don’t mean I’m going to protect the UU congregations who have lousy hiring practices — no, I mean I’m going to protect the UU professionals who provided some of these examples for me.

Requiring more than full-time work

Several months ago, a colleague showed me a job posting where a UU congregation in the northeastern U.S. posted a job that required eight hours a day, six days a week.

The first problem with this is that it’s stupid. Back in June, 2019, Shainaz Firfiray, Associate Professor of Organisation and Human Resource Management at the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, England, wrote a piece for The Conversation titled “Long hours at the office could be killing you,” in which she cites growing evidence that a 35 hour work week is most efficient, whereas longer work weeks can cause stress, anxiety, and depression. That’s even more true in the middle of the pandemic, where I’m seeing a huge increase in stress, anxiety, and depression among UU professionals.

I know we have congregational polity, so no one can stop your congregation from being stupid and demanding six day work weeks of your professionals. But if you do that, please do not complain to me or express surprise when your professionals grow stressed, anxious, and depressed — and then become less efficient and effectual — and even in the worst case scenario engage get driven into unethical or unprofessional behavior. Do not complain or express surprise, and also, please, accept full responsibility for being stupid.

The second problem with demanding a six day work week is that it’s unethical. Why? Well, first of all, if you claim to be paying a salary that conforms to UUA guidelines for this six-day-a-week job, you’re lying. The UUA guidelines are for full-time work, so if you’re demanding more than full-time hours, then you’re not paying the salary required by guidelines. I’ll walk you through this. Let’s take the example of a parish minister in a small congregation with fewer than 150 members in Geo Index 3. For full-time work, the UUA guidelines call for a range of $54,100 to $76,500. If you’re demanding a six-day work week, then on an hourly basis you should pay time-and-a-half for every hour over 40 hours. That gives a salary range of $70,330 to $99, 450. So if you advertise a salary range of $54,100 to $76,500, require a six-day workweek, and claim to be meeting UUA guidelines, you are in effect lying.

There’s another reason why this is unethical. It’s treating your professional employee like a wage slave. Actually, a congregation that demands a six day work week of its professionals is treating them worse than wage slaves. I spent twelve years punching a time clock, and when you punch a time clock your employer tends to be very respectful of your extra hours. But an unscrupulous employer will ask for more and more hours from a more-than-full-time salaried employee, because demanding more doesn’t cost them a cent.

Not publicly advertising the salary

Recently, BBC News reported on “Why companies don’t post salaries in job adverts.” UU congregations appear to be part of this world-wide trend. Over the past year, UU colleagues have pointed out to me several instances of UU congregations posting jobs that give no indication of what the salary is.

In addition, there now seems to be a trend of posting jobs with the vague claim that the congregation “pays UUA guidelines.” Except that when you get to the interview, it turns out that the salary that’s offered is the lowest possible salary the congregation can get away with. A year ago, I was shown one job posting for a religious educator that claimed to “pay UUA guidelines.” Now for religious educators, there are five different salary levels based on your level of experience and training. For example, the salary ranges for a full-time religious educator position in a mid-sized II (250-349 members) congregation in Geo Index 3 range from $55,100 to $65,200 for a Credentialed Masters Level religious educator, down to a range from $34,700 to $37,900 for an inexperienced, untrained Religious Education Coordinator. When my colleague got to the interview, this congregation that claimed to “pay UUA guidelines” for a Director of Religious Education was actually only offering $34,700, the lowest possible salary for a Religious Education Coordinator. That’s dishonest.

It’s not only dishonest, it’s stupid. As the BBC reports, “knowing the expected salary upfront lets a candidate understand whether a job will be financially viable for them.” So the hiring committee is actually wasting its own time reviewing applications and conducting interviews with people who are going to turn them down when they hear what the salary is. Furthermore, it’s also stupid because, according to the BBC, “organisations that are more transparent about their salaries can win over the best candidates and attract diverse applicants.” BBC quotes one expert as saying, “if the salary banding isn’t there, I think there can be a tendency for some of the better talent on the market to not apply.” In short, lack of salary transparency means you’ll attract a lower-quality and less diverse talent pool.

Finally, it’s not only dishonest and stupid, it’s also illegal in some states. As of 2019, Colorado requires employers to disclose pay ranges in all job listings. Similar legislation is pending in other states. The very title of the Colorado law makes it clear that this is a justice issue — “Equal Pay for Equal Work At” –and the law is designed to eliminate the gender pay gap, and all other pay disparities. So to avoid potential fines, and to hep further justice in the work world, you might as well get in the habit of posting the salary range in your job listings.

Cheating on benefits

Some UU congregations post jobs where they claim to compensate at UUA salary guidelines, but then they don’t offer the full benefits package called for under UUA guidelines. So technically, they’re not lying — the congregation is in fact paying the salary called for under UUA guidelines. But the total compensation package does not meet UUA guidelines. That’s dishonest. It’s the old bait-and-switch game.

Actually, sometimes it goes beyond dishonest into stupid. A colleague showed me one job posting where the congregation claimed to pay at UUA salary guidelines. Of course the actual salary wasn’t listed. But they did list the benefits. And the benefits package wasn’t even close to the UUA recommendations. I guess they assumed that applicants were going to be either desperate enough not to care, or ignorant enough not to look at the UUA guidelines. It’s stupid when you go out of your way to try and attract applicants who are desperate and/or ignorant. It’s also stupid to assume applicants are going to be desperate, when in actuality there’s a nationwide labor shortage.

Lessons to be learned

First lesson to be learned: There’s a labor shortage right now. If UU congregations want to attract the best candidates, especially if they want to attract more diverse candidates, they need to offer reasonable hours, they need to be transparent in their job postings, and they need to offer a decent benefits package.

Second lesson to be learned: If the congregation’s budget won’t pay for all the staff they want, trying to squeeze more work out of your staffers for less pay is not the way to go. You’ll get lower quality work, and pissed-off staffers. Either raise more money, or reduce your expectations of what you can get out of staff.

Third lesson to be learned: Financially, it’s gotten to be a harsh world for small nonprofits. We all know that staff cuts are going to be the norm for most congregations for the foreseeable future. We all know that the way to attract the best talent in this harsh world is to be fair and transparent. And I’m predicting that the congregations that attract the best talent, the most diverse talent, are going to be the congregations that survive — and even thrive — in the face of today’s harsh financial realities.

By Philip Warburg

Solar roof on Elnora Thompson's home. Photo credit: Resonant Energy

The Better Buildings Act, now making its way through the Massachusetts legislature, is a monumental step toward curbing fossil fuel use by larger commercial and public buildings. Yet even as we focus on these major carbon polluters, we cannot lose sight of the need to bring clean energy solutions to residential communities, particularly those that have been unable to tap the solar energy that shines on their rooftops.

In recent years, more than 100,000 solar arrays have been installed on Massachusetts homes and businesses, but the Commonwealth’s lower-income communities have experienced little of that growth. In some of those communities, local activists are teaming up with enlightened entrepreneurs to close the solar power gap.

When Boston-based Resonant Energy was looking for low-income homeowners to join its Solar Access Program, it’s no surprise that Elnora Thompson stepped up. For decades, she has dedicated herself to strengthening community ties and healing the environment in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, a few blocks from Codman Square. First, she spearheaded community gardening; then she turned to solar power. 

Shortly after moving to her current home in 1990, Thompson learned about a makeshift community garden where she could plant some vegetables. “There were ten guys here at the time, and I was the only woman,” she recalls as we sit in the morning shade beneath a pergola surrounded by tight rows of beans, greens, sunflowers, and staked tomato plants. “They appointed me the coordinator, so I have been doing it ever since.”

About a decade ago, when a condo complex was proposed for the garden site, Thompson was on the front lines rallying opposition to the project. “We got Codman Square Health Center, ABCD [Action Plan for Boston Community Development], all the grocery stores, and everybody with a nutritional link to come on board with us.” After a multi-year struggle, the community gardeners won title to the property from the City of Boston for a dollar and registered the Nightingale Community Garden as a nonprofit organization. Today, the garden has 134 plots and yields 25,000 pounds of fresh produce annually.

Elnora Thompson in Nightingale Community Garden. Photo credit: Philip Warburg

Thompson recalls her first encounter with Resonant Energy a few years ago. “A young lady showed up at my house, and I was in my front yard working. She said, ‘We have this program,’ and she started explaining it to me. I said, ‘I run a community meeting over at Codman Square Library and we’re meeting tonight. Why don’t you come over and present?’”

At the meeting, Resonant Energy’s field representative described the company’s offering. In exchange for leasing out roof space to Resonant for a solar array, homeowners would receive twenty percent of the sun-generated power free of charge. The estimated savings, deducted from their monthly electricity bills, would amount to roughly $500 per year, and after ten years, the homeowners would have the option to buy the solar arrays outright at a deeply discounted price.

Nine people expressed initial interest, but progress was slow. Thompson worked hard at reining in her neighbors’ impatience with the many months it took to line up financing for their installations and a contractor to install the solar arrays. After multiple neighborhood meetings and working sessions with Resonant staff around her kitchen table, Thompson and five of her Dorchester neighbors now have solar power on their property. Her own photovoltaic (PV) array was activated on August 24.

One of the barriers to low-income solar access is the cost of buying and installing a rooftop PV array, averaging more than $15,000 in Massachusetts. Federal and state investment tax credits on renewable energy—a real boon to solar buyers with sufficient taxable income—are of little use to low-income households. A low FICO credit score can pose other obstacles: it may bar homeowners of modest means from taking out a loan for the purchase of a PV array, prevent them from leasing solar equipment, and dim their prospects of signing a power purchase agreement that would let them buy electricity from a company that has installed its own solar panels on their property. Resonant’s Solar Access Program surmounts all those hurdles, offering solar power at no upfront cost and without any ongoing financial obligations.

Resonant Energy, as a certified B Corporation, is legally bound to conduct business in a socially and environmentally responsible way. The company’s mission, as co-founder and co-CEO Ben Underwood describes it, is “to fundamentally change how the profits of the solar industry are distributed and whom they benefit.” Resonant, a worker-owned company, has installed four megawatts of solar power on individual homes, multi-family affordable housing, and houses of worship across Massachusetts, plus a few in New York State. That’s more than the electricity needed for 650 average American homes.

Financing for Elnora Thompson’s roof and several other Resonant Energy projects comes from Sunwealth, a Cambridge-based investment firm whose mission aligns with Resonant’s goal of advancing solar access and inclusion. Jess Brooks, chief development officer at Sunwealth, describes the challenge her firm addresses: “On the investor’s side, how do you connect all the people who care about addressing climate change, particularly care about building strong and more vibrant regional solar economics, want to be invested in local solar projects supporting local businesses, and care about a more equitable clean energy future?” 

In expanding the reach of solar power to households and communities that mainstream lenders steer clear of, Brooks emphasizes that Sunwealth operates within existing capital markets. “Sunwealth has intentionally chosen to develop in a way where we are delivering returns to investors. We are not requiring a grant subsidy to do the work.” In some older homes, though, antiquated wiring and aging roofs have to be replaced before solar can be safely installed. Ben Underwood says that Resonant has raised extra funds from philanthropic sources to cover those expenses.

Sunwealth’s CEO Jon Abe acknowledges that, while many of the installations it finances serve low-income households, it’s often cheaper to install solar systems in suburban and rural areas than in crowded cities with older buildings and electric distribution networks that strain under the added load of solar power. That’s part of what makes Sunwealth’s collaboration with Resonant Energy so impressive. Neither firm is charting the most effortless path to a clean energy future; both are dedicated to balancing profits and environmental gains with a commitment to leveling the solar power playing field for underserved communities.

Rev. Mariama White-Hammond, the City of Boston’s chief environmental officer, gave the keynote last month at a backyard celebration of Resonant Energy’s first half-decade. “I’m glad to be here, where a few crazy people said, ‘We’re going to try something different, we’re going to put ourselves out there,’” she said. “I hope it will make all of us walk away from here asking, ‘What is the next courageous, community-driven, creative solution that we are going to go for?’ Because time is running out and the status quo certainly isn’t working.”

About the Author 

Philip Warburg is a Senior Fellow at Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy.

For those of us of a certain vintage, the image of the evil dictator of Communist Russia, an ugly little man who resembled a pig, pounding his shoe on a table at the United Nations confirmed our worst fearsthat the possibility of a nuclear World War III was in the hands of a crude mad man.  And that’s exactly what we were supposed to think.

According to most of the almanacs I consult regularly in preparation of these blog posts, it was October 12 1960 when Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Unionthrew that famous temper tantrum.

But it turns out that it may have been September 23 or 29, or October 13 during the Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York.  It may have come in protest to a speech by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan or remarks by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong.  He was visibly upset by statements of both men.

He may have banged his shoe at the podium…or at his seat in the Soviet delegation…or perhaps not at all.

And the old man was not really a dictator, as in the single,unquestioned authority of the nation in the way of Hitler, Stalin, or Third World generalissimos.

How could we have gotten it so wrong?

The trouble is, there is no documentation of the event in the official records of the United Nations.  In the daily press it was not mentioned in reports on any of the possible dates.  No footage could be found in the archives of NBC and CBC, both of which covered the General Assembly regularly and often broadcast important speeches live.  Nor has any authentic photograph of the episode been found—more on that later. 

Fuzzy accounts of the event have been pieced together from memories and memoirs, many of which don’t agree.

In retrospect, it is astonishingthat the leader of one of the most powerful nations on Earth came to the major city of his chief rival to sit for hours daily over a span of weeks for the meeting of the Security Council.  And he wasn’t the only one—Macmillan was only one of the topWestern leaders who did the same, as did a parade of presidents, prime ministers, kings, and despots from lesser nations.  If Dwight Eisenhower elected only to attend briefly to make his annual speechand to consult with world leaders in private meetings, the United States was represented at the top level by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as well as the Cabinet level Ambassador to the world body.  It shows how important the UN was viewed in those distant days.

Most historians now discount the possibility that the shoe came off in September.  He did take to the podium, pounding his fists, in angry denunciation of Macmillan’s speech that day.  Later an AP photo of that diatribe would be altered by someone, and a shoe inserted into Khrushchev’s fist.  It was released and widely circulated by the mediawithin weeks of the alleged event and not questioned at the time.  Who made the alteration and how did get to the media?  No one seems to know, but it has all the earmarks of a classic intelligence service disinformation operation.

The consensusnow is that it was Sumulong’s speech on October 12 that was the trigger—if the event happened at all.  The Philippine delegate rose in support of an anti-colonial resolution that had the supportof the Soviets and their allies.  The delegate spoke as a representative of a nation with a colonial past which had achieved its independence.  Of course, the Philippines, while independent, were known as a staunch ally of their former colonial master, the United States.  Although the resolution was tailored to the remaining colonial holdings of the Westernpowers, Sumulong strayed from the topic at hand to offer a slap at the Soviet Union:

 …It is our view that the declaration proposed by the Soviet Union should cover the inalienable right to independence not only of the peoples and territories which yet remain under the rule of Western colonial Powers, but also of the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights and which have been swallowed up, so to speak, by the Soviet Union.

An enraged Khrushchev was recognizedon a point of order and rushed the podium. He shoved the Philippine diplomat aside and launched an extended diatribe calling Sumulong a “jerk, a stooge, and a lackey…a toady of American imperialism” and demanding that he be ruled out of order.  Assembly President Frederick Boland of Ireland did caution the Sumulong to “avoid wandering out into an argument which is certain to provoke further interventions.”  But Sumulong was permitted to continue his speechand Khrushchev returned to his seat in the Soviet delegation.

At least one person remembersthe Soviet premier as using his shoe at the rostrum in this confrontation.

But most agree that it happened after he sat back down.  As the Filipino continued to speak, Khrushchev pounded both fists angrily on his desk, joined obediently by other members of the Soviet delegation and Eastern Bloc nations.  In fact, he pounded so hard that his watchstopped or flew off his wrist—not speaking well of qualityof Soviet consumer goods.  According to a memoir by Khrushchev’s daughter Nina, confirmedby interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev who sat next to him, he looked down and saw his shoe, which he had removed for some reason earlier and spontaneously picked it up and began pounding the table.  He never, as some reports had it, removed the shoe from his foot, a virtual impossibility in the cramped spaceof the desk and given his girth.

Decorum at the session soon broke down and it was gaveled to adjournment by President Boland, who was being abused and booed from the Soviet bloc seats.

However, other accounts do not remember or mention the shoe at all.

To make matters even more confusing in his own memoirs Khrushchev remembered a shoe pounding incident but placed it in an entirely different context—a protest to remarks by a diplomat from Franco’s Spain.  A later published edition, however, contained a footnote saying that the incident was misremembered.

That United Nations trip is also remembered for Khrushchev’s own addressto the world body in which he famously said of the United States, “We will bury you.”  That was played in the U.S. press as a threatof nuclear annihilation.  In fact, translators and linguists are unanimous that he had a different, less threatening meaning.  He was quoting a well-known Russian proverb that means “we will survive you and see you in your grave.”  It was a prediction of the triumph of Communism over capitalism as inevitable, but not a threat of war.

No matter what happened, Americans were soon convinced that Khrushchev was an arch-villain and dictator.  In fact, although he had consolidated considerable power in the Party, Khrushchev was never able to rule alone.  He was answerable to the Presidium of the Party and to the larger Polit Bureau, each of which included powerful rivals who limited his freedom ofaction.

Moreover, in the Soviet sense, Khrushchev was a liberal and reformer.  He had presided over de-Stalinization of the Party.  He had also loosened economic regulations, liberalized the still restricted freedom of writers and intellectualsto express themselves, and broke with the most aggressive military ambitions of hard liners.  Western intelligence agencies undoubtedly knew all of this.

In fact, four years later Khrushchev was deposed by the hardliners led by Leonid Brezhnev.

But to keep up public supportfor continued high defense spending and the proclaimed policy of aggressive containment of Communism, it was necessary to paint the Soviet leaders in the same stark terms as the U.S.’s late enemies in World War II.

All of this should be kept well in mind as one after another leaders of smalland weak nations are portrayed to the American people as, inevitably, Hitlers.

While Harjo's series is a hit across the country and beyond, here at home in Oklahoma, Native Americans are experiencing a deep connection to the series. Many, including myself, have been watching Harjo’s career and feel pride to see his creativity and authentic, indigenous storytelling be recognized by the world.

The post OK’s Indigenous Filmmaker brings Authentic Stories to the Screen appeared first on BeyondBelief.

Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn now lives in the Bay Area, where he attends the Lighthouse Church in San Francisco, and plays in the worship band. According to a recent news article — about how he recently recorded four songs that will benefit the church’s homeless ministries — being a Christian in the U.S. may require apology:

“While he doesn’t have ‘any hesitation’ identifying as a Christian, [Cockburn] is starting to wonder if that’s such a good thing to say in public in the U.S. these days. If someone asks if he’s a Christian, he still says, ‘Yes, I’m a Christian, but I got vaccinated.'”

Corruption and cronyism can undermine political stability and legitimacy as surely as violence can, albeit more insidiously.

– The Washington Post Editorial Board
“The Pandora Papers gave us rare transparency: Is there hope for more?“
(10-8-2021)

This week’s featured post is “What to Make of the Pandora Papers?“

This week everybody was talking about Congress

Still no reconciliation infrastructure bill, but at least we won’t pointlessly wreck the world economy by hitting the debt ceiling, at least not until December.

I know I keep repeating this, but it needs saying: There is no reason to have a debt ceiling. Other countries don’t. The time to worry about the debt is during the regular budget process, when Congress is appropriating money and setting tax rates, not when the country is borrowing to cover money already committed. In practice, the debt ceiling functions as a self-destruct button that irresponsible legislators can threaten to push.

Mitch McConnell is facing criticism in his caucus for backing down on pushing the self-destruct button, and is pledging to be more irresponsible when it comes up again in December.

It continues to be hard to tell where the reconciliation-bill negotiations are, or to predict where (or when) they will wind up. I’m having trouble even finding a good article about where things stand. We’ll know when we know.

and the Trump coup

The Senate Judiciary Committee issued a 400-page report outlining what we know about Trump’s subversion of the Justice Department in service to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The story suffers from the problems of any slowly evolving narrative: We sort of knew all that already, but we didn’t know it in this detail or with this degree of certainty.

For example, stories that the NYT or WaPo published based on anonymous sources are repeated here, but based on testimony under oath. That’s actually new, but it doesn’t feel new.

The Republican minority’s defense of Trump is basically that he didn’t succeed this time. When DoJ officials threatened to resign en masse if he installed Jeffrey Clark as attorney general so he could push the Big Lie, for example, Trump backed down. So no harm, no foul.

Josh Marshall makes an analogy:

You’re in the bank, alarm goes off, cops surround the bank: then you say, okay, I’m not feeling it. I’m calling this off.

A number of Trump’s associates are defying subpoenas from the House January 6 Committee. Trump himself is urging this defiance, and justifying it based on a completely bogus interpretation of executive privilege.

Executive privilege belongs to the office of the presidency, not to the individual who holds that office. And it is exercised by the current president, not the one whose past actions are being investigated. Often presidents will protect past administrations, particularly when the information sought continues to have security implications. But Biden is not going to help Trump cover up his attempt to steal the election from Biden.

This is a point Trump has missed all along: He always treated his power as personal power, and not as the power of his office.

and Facebook

Former Facebook insider Frances Haugen testified to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection Tuesday, following an appearance on 60 Minutes last week.

Her basic message is that Facebook’s profit motive conflicts with the public good — which is pretty much the definition of when regulation is necessary. In general, Facebook benefits by promoting engagement, and that usually means taking advantage of weaknesses. If you’re obsessed with something, Facebook gives you more of it. If something angers you to the point that you just have to respond, Facebook benefits.

That tendency is most obviously destructive and wrong when it comes to minors — teen girls, say. Haugen told 60 Minutes:

What’s super tragic, is Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed, and it actually makes them use the app more

Bad as Facebook (and its subsidiary Instagram) are, I hope they don’t become scapegoats for an entire industry that responds to the same market dynamics. As Shoshana Zuboff described in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, all the social-media companies have the same model: Provide a free service, learn things about people by watching them use the service, and then use that knowledge to manipulate their behavior.

It’s not that Facebook is uniquely evil. But this is a setting where the market rewards evil. Facebook is the current market leader, but the next market leader would be just as bad.

and the Texas abortion law

Now it’s blocked, and now it isn’t, as federal court rulings ping-ponged back and forth this week.

The state law, SB 8, which effectively eliminates abortions after six weeks of pregnancy by allowing private citizens to sue people (other than the pregnant woman herself) who are involved in an abortion after the presence of electrical activity that presages a fetal heartbeat after a heart eventually develops, took effect September 1 after the Supreme Court refused to block it.

The federal Justice Department filed suit against Texas on September 9. Wednesday, a federal judge granted DoJ’s request for an injunction to block enforcement of the law, denouncing the State of Texas for contriving an “unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme” to deprive citizens of their “right under the Constitution to choose to obtain an abortion prior to fetal viability”.

Friday, a federal appeals court put a temporary stay on that injunction, pending its consideration of a more permanent ruling.

Even if the injunction is eventually upheld, abortions in Texas may still be limited by the slippery nature of SB 8. The injunction prevented Texas courts from processing lawsuits filed under SB 8, but can’t eliminate abortion providers’ liability if the law is eventually upheld, which could take years to determine. (SB 8 allows lawsuits to be filed up to four years after the abortion.)

I continue to wish that a blue state would concoct some similar civil-lawsuit scheme to ban gun sales — not in order to ban gun sales, but to see how fast the partisan Supreme Court would act to defend a constitutional right that Republican voters care about.

and the pandemic

Average new cases per day in the US have gone back below 100K, down from 175K in mid-September. Deaths have declined less sharply, from over 2000 per day to around 1750. But we’re still well above the mid-June lows, when new cases fell to around 12K per day, with daily deaths in the 200s.

In general, regional differences are evening out, with a few high-risk areas in Alaska, Appalachia, and counties along the northern border.

I’ll make a wild guess and predict that cases and deaths will continue to drop at least until Thanksgiving.

Merck has filed for FDA emergency use authorization of its new anti-Covid pill.

Right-wing politician and commentator Allen West, who is challenging Gov. Greg Abbott in the Republican primary, took hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin rather than get vaccinated. He’s going into the hospital with low oxygen levels after catching Covid.

Chris Hayes won’t let up on the Fox News hosts who challenge every vaccine mandate except the one that actually applies to them at Fox News. I think he’s enjoying himself.

and you also might be interested in …

Climate change destroyed 14% of the world’s coral reefs between 2009 and 2018. The root problem is that the increased carbon in the atmosphere gets absorbed into the ocean, making it more acidic.

September’s jobs report was positive, but still fell well short of economists’ expectations as the economy added 194K jobs rather than the predicted 500K. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.8%, indicating that the weakness was due more to people staying out of the job market than to a lack of jobs for them to find.

The theory that extended unemployment benefits were keeping people from looking for jobs — and so they would flood back into the market when those benefits ended in early September — failed, just as it failed when most red states cut benefits inJuly.

“Many people had Sept. 1 marked on their calendars as the day when things would go back to normal — when they would return to their offices, their kids would return to school and they’d head back to their favorite bars. But instead, the recovery sputtered,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist with hiring site ZipRecruiter.

As has been true all along, the economic problem is the pandemic itself (which surged in September, but now is receding again) not government responses to it. Workers (particularly women) are reluctant to go back to high-risk, low-pay, public-facing jobs, or to return their unvaccinated small children to group daycare centers (which are having trouble staffing up anyway). And as far as “favorite bars”, I’m still only going to restaurants with outdoor seating. Apparently it’s not just me:

the recent surge in covid cases, which is slowly abating, spooked many diners who earlier this summer had embraced going to restaurants in record levels. Restaurant attendance has been inching down in August and September, according to the reservation app Open Table.

The overall number of restaurants has fallen 13% since the spring of 2020 and restaurant employment is about a million jobs short of pre-pandemic levels.

Speaking of childcare, and the portion of Biden’s proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that tries to improve it (and make us more like other first-world countries), the NYT describes the situation faced by a couple in Greensboro, North Carolina:

Until their elder son started kindergarten this fall, Jessica and Matt Lolley paid almost $2,000 a month for their two boys’ care — roughly a third of their income and far more than their payments on their three-bedroom house. But one of the teachers who watched the boys earns so little — $10 an hour — that she spends half her time working at Starbucks, where the pay is 50 percent higher and includes health insurance.

… The huge social policy bill being pushed by President Biden would cap families’ child care expenses at 7 percent of their income, offer large subsidies to child care centers, and require the centers to raise wages in hopes of improving teacher quality. A version before the House would cost $250 billion over a decade and raise annual spending fivefold or more within a few years. An additional $200 billion would provide universal prekindergarten.

One aspect of the child-care problem that doesn’t get enough attention is that it’s yet another poverty trap: If child care costs more than a couple’s second paycheck, the short-term economic incentive is for the lower-earning parent to stay home. But parents who can afford to stay in the job market anyway might improve their career prospects in ways that make long-term economic sense. This poverty-trapping effect hits even harder when one parent is investing in a career, either by going to school or working an internship, rather than earning an immediate paycheck.

Saturday, the NYT’s top-of-the-web-page article examined China’s potential military threat to Taiwan, and whether either the Taiwanese or the Americans are adequately prepared for it.

The article makes me wish I could trust the Pentagon (and the Times’ relationship to the Pentagon) more than I do. Maybe the concerns expressed there are completely legit and as worrisome as they sound. Or the article could be defense-budget propaganda: Maybe the Chinese military threat has to be emphasized now that the American people have lost interest in Afghanistan and the Islamic threat more generally.

A New Yorker article from August raised that point in response to a different China hawk:

A smart liberal’s reply to Colby might be: Is this for real? Americans have spent much of the past two decades trying to find some way through the disastrous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that political hawks urged on them. Now that the full depth of the latter debacle has become so impossible to deny that the V.A. is issuing suicide-awareness bulletins for former soldiers suffering from “moral distress,” the hawks want to urge another generation-defining conflict on Americans?

A bunch of thoughts complicate my layman’s analysis (which is all you’re left with when you don’t trust the experts): As the article points out, the US already spends three times as much on defense as China does. However, given the inefficiencies and pork-barrel spending built into our defense budget, plus the fact that things are just cheaper in China, we probably don’t have a 3-to-1 advantage in real military resources.

And then there’s the fact that China hasn’t fought a war in a very long time. From generals down to privates, just about everybody involved in a hypothetical Taiwan invasion would be seeing their first combat. Would President Xi really trust the results of his war games that much?

And finally, if I were running China, I would see many long-term global trends running in my favor, and be worried about screwing them up. (This WaPo columnist disagrees: What if pro-China trends are about to turn, as its economy becomes more government-centered and its politics more tyrannical?) War is always a throw of the dice. So I hope Xi knows the story of King Croesus of Lydia and the Oracle of Delphi. “If Croesus attacks Persia,” the Oracle pronounced, “he will destroy a great empire.”

He did attack, and the empire he destroyed was his own.

Mike Pence is laying the groundwork for a 2024 presidential campaign. He truly does not seem to understand that January 6 ended his political career. He didn’t do everything he could to steal the election for Trump, so diehard Trumpists will always see him as disloyal. But at the same time, he will never be able to separate himself from his four years of enabling and defending Trump.

When it comes to replacing democracy with a fascist personality cult, you can’t be half committed.

Trump and his followers are rallying behind Max Miller’s primary campaign against Ohio Republican Congressman Anthony Gonzalez, who committed the unforgivable sin of voting for Trump’s second impeachment. The domestic violence charges made by Miller’s former girlfriend, Trump’s former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, don’t seem to be regarded as a big deal by comparison.

This kind of thing was inevitable once Republicans decided to ignore the Access Hollywood tape (where Trump bragged about a pattern of sexual assaults), as well as the corroborating testimony from dozens of his victims. In Republican circles, assaulting women is now just something that manly men do, and that women are understood to routinely lie about.

Here’s what one guy learned from working in a California gun shop.

Guns in America require a fix that isn’t written into law. It’s something deeper, something in society that causes men to turn to weapons as their last vestiges of manhood.

and let’s close with something sexy

If you think it’s hard to attract a human mate, watch what this puffer fish has to do.

There are reasons why you should care.

Last week, a vast trove of documents called the Pandora Papers became available to the public, and stories based on these documents started appearing in newspapers around the world. The documents reveal much about the wealth that the global elite keep hidden.

If that story sounds familiar, it should. This is the third round of such revelations from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), following the Panama Papers in 2016 and the Paradise Papers in 2017. That’s why The Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Sternberg responded with “Everyone already knows this stuff.“

In other words: Yeah, the world is corrupt and here’s more of it. But so what? The super-rich play by a different set of rules — always have, always will. What’s the point of looking into how it all works?

It’s hard to imagine a more corrosive take on this story. It’s one thing if a few masterminds are so clever that their crimes escape detection. But if no one cares when hidden crimes are exposed — or if a few scapegoats are punished, but the system rolls on unchanged — then the world is very sick indeed. As The Washington Post’s editorial board observed:

[T]he big picture — of a vast, no-questions-asked-zone, open to legitimate and illegitimate transactions alike — is concerning. Corruption and cronyism can undermine political stability and legitimacy as surely as violence can, albeit more insidiously. To the extent the world’s offshore havens are facilitating official malfeasance, they are contributing to the global decline of democracy.

So while I could spend my time exploring how the offshore systems works, or raising outrage about extreme cases, or reacting in some other way, I think the most valuable thing I can do is try to answer that basic so-what question: Why should you care about all this?

After looking at what a variety of other people are saying and talking to a few insightful friends, I think the answers boil down to these:

• The importance of corruption as a central issue connecting all other issues.
• The accomplishments of previous rounds of revelations.
• The momentum of ever-larger exposures of secrets.
• America’s role in building and maintaining the corrupt system has to end.

Corruption. It’s not an exaggeration to say that corruption is the most important issue of our time. Money buys power, and power gathers more money. No matter what issue you care about, progress is impeded (or maybe blocked completely) by wealthy special interests that can influence the course of events in ways that go well beyond you and your vote and your voice in the public square.

Brooke Harrington points out that the issue is not just money.

“[T]ax havens” aren’t really for avoiding taxes: They exist to help elites avoid the rule of law that they impose on the rest of us. The offshore financial industry is generating much of the economic and political inequality destabilizing the world.

It’s one thing when money works its influence openly. If some giant corporation runs ads telling us all how wonderful it is, if it puts out press releases telling us what public policies it wants, and if it endorses and supports candidates who promise to implement those policies, then the People can judge. Climate-denying Senator James Inhofe, for example, is widely known as “the Senator from Exxon-Mobil”. But if the voters of Oklahoma know that and elect him anyway, that’s democracy.

What’s really destructive, though, is secret money in all its forms: lobbyists who work behind the scenes, writing laws that legislators attach their names to; candidates supported by political action committees with benign names, whose donors are not known; “academic” research whose conclusions are dictated by invisible donors, and so on.

The ultimate form of secret money is wealth whose owners can’t be identified at all, and which can be transferred from one person to another without any traceable transaction. Such wealth allows dictators to siphon their nation’s wealth away, and to hang onto it even after they lose power. It allows bribes of any size to go to officials in any country.

The existence of secret wealth and a system for transferring it from one malefactor to another is more than just a tax on the legitimate economy, it corrodes the public trust that is necessary for collective action. Conspiracy theories of all sorts seem more plausible, given the extent of what we know we don’t know. The vague awareness of an untouchable global elite can motivate authoritarian populism, the desire for a man-on-horseback who can sweep it all away without being caught in the tangle of corrupt laws and contracts.

Past accomplishments. Sternberg’s so-what take on the Pandora Papers roots itself in the assumption that the Panama and Paradise Papers turned out to be “duds”.

There they go again. Another year, another breathless media uproar over “revelations” of the financial comings and goings of the world’s super-rich. Reporters spend many months combing through documents extracted—we’re never told how—from various law firms and other service providers presumably because the reporters think exposing this information will accomplish . . . well, we’re never sure what.

He notes that only one world leader — the prime minister of Iceland, if you call that a world leader — had to resign. But Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s 10-year prison sentence should count for something, even if he was already out of office. And that’s not the only kind of impact. For example, by 2019, the Panama Papers had led to governments recovering $1.2 billion in taxes.

Brooke Harrington observes that impacts on the reputations of the rich and powerful are also important. Subjects of ICIJ revelations may stave off legal consequences, but the embarrassment stings.

And focusing on what the people exposed by the Panama and Paradise Papers got away with is not the full story: The whistleblowers also got away with it. The ICIJ succeeded in shielding their sources from exposure.

Five years on, we still do not know the identity of “John Doe,” who leaked the Panama Papers, nor of the person or people who leaked the Paradise Papers four years ago.

And that’s one reason why the troves of leaked documents are getting bigger: The Pandora Papers come from 14 different financial services companies, where the Panama Papers all came from one.

Brooke Harrington:

As I found in talking with wealth managers all over the world, a significant number understand that their work has contributed to dangerous levels of economic and political inequality; they want to do something, and many understand that one of the most effective uses of their insider position would be to pull back the veil of secrecy that makes so much of offshore corruption possible.

As whistleblowers are emboldened, potential clients of the offshore industry may be discouraged: The firm that promises you secrecy may not be able to fulfill that pledge.

Momentum. So the right metaphor for the various “papers” is hammer blows against a wall. The first blow didn’t bring it down, and neither did the second — though each left a mark. The third probably won’t bring it down either, though we can hope for a bigger mark, or maybe even a few chips flying.

But it’s not going to stop.

What the ICIJ has done during these five years is construct an infrastructure for attacking financial secrecy. And that makes these revelations fundamentally different from past Pulitzer-winning exposé from the point of view of one crusading newspaper like The New York Times or The Washington Post. ICIJ has constructed a searchable database that allows each local news outlet to research the story most relevant to its audience.

So while the national papers tell us about the King of Jordan‘s secretly purchased $106 million mansions in Malibu, Georgetown, and London, or the Czech prime minister‘s $22 million chateau in France, The Miami Herald writes about the local mansion secretly owned by empoverished Haiti’s richest man. (The Czech opposition parties gained enough seats in this weekend’s election that they may be able to unseat the prime minister, who has a nice chateau to retire to.)

In Florida, the Bigios have lived behind protective gates in the most exclusive of zones, Indian Creek Island. They’ve enjoyed protection from local police officers who around the clock staff the entrance gate to the private island community. Property records show their home is held in the name of two corporations: Agro Products and Services, registered in Florida, and Porpoise Investments Ltd., a shell company registered in the Isle of Man, a self-governing low-tax British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea.

In other words, there’s not just a mechanism for protecting people who reveal the secrets of the super-rich, there’s a path for getting that information to the people who will care most about it.

The ultimate point of these hammer blows is not to send some scapegoat to prison or embarrass another one into retiring from politics. The point is to change public opinion in ways that change the landscape of what is politically and legally possible. Changing public opinion always seems impossible until it happens. (Same-sex marriage is a good example.) But once it starts happening, it can move quickly.

Change starts at home. We’re used to thinking of offshore tax havens as tiny island nations like the Bermuda, or places with a long tradition of secrecy like Switzerland. But perhaps the most shocking thing I learned from the Pandora Papers articles I read was that South Dakota now rivals Zurich, the Cayman Islands, and other famous wealth-hiding havens. One Dominican family’s money came from exploiting poor workers in the sugar cane fields; it now sits in trusts in Sioux Falls, where it should be safe against worker lawsuits.

Other states competing to lure wealth include Alaska, Delaware, Nevada and New Hampshire.

Think about how you felt a few paragraphs ago, when you read about “the world’s offshore havens … facilitating official malfeasance [and] contributing to the global decline of democracy” or “help[ing] the elite avoid the rule of law”. Maybe you got angry at some imagined remote island paradise, where corporations are headquartered in post office boxes.

Nope. It’s the United States (and the UK). The people undermining the rule of law and contributing to the global decline in democracy? It’s us.

It’s got to stop.

This isn’t somebody else’s problem that we can feel superior about or shake our fists helplessly at. If public opinion is going to turn against secret money anywhere, and if popular resolve is going to force the system to change, it’s got to start here.

So sure, the overall story of the Fill-In-the-Blank Papers is hard to get a handle on. The topic is intentionally confusing, the examples are too diverse to sum up easily, and the time scale is longer than stories we usually think about. But don’t lose track of this, because it’s important, things are happening, and it’s your problem too.

Last week the Pandora Papers were coming out just as I was putting out the Sift, so all I could do was say that it was happening and give you a few links. With a week to think about it, this week’s featured post will discuss what to make of it all. Is there more going on here than just confirmation of the eternal truth that the rich play by a different set of rules?

It’s a holiday and I’m running on a slower schedule, so that post probably won’t appear until around 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has a number of things to cover: the debt ceiling deal, and the continuing negotiations around the Biden agenda; an interim report on the Trump coup; Facebook’s whistleblower testifying to Congress; the back-and-forth court rulings about the Texas abortion law; a discouraging jobs report; worries about China and Taiwan; and the continuing turn-around in the Covid surge — all of which leads up to a closing about the things a puffer fish will do for love.

Look for that around 1.

Today is celebrated as Indigenous People’s Day in most of the Americas and in other parts of the world.  I first blogged the still spreading and growing recognition that has its official origins in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.  But in the United States Native Americans have been staging actions, protests, and alternative events to a Federal Holiday on the Second Monday in October for decades.

That’s right, your calendar probably marked today as Columbus Dayin recognition of Cristoforo Colombo/Cristóbal Colón/Christopher Columbus.  I’ve blogged about him, too, and his alleged discovery—alleged because he didn’t know where he was going, “found” what was never lost, claimed what wasn’t his to take, and didn’t even know where the hell he was.  When just about everyone else in Europe had figured out that he never reached the East Indies or Asia he continued to lie about it.

None-the-less the mercenary mariner was rewarded with fancy titles—Admiral of the Ocean Sea for one—and made Viceroyover half the damned world.  And he screwed that up by being so brutal that he virtually wiped out the once numerous Carib peoples who inhabited the islands under his immediate effective sway.  He also bullied and oppressed potential rivals—would be Conquistadors of even richer realms on the mainland, many of whom had better connections at Court than a Genoan hireling.  He was stripped of his titles,wealth confiscated, and shipped to Spain in disgrace and chains.

Not much to celebrate there.

Yet despite the fact that Columbus never set foot in North America—the closest he got was wandering around portions of Central America after being abandoned by mutineers and quite typically lost—he somehow became an iconic folk figure and symbol of the New World to the English and overwhelming Protestant colonists hugging to the Atlantic shore far to the north of any of his voyages. 

Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian sailor with even less to justify it, swooped in and got his name attached to two continents just because he knew the right cartographer.  But Columbia was a popular alternative name for Western Hemisphere lands and some Patriots wanted to officially adopt it for their new country.  Think of the song, once almost an unofficial national anthem, Columbia the Gem of the Oceanand other evidence.  When Thomas Jefferson’s pal Joel Barlow, a diplomat and literary dabbler, wanted to create a national epic poem he churned out The Columbiad, a turgid contemplation of Columbus and the new world.

Around the 400th anniversary of the alleged discovery in 1892 interest in him was elevated by events around the world, but particularly at Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition.  American Catholics—a struggling and despised minority—looked to the notoriously pious Columbus who had slaughtered all of those natives in the guise of converting them to the One True Church to establish their bona fides as worthy Americans.  Thus, the Knights of Columbus became the Catholic answer to the WASP Masonic Lodges.

But it was urban Italians, among the last European immigrants to become White, in the big cities of the East Coast and Midwest who made Columbus Day and lavish annual parades and answer to the earlier immigrants—especially the Irish—in their struggle for a fat slice of the patronage and privilege pie of the Democratic Party machines.

As protests against honoring a figure who represented centuries of land theft,colonial subjugation, genocide, and cultural annihilation has grown, support for the holiday has waned.  City after City and several States have officially dumped Columbus Day, and most have adopted some form on Indigenous Peoples Day in its stead.  Support had dwindled to indignant Italian civic organizations and the kind of cultural fuddy-duddies who cannot stomach change of any kind.

More recently, however, a sub-set of the Alt-Right and neo-fascist movements who claim to honor and preserve European culture and secure its dominance in American society, have begun to make war on the anti-Columbus Day warriors, especially attacking Native Americans and a “cultural elite of race traitors.”

This year President Joe Biden proclaimed the second Monday in October as Federal Indigenous Peoples Day.  That did not, however, erase Columbus Day which was created and recognized by Congress.  The two celebrations are like bitterly divorced spouses forced to continue to live together in the same house.

Anyway, all of that is more than I intended to write about Columbus.  By now you know the story.  So I celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day.  I hope you do too.

In honor of the occasion, I am revisiting a verse I wrote in 2016 just during the most important Native American resistance in decades—the campsto block the Dakota Access Pipeline which threatened to pollute the Missouri River and defile traditional Sioux lands.  May their long and valiant prayerful witness be inscribed in the sacred winter count and sung of around the campfires for all of the generationsthey were trying to protect.

Tonto Will Not Ride into Town for You

For The Camp of the Sacred Stone 9/30/2016

Tonto will not ride into town for you, Kemosabe,

            and be beat to pulp by the bad guys

            on your fool’s errand.

Pocahontas will not throw her nubile, naked body

            over your blonde locks

            to save you from her Daddy’s war club.

Squanto will not show you that neat trick

            with the fish heads and maize

            and will watch you starve on rocky shores.

Chingachgook will save his son and lineage

            and let you and your White women

            fall at Huron hands and be damned.

Sacajawea and her babe will not show you the way

            or introduce you to her people,

            and leave you lost and doomed in the Shining Mountains.

Sitting Bull will not wave and parade with your Wild West Show

            nor Geronimo pose for pictures for a dollar

            in fetid Florida far from home.

They are on strike form your folklore and fantasy,

            have gathered with the spirits of all the ancestors

            to dance on the holy ground, the rolling prairie

            where the buffalo were as plentiful

            as the worn smooth stones of the Mnišoše,

            the mighty river that flows forever.

They are called by all the nations from the four corners

            of the turtle back earth who have gathered here,

            friends and cousins, sworn enemies alike,

            united now like all of the ancestors

            to kill the Black Snake, save the sacred water,

            the soil where the bones of ancestors rest,

            and the endless sky where eagle, Thunderbird, and Raven turn.

Tonto has better things to do, Kemosabe…

—Patrick Murfin

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042451/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-10-10_Celebration_Sunday.mp3

Patricia Infante

Continue reading ""Lives" on Hold"

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042357/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/10-10-21-audio.mp3

"Who is Earth to Me?" (October 10, 2021) Worship Service

Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book "Braiding Sweetgrass" opens with a simple description of this act of weaving, braiding the supple green stalks of a plant, but what unfolds is layers of relationship and story and a paradigm that has saving grace.

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Daniel Jackoway, Worship Associate; Sam King, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, Organist; Mark Sumner, Music Director; Jon Silk, Drummer; Asher Davison, Soloist

Eric Shackelford, Camera; Shulee Ong, Camera; Jonathan Silk, Director of Communications; Joe Chapot, Live Chat Moderator; Thomas Brown, Sexton; Dan Barnard, Facilities Manager; Judy Payne, flowers

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042312/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20211010VRSSermon.mp3

Presented by Rev. James Galasinski; Anne Marsh, Worship Associate; Nylea Butler-Moore, Director of Music

The interdependent web of existence is central to who we are. We are all connected. We are entangled. These are scientific facts and theologically rich concepts worthy to be chewed on. So, quantum mechanics has a central place in our faith.

The Rev. James Galasinski is in his sixth year of settled ministry at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Canton, NY. Before that he served the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque and fell in love with the mesas, the mountains, and the red chile of New Mexico. James enjoys listening to jazz, growing tomatoes, writing poetry, and hiking with his wife, Ulrike, and their two sons, Miles and Oskar. He is excited to be back in Los Alamos as a pulpit guest.

SERVICE NOTES

WELCOME!
New to our church community? Sign our guestbook and let us know if you’d like to get more connected.
For more information on our church community, visit us on the web at http://www.uulosalamos.org or call at 505-662-2346. 
Connect with us on Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/uulosalamos
If you would like to submit a joy or sorrow to be read during next week’s service, we invite you to write it in our Virtual Prayer Book.
Have questions? While our minister, the Rev. John Cullinan, is on sabbatical, contact our office administrator at office@uulosalamos.org.

MUSIC CREDITS

• “Poeme Erotique” from Lyric Pieces (Lyriske stykker), Op. 43, No. 5 by Edvard Grieg. (Yelena Mealy, piano). Music Public Domain, video used by permission.
• “For the Earth Forever Turning” (also known as “Blue Green Hills of Earth”) by Kim Oler, arr. Nick Page. (Nylea Butler-Moore, piano). Permission to stream song #27231 in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-730948. All rights reserved.
• “O Brother Sun,” (also known as “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon”), trad. Scottish tune.  (Wade Wheelock, violin). Music Public Domain, video used by permission.
• “Turn the World Around” by Harry Belafonte, arr. Jason Shelton. (Nylea Butler-Moore, vocals & piano). Permission to stream ASCAP song #2913155 in this service obtained from CHRISTIAN COPYRIGHT SOLUTIONS with license #10770.
• “All Creatures of Our God and King” (also known as “All Creatures of the Earth and Sky”), from Geistliche Kirchengesange, text attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, arranged by Cindy Berry. (Yelena Mealy, piano). Permission to stream the arrangement in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-730948. All rights reserved.
• “Arietta” from Lyric Pieces (Lyriske stykker), Op. 12, No. 1 by Edvard Grieg. (Yelena Mealy, piano). Music Public Domain, video used by permission.   
• “The Way,” text: unknown author, music: Nylea L. Butler-Moore. (UU Virtual Singers with Larry Rybarcyk, acoustic guitar & Nylea Butler-Moore, piano; Nylea Butler-Moore, Music Director; Rick Bolton, AV Engineer.) Used by permission. 

Permission to stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-730948. All rights reserved.
Permission to stream music in this service obtained from CHRISTIAN COPYRIGHT SOLUTIONS with license #10770.

OTHER NOTES
*Chalice Lighting by Paul Sprecher (Worship Web)
Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address (traditional – public domain)
Reading from Gut Symmetries, by Jeanette Winterson, Vintage Books, 1998  (fair use)
Benediction by James Galasinski

*permission granted through the UUA

OFFERTORY

Our Share the Plate partner for October is Roadrunner Food Bank.. 

100% of all offered this month will be given to our partner.

We are now using Givelify.com to process the weekly offering: https://giv.li/5jtcps

SERVICE PARTICIPANTS

• Rev. James Galasinski, Guest Speaker 
• Anne Marsh, Worship Associate
• Nylea Butler-Moore, Director of Music
• Yelena Mealy, piano
• Wade Wheelock, violin
• UU Virtual Singers: Kelly Shea, Nylea Butler-Moore, Rebecca Howard, Anne Marsh, Kathy Gursky, Mike Begnaud, & Skip Dunn with Larry Rybarcyk, acoustic guitar  
• Mike Begnaud, Rick Bolton, and Renae Mitchell AV techs

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042252/https://www.uulosalamos.org/ucla/pulpit/2021/20211010-Spooky_Entanglement_and_Nonseparability.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042217/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/211010.mp3

We see a lot of wildlife while we are hiking. Around here it is mainly coyotes, snakes, turkeys, squirrels, birds, and deer. I refuse to list all the different bugs. We saw a bobcat once in the Headlands. In the Sierras I have seen a lot of bears and one young mountain lion. With the mountain lion, I was happy that there were a lot of other people around.

I took a picture of these deer because we parked at Deer Park and just seemed funny that it was so aptly named. Notice the leaves on the ground. It is fall, but unlike other parts of the country, the leaves are mainly brown and not very spectacular. Sometimes not spectacular is just fine. That is what this week felt like -just fine. When I lived in Utah, the locals always said “you’re fine” rather than “no problem” or “no worries.” The culture there tends to be optimistic – except when it’s not. Sweeping statements, generalizations, don’t work for me any more. I need more nuance I think.

My weight is up again, but I had fun at a luncheon on Friday and clearly ate more than I needed. That is OK. Rambling is also OK. Counting your blessings is a good thing in general, but don’t count your chickens until they have hatched. The show isn’t over until the fat lady sings, but you still have to take one step, one day, at a time on the road to any type of transformation. Sometimes there are deer in Deer Park, and sometimes a tree falls over and blocks a trail. I am not a fan of opera, but I do like to sing along with most other types of songs. Staying in tune is a challenge I also rarely meet, but it would be easier in a choir. Not that one would let me in and yeah, COVID, so singing in a group is not a risk I would take, even though I am vaccinated. Some “breakthroughs” are good, others not so much. Nuance. Gotta love it, but hating it is OK too. I think.

L’Chaim!

My average weight this week is up 1.8 pounds for a total loss of 169.9

Now there is talk of messing with it by adding new principles. As Rev. Denise D Tracy has written the seven principles should be considered immutable and unchangeable. Amendments can be added but the original seven principles which were developed over 9 years of study and discernment should be considered sacrosanct.

Unitarian Universalists do not like authority which is considered sacred. They would rather question, complain, discuss, reason, and argue. This tendency to be skeptical, curious, and rebellious is a good up to a point, but is nothing holy, is nothing true, can nothing be counted on?

Unitarian Universalists either believe in nothing permanent or they believe in something true. In the post modern world, sometimes called the "post truth world", there is no truth according to the adherents of this worldview. But this is false belief and leads one eventually to pessimistic nihilism. If you believe in nothing, you will fall for anything.

There is an infinite presence, whatever you want to call it, "Higher Power," "God," "Mother Nature," "The Force," and it fuels the good, the true, and the beautiful. The Seven Principles are good, true, and beautiful and they should be not only allowed to stand, but lifted up as a beacon of faith not to be tampered with.

Joseph Labadie with his flowing moustache and imperial goatee cut quite a dashing figure as a young man and after his adoption of big wide-brimmed hats in his later years looked like he might have toured with Buffalo Bill Cody and Ned Buntline.  But he was one of the late 19th and early 20th Century’s leading anarchists and the only one to have a long careerat the very center of the labor movement.

His background was strikingly different from most of the better known figures of the movement—the German Johann Most who introduced the European model featuring the idealizationof the propaganda of the deed or immigrants like most of the Haymarket Martyrs,Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Carlo Tresca.  He was also unique among home grown anarchist figures like Bostonian Benjamin Tucker and former Confederate trooper, Texas Radical Republican, and Chicago labor leader Albert Parsons and his bi-racial wife Lucy Parsons.

He was born as Charles Joseph Antoine Labadie on April 18, 1850 in Paw Paw, Michigan into a Frenchfamily who settled on both sides of the Detroit River when the land was claimed as New France.  Even at this late date the area was still frontier-like and as a boy spent much time fishing and hunting with the Potawatomi tribes in southern Michigan, where his father served as interpreter between Jesuit missionaries and the native tribes.  He deeply admired their culture, especially a sense of communalism. 

His only formal schooling was a few months in a parochial school.  But he was bright, inquisitive, and read everything he could lay his hands on.  He must have had some informal apprentice training because by his late teens he had become a tramp printer, literally packing a small press and type font cases on his back or in a pushcart as he made a circuitof small towns and farming villages.  The life on the road was an eye-opening experience in and of itself. 

After five years on the road, Labadie settled in Detroit where he became a typesetter at the Detroit Post and Tribune.  He joined Typographical Union Local No. 18, rapidly rose in its leadership and was one of its two delegates to the International Typographical Union convention in Detroit in 1878.

He married a first cousin, Sophie Elizabeth Archambeau, in 1877. Together they had a happy marriage and raised three children Laura, Charlotte, and Laurance, who also became a prominent anarchist essayist.

Labor conditionsof the post—Civil War era of rapid industrialization were brutal and labor unrest was sweeping the country culminating in the Great Railway Strike of 1877.  Although Detroit was only on the fringes of that epic battle it inspired Labadie as it did his fellow typographer in Chicago, Albert Parsons.  Like Parsons he joined the early Socialist Labor Party, which included all sorts of radical tendencies and was soon a familiar sight handing out its tracts and pamphlets on the streets of Detroit.  He was gaining a reputation.

Like others of the era, he dabbled in several radical ventures while slowly evolving his unique political philosophy.  In 1878 he organized Detroit’s first assemblyof the Knights of Labor and ran unsuccessfully for mayor on the Greenback-Labor ticket.  In 1880 he served as the first President of the Detroit Trades Councilwhich united both Knights lodges and craft unions. He also founded the Michigan Federation of Labor.

His positions with the Detroit Trades Council and the Michigan Federation of Labor eventually made him a de facto ally of Samuel Gompers and the emerging American Federation of Labor (AFL) although the relationship was often strainedand tenuous.

Labadie also edited a succession of local labor papers and began contributing articles and columns to several other publications including the Detroit Times, Advance and Labor Leaf, Labor Review, The Socialist, and the Lansing Sentinel.  His long running opinion column Cranky Notions was carried widely and admired for its forthright style and humor.

In 1883 Labadie announced that he was embracing the individual anarchism of Benjamin Tucker.  It was a somewhat odd and contradictory association that he never renounced even though his commitment to an organized labor movement was at oddswith Tucker.   But both renounced violence and owed much to the philosophy of the American Universalist anarcho-pacifist Aden Ballou, Russian Mikhail Bakunin, and presaged the work of Leo Tolstoy.

Nominally accepting identity as a socialist in the days before Marxism solidified as the dominant trend in the international labor movement, Tucker rejected any permanent or transitionalstate involvement and advocated for a free market solution.   Tucker wrote

The fact that one class of men are dependent for their living upon the sale of their labour, while another class of men are relieved of the necessity of labour by being legally privileged to sell something that is not labour...And to such a state of things I am as much opposed as any one. But the minute you remove privilege...every man will be a labourer exchanging with fellow-labourers...What Anarchistic-Socialism aims to abolish is usury... It wants to deprive capital of its reward.

Tucker also rejected organized labor unions and their intermediate reform demands like eight hour day and minimum wage laws.  He believed instead that strikes should be organized by free workers rather than by bureaucratic union officials and organizationsand that such spontaneous uprisings would lead to the collapse of the state.  Labadie was sympathetic in the abstract but as a practical leader he never abandoned the labor movement which he continued to serve the rest of his life.  In fact, no other anarchist ever had a longer or more fruitful association with organized labor that Labadie.

Both Tucker and Labadie were initially critical of the violence advocated by the German anarchists and the Haymarket defendants.  But both became active in international defense efforts because they did not believe they were the sole perpetrators of violence. Labadie broke with the Knights of Labor when Grandmaster Workman Terrance V. Powderlytheir national leader, repudiated the defendants completely.

Without the oppression of the state, Labadie believed, humans would choose to harmonize with “the great natural laws...without robbing [their] fellows through interest, profit, rent and taxes.” But sometimes at odds with Tucker, he supported localized public cooperation, and was an advocate for community control of water utilities, streets, and railroads.

By the turn of the 20th Century the great majority of the labor left of the anarchist movement rejected Tuckerism and became centered on anarcho-syndicalism which viewed labor unions as the natural building blocks of a society without state oppression.  Today Tucker is considered the inspiration for modern libertarianism.  Labadie’s association with him has taintedhis reputation on the left.