We stand together, Christ and I, in peace and certainty of purpose. And in Him is His Creator, as He is in me.

It looks to be a warm, pleasant evening this Saturday, September 11 at 6:30 pm in Woodstock, Illinois for a special bicycle ride through the streets and neighborhoodsof charming city.  It will be neighbors helping neighbors at the Ride To Leave a Light On As a Beacon for Others.  Sponsored by Ken West’s Material Things shop the bike ride will raise funds for local organizationsthat support community members who are struggling in one manner or another. 

This year those organizations will include New Directions Addiction Recovery Services;  Live4Laliwhich “works to reduce stigma and prevent substance use disorder among individuals, families, and communities, and minimize the overall health, legal and social harms associated with substance use”; CLBreak, a Crystal Lake teen center; Illinois Migrant Council; the Community Foundation for McHenry County; CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates for children) of McHenry County; and Compassion for Campers which provides gear and supplies to the unhoused.

Folks can support any or all of these great causes by purchasing strings of lights for $10 each to decorate bicycles and riders and, of course, by riding.  Strings can be purchased from participating organizations, from Material Things using this link, or the evening of the event.  You can designate your purchase to support any of the organizations or to be split evenlyby all.

Strings and information on the organizations will be available on Woodstock Square beginning at 6:30 as riders gather.  There will be opening remarks and instructionsbeginning at 7, and the ride will set off at 7:20.  Ride is approximately  4.5 miles on level terrain and take 45 to 50 minutes.  When riders return to the Square there will be live music by Big Fish.

It promises to be a family friendly, joyous eveningfor riders, supporters, and folks out and about around the Square.

Material Things, a fine crafts artisan market at 103 East Van Buren Street on the Square is donating the lights for sale.

 A person asked about A Course In Miracles and how it might relate to the twelve step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The question also was raised about how ACIM might be incorporated into Unitarian Universalism. In attempting to relate the ACIM workbook lessons to AA and UU has resulted in this year's study of the workbook of ACIM which we are coming to an end of in the next two weeks after one year.

The ACIM workbook lessons relate to people at different stages of spiritual development. However, the lessons are easier to understand and apply if the student understands the underlying metaphysical model of the Course which is based on the nonduality of the Divine.

The Course uses a post integral world view based on the idea that the Course was channeled to Helen Schuman by Jesus. The post integral world view is a stage or level of development which only a small percentage of the population have attained so far at this point in human evolution. Therefore, the number of students using this material is very small.

If you have been studying this material, the usefulness of it is found in the application of the daily lessons in one's own life and in sharing the ideas and applications with others.

It would be helpful to improve our understanding of this material if you would comment on how the material has been useful in your life and in the lives of those you have shared it with.

Thank you for your attention and assistance.

Today is the first full day of Rosh Hashanah which began at sundown last night.  In the United States that was also the evening of Labor Day which for many Americans is itself a kind of new year—the traditional end of summer and the beginning of a new work/school year when we are supposed to get back down to business.

For Jews it is Yom Teruah, the Day of Shouting (or Blasting) which marks the first of the High Holy Days as well as the start of the New Year.  It falls on first day of Tishrei, the seventh month of the ecclesiastical year that began with Passover in the spring and represents the first of the civic year.  This year it ushers in 5782 on the Hebrew calendar.

It is a joyous celebration filled with the hope of a brand new year and is celebrated at synagogue services highlighted by the blowingof the shofar, a hollowed-out ram’s horn, as proscribed in Leviticus to “raise a noise” on Yom Teruah.   It is also it is also a symbolic wake-up call, stirring Jews to mend their ways and repent and begins a period of preparing for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  Poems called piyyutimare added to the regular services and a special prayer book, the mahzor, is used on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  A number of additions are made to the regular service, most notably an extended repetition of the Amidah, the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy. The Shofar is blown during Mussaf at several intervals a total of 100 times. 

A Rosh Hashanah seder is offered by many communities but reflecting the years of exile and repression when many Jews could not openly worship at the Temple in Jerusalem or in Rabbinic synagogues, there are also rituals for the home and family including ritual foods especially apples dipped in honey to symbolize a sweet new year.  Depending on customs and traditions, other foods are also included.  Among the Ashkenazi Jews who make up most of American Judaism the ritual plate may also include dates, pomegranates, black-eyed peas, pumpkin-filled pastries called rodanchas, leek fritters called keftedes de prasa; beets. and a whole fish with the head intact. It is also common to eat stuffed vegetables called legumbres yaprakes.  Wine accompanies the blessing.

Details and customs vary depending on the origins of communities in Europe, the Mediterranean, or the Mid-East.  And also between Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform congregations.  Many entirely secular Jews still observe some of the traditions culturally.

To my many Jewish friends L’shanah Tovah no matter how you keep the day.

It’s almost impossible to get your mind around how much is currently being sacrificed in favor of a Senate procedural rule that appears nowhere in the Constitution and emerged to buttress segregation.

– Ben Rhodes

This week’s featured post is “A Dozen Observations about Texas, Abortion, and the Supreme Court“.

This week everybody was talking about the Texas abortion law

That’s the subject of the featured post.

and the cost of the filibuster

The Texas abortion law could be undone if Congress passed the Women’s Health Protection Act. But it won’t, of course, because the WHPA can’t muster 60 votes to get past a Republican filibuster.

So we can add one more item to the bill America pays to maintain the filibuster. Similarly, all the hoops and hurdles Republican legislatures have put in the way of voting could be reversed if Congress passed the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, or some watered-down version of either bill. Even Joe Manchin claims to want to pass something to protect voting rights, but again, unified Republican opposition makes the filibuster an insuperable roadblock.

Similarly, the filibuster dooms the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a $15 minimum wage, and statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. It’s the reason January 6 is being investigated by a House committee rather than a bipartisan commission.

Historically, the filibuster protected segregation in the South, preserving Jim Crow for decades.

Filibuster defenders need to be challenged to answer: What victories balance all these losses? At what moment in American history was the Republic saved from a catastrophic mistake because some prescient minority filibustered? I don’t know of one.

and the growing Republican acceptance of gangsterism and violence

Thursday, CNN reported that the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection had asked telecommunication companies to preserve the phone records of a number of Republican congresspeople, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

Notice: preserve, not turn over. If the committee eventually decides that it needs some of those records, it will presumably subpoena them. At that point, McCarthy et al might challenge the subpoenas in court, and I assume the companies will do whatever the courts tell them. All perfectly normal.

Kevin McCarthy responded like a Mafia don.

If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States. If companies still choose to violate a federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.

An appropriate response to this tweet might be: WTF? Or more specifically, WFL: what federal law?

McCarthy’s office has not responded to CNN’s request for clarification on what law McCarthy believes the telecommunication companies would be violating.

Marjorie Taylor Greene was more explicit about the threat, if not the law:

These cell phone companies, they better not play with these Democrats, because Republicans are coming back into the majority in 2022, and we will take this very serious.

When you warn people not to cooperate with investigators, or else — that’s pretty much the definition of obstruction. But for congressional Republicans, it’s just Tuesday.

A week ago yesterday, North Carolina Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn issued this threat:

If our election systems continue to be rigged, and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed.

He went on to say that he dreads “having to pick up arms against a fellow American.” Not that he wouldn’t do it, but that he doesn’t look forward to it. You don’t “dread” things that you know you aren’t going to do.

Cawthorn’s spokesman claimed he was opposing violence. But when a conditional threat is based on a lie, the result is just a naked threat. Democrats can’t stop rigging and stealing elections, because they haven’t done that in the first place. If I tell you I’m going to burn your house down unless your dog stops peeing on my lawn, and you don’t have a dog, then the bottom line is that I’m threatening to burn your house down.

As we’ve seen again and again, Trump claims fraud whenever he loses. He claimed that fraud prevented him from winning the popular vote against Hillary Clinton in 2016, and he also claimed Ted Cruz committed fraud when he beat Trump in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, tweeting: “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.”

Given that history and Cawthorn’s devoted Trumpism, the only conclusion to draw is that Cawthorn is regretting in advance all the Americans he will kill if his side loses again. If they lose, they will claim fraud again and get violent again, but with more bloodshed this time.

A Republican candidate for county executive in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, explained how he plans to handle schools boards that impose mask mandates.

Forget going into these school boards with frigging data. You go into school boards to remove ’em! That’s what you do! They don’t follow the law! You go in and you remove ’em. I’m going in there with 20 strong men, I’m going to speak to the school board and I’m going to give them an option. They can leave or they can be removed.

No attempt to convince, no organizing for the next election, no petitions or marches or sit-ins. Just “20 strong men”. Increasingly, that’s how the GOP wants to handle things.

All across the country, there are reports of the Proud Boys joining anti-mask protests outside of schools and school board meetings. Explicit threats are often part of these demonstrations.

and the pandemic

I’m not sure I trust this week’s numbers. On the one hand, they follow the recent trend of slowing growth: New cases are up only 8% over the last two weeks, compared to last week’s 20%, preceded by 36% and 60%. On the other hand, the biggest drop is 51% in Louisiana, with even bigger drops in the coastal counties where Ida hit. It could just be that the hurricane interrupted testing and reporting of new cases. But if these numbers are accurate, we could hit a peak this week.

and you also might be interested in …

It’s weirdly ironic that Covid-related unemployment benefits are expiring on Labor Day.

My part of the northeast got some rain, but no serious flooding when the remnants of Ida blew through Wednesday night and Thursday morning. South of here, though, particularly in Philadelphia and New York, things got ugly, and more than 40 people died.

Meanwhile, Louisiana is still recovering from when Ida hit there eight days ago.

In addition to the abortion ban, Texas now has open carry of firearms, without permits or training. So if you want to shoot up a Texas school or shopping mall, you aren’t breaking any laws until you pull the trigger.

The anti-voting law that Texas Democrats delayed by leaving the state? It passed. Harris County is suing to keep it from being enforced.

You’ll be pleased to know that Rudy Giuliani reports that he is “not an alcoholic” and functions “more effectively than 90% of the population”.

Trump Tower is having trouble finding tenants, but it has one really reliable, deep-pocketed one: the Make America Great Again PAC that Trump runs himself. It rents a space that could accommodate 30 employees, but it only lists three, and they’re not there most days. The high-priced lease appears to be a simple way to turn donors’ money into personal income for Trump, but it’s all perfectly legal.

and let’s close with something explosive

I’ve previously closed with videos of elaborate domino constructions that fall in amazing and beautiful ways. An even more kinetic version of the same basic idea is the stick bomb. The elasticity of tongue depressors is used to store potential energy, which can be released in a chain reaction.

If you want to build your own, here’s a tutorial.

As you undoubtedly already know, the Supreme Court refused to interfere with the new Texas abortion ban, which took effect Wednesday. In brief, the law bans abortion after a “heartbeat” is detectable in the embryo, which happens (not really, but sort of, more below) at around six weeks. That’s usually before a woman knows she’s pregnant, so most pregnant Texas women will not, at any point in the process, have legal options other than carrying their fetus to term.

What makes this law different from dozens of other anti-abortion laws (that routinely get voided by the federal courts) is its method of enforcement: Abortion is illegal, but not criminal. No one is arrested or sent to jail. But private citizens can sue people (other than the pregnant woman herself) who perform or “abet” a post-heartbeat abortion. If they win, they get attorneys fees plus $10,000.

That enforcement method makes it tricky for a federal court to block the law. Ordinarily, a court would enjoin state officials not to enforce a law that violates established constitutional standards, but here Texas can say: “We don’t enforce it. Private citizens and the state courts enforce it.” Five conservative judges (three of them appointed by Trump) decided to take advantage of that loophole. So the law stands and abortion is effectively banned in Texas.

Much has been written about this situation in the last week, so rather than add another article to the stack, I want to organize what’s already out there. That’s why this post is a list of short observations rather than a single essay. In each case, I’ll point you to other sources that do the elaboration.

Let’s start with some basic references.

The law itself (Senate Bill 8) is here. It’s written for lawyers, and I don’t recommend reading it unless you’re really getting down into the weeds.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the request to intervene is only 12 pages, and is much more readable. The majority’s statement is barely more than a page. Chief Justice Roberts wrote a three-page dissent. Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan also wrote dissents, each of which was co-signed by the other two. So the Court published roughly ten times as much material explaining why it shouldn’t have done this than justifying why it did.

Slate has a good FAQ about what the law covers and how it might be interpreted. Some of the issues will depend on what judges do, and even if the law is technically on your side, you still will have to respond if someone sues you.

The bill is named the Texas Heartbeat Act, but a six-week embryo doesn’t have a heart.

LiveScience.com explains:

Rather, at six weeks of pregnancy, an ultrasound can detect “a little flutter in the area that will become the future heart of the baby,” said Dr. Saima Aftab, medical director of the Fetal Care Center at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. This flutter happens because the group of cells that will become the future “pacemaker” of the heart gain the capacity to fire electrical signals, she said.

NPR goes into more detail:

“When I use a stethoscope to listen to an [adult] patient’s heart, the sound that I’m hearing is caused by the opening and closing of the cardiac valves,” says Dr. Nisha Verma, an OB-GYN who specializes in abortion care and works at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

The sound generated by an ultrasound in very early pregnancy is quite different, she says.

“At six weeks of gestation, those valves don’t exist,” she explains. “The flickering that we’re seeing on the ultrasound that early in the development of the pregnancy is actually electrical activity, and the sound that you ‘hear’ is actually manufactured by the ultrasound machine.”

Healthline.com says that at six weeks, an embryo is “about the size of a grain of rice”.

You might be wondering why anti-abortion activists lie so blatantly about this rather obscure point of biology (or perhaps how they can call themselves Christians while they do). Similarly, they make bogus claims about a fetus’ ability to feel pain at 20 weeks. Neither of these thresholds have any legal significance. (After all, farm animals have heartbeats and feel pain, but they are killed by the millions without any political backlash.)

What activists are trying to suggest with heartbeats and suffering is the presence of a human soul, which many of them say enters the embryo at conception. (In National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters writes: “That heartbeat should strike the consciences of anyone with an open mind about the morality of the issue.” Sorry, but that shot just goes right past me; I am neither engaged nor shamed by it.)

They may describe this theological speculation as “Biblical”, but in fact it is not, as I’ve explained before. In Catholic circles, this teaching was virtually unknown before the 1600s, and it didn’t become orthodox among conservative Protestants until after Roe. For Evangelicals, the politics motivated the theology, not the other way around.

In any case, one American’s theology does not bind other Americans, because the Founders very explicitly did not set up a theocracy.

Complete bans on abortion are not popular now, and never have been.

Gallup has been asking about abortion for nearly half a century, and the numbers have been remarkably stable. Less than 1-in-5 Americans believe abortion should be “illegal in all circumstances”, and that’s been true consistently since 1975. The split between those who want abortion legal in “any circumstances” or “certain circumstances” bounces around a bit more. Even that may not represent an actual change of opinion, but could correspond to a change in the circumstances that came to mind when the question was raised.

On the specific question of overturning Roe v Wade, public opinion has long supported leaving Roe alone. In 1989 the public was against overturning Roe 58%-31%, and the most recent survey was 58%-32%.

I sum up my reading of public opinion with a quip. Most Americans, whether we are conservative or liberal, have exactly the same opinion about both abortion and guns: “I am appalled by the sheer number of them in this country, and wish there were fewer. But if my family gets into some extraordinary situation and decides that we need one, I don’t want the government to stand in our way.”

The court majority is acting in bad faith.

The majority purports to be stymied by the complexity of the situation: No one knows exactly who will decide to enforce the Texas law, so how can they craft an injunction?

it is unclear whether the named defendants in this lawsuit can or will seek to enforce the Texas law against the applicants in a manner that might permit our intervention.

Will Wilkinson points out the obvious:

you know that the conservative majority would not affirm this principle in general. There is zero chance that Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Thomas would offer the same deferential treatment to a formally identical California law designed to frustrate citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights by incentivizing civil lawsuits against anyone who gives away or sells or in any way aids or abets the possession or ownership of a firearm.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent is blunt and direct:

It cannot be the case that a State can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry.

But of course, it’s not the case in general. This is a one-time-only principle that applies solely to abortion.

A decision this consequential shouldn’t happen through the shadow docket.

Essentially, the Court has reversed Roe v Wade: Texas has made nearly all abortions illegal; the Court has refused to protect a woman’s previously recognized constitutional right; and now other red states are scrambling to pass their own bounty-hunter law.

It is certainly within the Court’s power to reverse previous precedents and thereby reinterpret the Constitution. But the typical way for a reversal to happen is through the regular docket (known to lawyers as the “merits” docket): A case challenging the precedent works its way up through the federal courts. Through that process, the lower courts develop a body of publicly available evidence and reasoning. Then the Supreme Court hears lawyers for both sides argue the case, and interested third parties submit briefs supporting one side or the other. The justices withdraw for weeks or months to consider it all, and then a decision is announced, supported by a written majority opinion (which may be critiqued by dissents from judges outside the majority). When Brown v Board of Education reversed Plessey v Ferguson in 1954, that was the lengthy process it went through. (The original lawsuit was filed in 1951.)

A case challenging Roe is already on the Court’s calendar for this term. We should get a decision by June at the latest. If a majority wants to reverse Roe — and apparently it does — that is the proper way to do so.

One key virtue of the regular process is transparency: The Court’s power may be mostly unchecked, but when it does something, we at least know what it did and why. Five justices can’t just say “Do this” and go home; they have to spell out the new interpretation in enough detail that lower courts and the various levels of state and federal government know what the law is now. The Court’s reasoning is available for legal scholars to examine and criticize, and Congress knows exactly what it must do if it wants to achieve a different outcome.

But the Court also has what is called the “shadow docket”. Wikipedia explains:

Shadow docket decisions are made when the Court believes an applicant will suffer “irreparable harm” if the request is not immediately granted. These decisions are generally terse (often only a few sentences), unsigned, and are preceded by little to no oral arguments. Historically, the shadow docket was used only rarely for rulings of serious legal or political significance, but since 2017 it has been increasingly utilized for consequential rulings, especially for requests by the Department of Justice for emergency stays of lower-court rulings.

So, for example, you might ask the Court to intervene if a law was about to go into effect that would remove one of your previously recognized constitutional rights. If, say, you had to give birth to your rapist’s baby because all the abortion providers in your state had to turn you away, you might reasonably claim to face irreparable harm. The no-longer-viable clinics might also reasonably claim irreparable harm.

By not acting, the Court is basically announcing: “Not so fast about thinking you have a constitutional right.” It has made women’s rights evaporate without any kind of transparent process. Or maybe that’s not the Court’s intention at all. Who can say, when the majority barely wrote a page of explanation?

Chief Justice Roberts, who is usually thought of as one of the conservative justices, complained about this lack of process:

I would grant preliminary relief to preserve the status quo ante—before the law went into effect—so that the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner. … We are at this point asked to resolve these novel questions—at least preliminarily—in the first instance, in the course of two days, without the benefit of consideration by the District Court or Court of Appeals. We are also asked to do so without ordinary merits briefing and without oral argument. … I would accordingly preclude enforcement of S. B. 8 by the respondents to afford the District Court and the Court of Appeals the opportunity to consider the propriety of judicial action and preliminary relief pending consideration of the plaintiffs’ claims

Translating from the legalese: If we don’t know what to do, we should freeze the situation as best we can until we have time to figure it out. But the other five conservative justices rejected that reasoning.

The Senate’s hearings on recent Supreme Court nominees have been a charade. The nominees lied, and the senators who credited those lies were either naive or complicit.

Numerous examples are possible, but the most ridiculous one was the 45-minute speech Susan Collins gave defending her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. For eight paragraphs she addressed “the concern that Judge Kavanaugh would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade”, assuring the country that the constitutional right established in Roe “is important to me”, and extolling Kavanaugh’s reverence for long-established precedents.

Naive? Complicit? Hard to say.

The 6-3 conservative majority is the result of a system rigged to over-represent White rural voters. The Court’s current conservatism does not and never has represented the will of the American people.

Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Both of these institutions are rigged in favor of White rural voters.

Three of the current justices (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) were nominated by Donald Trump, who was chosen by the Electoral College in defiance of the American people. (Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million votes, but won a 304-227 victory in the Electoral College.)

Sometimes Roberts and Alito are included on this list of minority justices, because George W. Bush also lost the popular vote in 2000. However, they were nominated in Bush’s second term, after he won re-election democratically.

Recent Republican majorities in the Senate have also not represented the American people. The principle that each state has two senators means that blue (and racially diverse) California’s 39 million residents have the same power as red (and almost entirely White) Wyoming’s 581 thousand. Combined with the successful attempt to stack the Senate by admitting tiny Northwestern states in 1889-1890, Republicans have a consistent structural advantage: For the last quarter-century, Republican senators have neither represented a majority of voters nor received a majority of votes, and yet they have held the majority of Senate seats about half the time.

This includes the term when Mitch McConnell refused to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, as well as the next term when McConnell and popular-vote-loser Donald Trump awarded that Court seat to Neil Gorsuch.

Senate Republicans use their artificially inflated numbers, together with the filibuster, to make sure the system stays rigged in their favor by denying statehood to (largely Black and urban) District of Columbia and (Hispanic) Puerto Rico.

Now that abortion rights have actually been lost, the Republican dog has caught the car.

Somewhere in Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway describes a bridge that is much desired but (precisely for that reason) can never be completed: As long as the bridge is in the future, corrupt politicians can raise funds to build it. But if it is ever finished, the money will dry up.

For decades, anti-abortion politics has been a similar scam, as David Frum explains:

Pre-Texas, opposition to abortion offered Republican politicians a lucrative, no-risk political option. They could use pro-life rhetoric to win support from socially conservative voters who disliked Republican economic policy, and pay little price for it with less socially conservative voters who counted on the courts to protect abortion rights for them.

That dynamic played out most clearly in 2016, when Trump dominated the anti-abortion vote, while pro-choice people assured each other that they could stay home or vote for Jill Stein.

But now, after years and years of warnings and an ever-increasing set of hoops women have had to jump through, abortion rights really are vanishing, even for women who are privileged in every way other than gender. If you live in a professional-class suburb of Dallas, and if your U of T freshman daughter gets roofied at a frat party and comes home pregnant, she either carries the baby to term or your family has to break the law — and maybe get sued.

If this possible impact on their lives means that the complacent majority will get riled now, the jig is up. That’s why national Republicans haven’t been spiking the football to celebrate an achievement they’ve been promising for decades.

Congress could fix this, if Democrats thought women’s rights were more important than the filibuster.

The Texas abortion law would be undone if Congress passed the Women’s Health Protection Act, which reinstates the protections of Roe v Wade nationally. Speaker Pelosi believes she can get the bill through the House. It’s unclear whether all 50 Democrats in the Senate would vote for it. But a handful of Republicans also claim to be pro-choice — here’s a chance to redeem yourself, Senator Collins — so the bill should get a majority, if it comes to a vote.

But it won’t come to a vote, because of the filibuster. A woman’s right to choose is yet another price the country must pay for Senator Manchin’s and Senator Sinema’s attachment to this time-dishonored Senate tradition, because the WHPA clearly can’t muster a 60-vote supermajority.

The Department of Justice could also do something.

Law professor Lawrence Tribe explains: It turns out the country has previously faced the problem of states turning a blind eye to (or even encouraging) vigilantes trying to intimidate Americans out of exercising their constitutional rights. In that previous era, Congress responded by passing the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which is still on the books.

Section 242 of the federal criminal code makes it a crime for those who, “under color of law,” willfully deprive individuals “of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” … In addition, Section 241 of the federal criminal code makes it an even more serious crime for “two or more persons” to agree to “oppress, threaten, or intimidate” anyone “in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same.” This crime may be committed even by individuals not found to be acting “under color of law” but as purely private vigilantes, as long as they’re acting in concert with others.

Tribe believes that using the KKK Act to protect abortion rights in Texas would be “in tune not just with the letter but the spirit the law”. He asserts that we have now reached the point where “the need to disarm those who cynically undermine constitutional rights while ducking all normal avenues for challenging their assault on the rule of law becomes paramount.”

Ordinary people can monkey-wrench the enforcement process.

A campaign to spam websites asking for tips on Texas abortions is taking off. We’ll see if this is just a snap reaction or if it has staying power.

If any pro-life folks think women’s-rights defenders are playing dirty, let me point out that so far no one is using the kinds of tactics the pro-life movement has long used against abortion clinics. No one is bombing their offices or threatening their workers with violence, because (unlike the pro-life movement) the pro-choice movement doesn’t have a terrorist wing.

As satisfying as monkey-wrenching might be, though, it probably won’t make much difference. Even if monkey-wrenchers make vigilante lawsuits harder to assemble, abortion clinics and other support services are already being shut down by the threat of such lawsuits, even if suits have not yet been filed.

Texas has made rape a viable reproduction strategy.

If you are a man who is unable or unwilling to convince any woman to bear your children voluntarily, you can still win the evolutionary battle to pass on your genes by committing enough rapes. Eventually you may wind up in jail, but your descendants will thank you. They will also thank the Evangelical Christians who paved the way for you.

The big news this week was the Supreme Court’s refusal to block Texas’ abortion-banning law. This was a backhanded way to subvert Roe v Wade, and other red states are already moving to copy Texas. There’s a lot to say about this situation — legally, politically, and socially — and there is no shortage of people already writing about it.

With that in mind, I have decided to take this blog’s name literally and do some sifting. Rather than write a long essay of my own, I’m pulling together what other people are saying as concisely as I can. So the featured post will be “[N] Observations about Abortion, Texas, and the Supreme Court”. N is currently up to 12, and I think I may stop there. The post should be out shortly.

Restoring the Roe rights is now another thing Democrats could do, if not for the filibuster. The weekly summary will make a list of these costs of the filibuster.

The summary will also examine the growing number of examples of Republican leaders embracing gangsterism and violence, including Kevin McCarthy threatening telecommunication companies with vague consequences if they cooperate with the investigation of January 6, and Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s threat of “bloodshed” if elections “continue to be stolen”. (Since no elections have been stolen, Democrats can’t avoid this bloodshed by not stealing them. But they could avoid it by not winning, which seems to be Cawthorn’s point.)

Hurricane Ida ravaging the Gulf coast makes this week’s Covid numbers hard to interpret. (Reported infections on the coast are down, but what does that mean?) The summary will include a few other odds and ends, before closing with a more kinetic variation on the domino principle: stick bomb explosions. That should be out before noon.

What was a decision you’ve had to make which was one-of-a-kind?  Marriage, job, relocation, retirement, divorce, major vacation - etc.   Did you actually think it through, weighing the pros and cons of all sorts ?  Did you ask the advice/opinion of friends and family? Did you just go with the flow and take the first job, proposal, house, or whatever? 

Most of the important decisions I have made in my life I made alone. I asked for advice, opinions, thoughts, feedback and most of it was wrong. Several of the more authoritative people giving me advice not only were wrong, but dead wrong in retrospect which goes to show me that decisions made by groups often are wrong.

In his book Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote, “Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it’s the rule.” In other words, wisdom can go out the window when individuals form groups.  When we’re solo, we’re usually rational: en masse, not so much.

Reading the current news should give one pause. Was it a good idea to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq? Were there weapons of mass destruction? Was Covid-19 over in the Spring of 2020 when the weather warmed up. Is it lifesaving to get the Covid-19 vaccine? And I'm sure you can come up with examples of your own when you and your family, community, state were led astray by the group.

I agree with Nietzsche that alone people make better decisions than when they are in groups. Have I ever been wrong when I made a lone decision? Yes, many times, and I always learned from it and made better decisions the next time I was in similar situations.

The Solomon Asch experiments and the Stanley Milgram experiments, two classics in Social Psychology, are very instructive.

Note:  It was my privilege to be asked to speak—and to host one year—from 2015 to 2019 at the annual Labor Day Event on Woodstock Square sponsored by McHenry County Progressives.  Today we will look back at the meat of my talk in 2016—a Presidential election year that turned out to have disastrous results.  Specifics about that race are now dated, but the themes they represent are all back this year, as you can read.  My remarks on the working class virtue of solidarity were adapted from earlier material, including one of my Labor Day sermons at the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock.

We gathered here last year [2015] for the first time, a small band of folks called together by some local fans of Bernie Sanders who wanted to celebrate his hero Eugene V. Debs and his connection to Woodstock.  As a fan of both, an old Wobbly, and a soapboxer, I was thrilled to be asked to participate.

A lot has happened in the last year and here we are again.  Bernie Sanders, thanks to folks like those who organized the Labor Day event, went from being an obscure longshot, to the leader of a wide and deep political revolution, and came tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic Party nomination.  When he didn’t some folks were heartbroken, other mad.  Some picked up their toys and went home in a sulk and huff.  Some picked up Bernie’s challenge to keep the Revolution going by going deep and wide—running for local office and trying to recapture Congress from troglodyte Republicans.  That’s what the folks here in McHenry County have done.

Some folks swore that no matter what they would never vote for Hillary Clinton, who apparently has horns and is the spawn of Satan, no matter what, no way, no how.  Others have either swallowed hard and followed Bernie’s appeal and decided to vote for Hillary, or with more enthusiasm vowed to actively work for her election along with the rest of the Democratic ticket.

People who were comrades in the campaign struggle a couple of months ago but are on opposite sides of the Hillary divide, are hurling invectives at one another, denouncing each other as traitors or saboteurs.  Relationships have been shattered.  That longed for political revolution is crippled by dissention.

Meanwhile genuine naked fascism has arisen as a mass movement and swallowed the traditional conservative party.  Ordinary Americans who have seen their lives and futures sacrificed time and again to corporate greed have been taught to blame their woes on a rotating cast of others—Mexicans and emigrants this week, Muslims and refugees next, women, gays, Black lives Matter protesters, scientists, the sick and the elderly.  Violence is in the air like the whiff of gunpowder.

Considering all this, on this Labor Day I want to commend to you the working class virtue of solidarity even if you have never considered yourself a worker. 

First we need to consider what solidarity is not….

Solidarity is not sympathy.  Sympathy is a passive emotion.  It also implies a separation from the object of sympathy and can teeter on pity, which is just sympathy tinged with revulsion. Empathy might be closer to the meaning in that it implies a common understanding of the distress.  But empathy is also passive.  Solidarity demands action.

Solidarity is not charity.  Charity implies a power and privilege differential.  The more powerful and more privileged deign to give to the less fortunate who are expected to respond with appropriate gratitude and humility.  Solidarity is mutual aid among equals.

Solidarity is not altruism.  Altruism is supposedly selfless giving requiring sacrifice but expecting no reward—except perhaps praise for being saint-like.  Solidarity recognizes the commonality of our conditions and expects to receive support by right as well as give it.

Solidarity is not family.  Families—and by extension surrogate families like clans, nations, religions, races and others—are expected to support their members out of blood obligation.  Solidarity demands respect for commonality with the other.  Solidarity with the stranger dismantles walls and promotes peace instead of a mad scramble over scarce resources.

Solidarity is not utopian.  Utopians conjure up sweet dreams of the perfect.  Utopians may simply drift on in the opium cloud of that dream. More dangerously, some utopians construct rigid ideologies around their vision which eventually require the ruthless suppression of anything and anyone not in conformity to that ideology.  Solidarity is rooted in the common realities we face together and is interested in addressing the roots of the problems as well as ameliorating the immediate effects.

Solidarity is not all warm and fuzzy.  Warm and fuzzy denies oppression.  Solidarity recognizes that there are those whose own narrow self-interest causes them to exploit, subjugate, and abuse others.  And solidarity demands common action to defend against such depredations and—yes—boldly to ultimately defeat the oppressors.

Solidarity is a recognition of our place in humanity, an ethic, and an active response to our common interests.

Solidarity enlarges our communities, builds bridges of respect that can span differences.  It does not demand lock-step conformity to some ideological purity to act together in mutual support.  It requires listening, really listening and not just waiting our turn to deliver a lecture.  When generations of feminists support Hillary Clinton passionately it means not sneering that they are voting their vaginas, but understanding why and ultimately standing with them just as we hope that they will stand with us for the dismantlement of corporate power. 

Solidarity requires humility and taking the risk of having our fragile identities challenged.  We cannot give more than lip service to Black Lives Matter unless we understand and take ownership of the White privilege understanding it is not a moral flaw but a condition we are born to.  By breaking down our defenses we can collaborate in our mutual liberation with respect and understanding.

Most of all, solidarity requires commitment and action.  There are no sidelines, no room for mere cheerleaders.  Each and every one of us are called to put our bodies and our lives on the line again and again in some meaningful ways.  And we are buoyed by the knowledge that others are prepared to do the same for us.

Can we make a promise this Labor Day to commit to the working class virtue of solidarity?  Can we face the challenges not just of the coming elections, but in defending women’s bodies and choice, dismantlement the new slavery of mass incarceration, and standing in the Spirit Camp of the Standing Rock Sioux as they defend all of our water.  There is a lot to do.  No individual can do it all. But we can all do something.

In the words of Ralph Chaplin in the great anthem of the Working Class:

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold;

Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old,

For the Union makes us strong!

Another story for liberal religious kids. I think I originally wrote this story for the First Parish in Watertown, Mass., back in the mid 1990s. I rewrote it in 2004 when I was at the UU Society of Geneva, Ill., and then forgot about it. Here’s the 2004 version:

Once upon a time, about a hundred and fifty years ago in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, a family lived in a house they called “Apple Slump.” There were four children in the family, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, along with their father, Mr. March, and Marmee, their mother. At the time this story takes place, Mr. March was far away, serving in the army during the Civil War.

Jo had long, chestnut-colored hair. She was a tall tomboy who didn’t really like being a girl. Jo also had a terrible temper; she had a hard time controlling their anger. But Jo figured out a way to keep her temper under control. She had what I think of as a “mood pillow.” 

“Apple Slump,” the house that the March family lived in, was a big, old, rambling New England farmhouse. Jo thought the best room in the house was the garret, a room up in the attic that had a nice, sunny window. Next to the window stood an old sofa.

The sofa was long, and broad, and low. It had been the perfect thing for the girls to play on when they were little. They had slept on it, ridden on the arms as if they were horses, and crawled under it pretending they were animals. As they got older, they had long, serious talks sitting on it, they lay down and dreamed daydreams on it.

Jo liked the sofa more than the other girls. It was her favorite place to read. She would curl up in one corner with a good book, and half a dozen russet apples to eat. As she sat reading and eating her apples, a tame little rat would stick its head out and enjoy her quiet company.

But sometimes Jo went up into the garret for a different reason. She had a terrible temper, and sometimes she would get in a horrible nasty mood. Sometimes, when she was in a particularly bad mood, she just needed to be alone.

She would run up into the garret, and pick up the pillow that was on the sofa. This was an old, hard, round pillow shaped liked a sausage. This repulsive-looking old thing was her special property. If she stood it on its end, that was a sign that any one of her sisters, or her best friend Laurence, or her mother, was allowed to come and sit down next to her on the sofa and chat; but if it lay flat across the sofa, “woe to the man, woman, or child who dared disturb it!” When they were younger, her sisters and Laurence had been pummeled mercilessly by this pillow, and now they knew better than to try to sit next to Jo when it lay flat.

I call this her “mood pillow,” and I think it’s a great idea. When Jo was in a bad mood, or angry about something, or when she just needed to be alone, she could use the pillow to let her family and friends know that they should leave her alone for a while. That way, she wouldn’t hurt those around her when she was in a bad mood.

When you’re in a bad mood, what do you do to keep from hurting those around you?

Affirming and promoting truth about public health

The mission of Unitarian Universalism is to nurture the true, the good, and the beautiful in the lives of its adherents and its collaborative partners around the planet. How has UU encouraged the seeking of truth in the time of Covid-19? To what extent have congregations been a source of information and the implementation of practices to contain and mitigate the spread of the virus?

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Has the implementation of this fourth principle had a beneficial influence on the decision making of its members and the communities within which the congregation resides? There seems to be little evidence of the impact of truth especially in red states where governmental policies and the media is filled with misinformation leading people astray. It seems strange that UU leaders have not spoken out more visibly about ways of discerning the truth in the midst of increased community polarization.

Reasonable voices are needed to lead communities to beneficial public health practices based on the scientific knowledge that is available. Could the church be a community leader who informs people and helps them develop the skills to interact with their neighbors and community institutions so that practices based on truth and reason be implemented?

Unfortunately, too many UU churches and the Association have been preoccupied with social justice issues rather than more immediate health challenges affecting the bodies of their members and the people with whom their members interact.

The opportunity to highlight the search for truth in the public health sector has by and large been missed and it is time, with the third wave of Covid infections by the Delta and Lambda variants, for UU congregations to assess, plan, and implement public health activities which impact the physical health of their members and the communities they serve.

This sermon was preached at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Huntington on 9/5/21 as part of a service of meditation and contemplation following a historic week.

Happy Rosh Hashanah all. Shana Tova! A good and sweet year to us all. In the Jewish calendar, we begin a new year; returning once again to a time of reflection, a time of atonement, a time of seeking out those we have wronged, and seeking to make amends, face to face. It’s a ritual that we return to year after year. Sacred ritual has a power to it that transcends human generations. I marvel at the rituals we have been enacting millennia after millennia. That which the human community does in concert, again and again, takes on a sense of eternity. It seeks to encounter the moment between the moments that the poet T.S. Eliot famously penned. The world will continue its spin, our days and lives will grow long and short, from coffee spoon to coffee spoon, but these moments of ritual, punctuate the routine. The rote becomes pierced, and one moment stands outs, amongst all the rest. When I hear the shofar be blown each year, it quickens my spirit. Time seems to shorten and stretch, to pause before eternity, knowing it will pass in a breath or two. We can return to this still point, again and again, but we can’t linger. It’s ever before us, but never any less urgent.

And it is in these still points, in the return to the Shofar, the return to rituals and community, that we innervate, or re-energize our spirits after times of hardship. And as we heard Tomo Hillbo’s wisdom earlier in the service– the thorns, whether we want them there or not, sometimes give cover for something new to grow. What will grow in this new year?

Today’s message will be more of a longer spoken piece broken up with song and meditation. We have all witnessed so much this week in our communal story. The hurricanes and tropical storms, the end to a 20 years war with little clarity on what’s next, and the stretching of Christian Theocratic Fascism in Texas as a springboard for too many other states. This is a service of contemplation and song, of the sweetness of the possibility of a new year found in this Holiest of Days in the Jewish calendar, and a time of witness for the labors of this week.

We begin with the storms. I have no answers now. But I do know we need to address where are hearts and spirits are after yet another historic hurricane. We can pray for all the people impacted, and there still needs to be a word for us as well. Many of us here lived through our own storms. Hurricane Sandy was devastating. Neighborhoods were destroyed, people lost their lives. Several of our own members lost their homes, or waited years for them to be fully repaired. Every massive hurricane that comes, can bring us back to that place again where we saw horror. I remember living by the power station that blew on the East River in NYC at the time. We wouldn’t know it for 4 days, when we could finally leave our Ave B apartment, but one of the piers on the East river had floated across a wide park and 4 avenues to rest near us. I stop watching the news when I learn of massive hurricanes in other parts of the world, until it’s over and there’s something we might be able to do to help those in need. It’s just too retraumatizing. If this applies to you, try to just turn off the weather channel if it’s not an immediate need for your own safety; it could be doing you harm. And I know some of us were hunkering down in our basements a few days ago, due to Tornado warnings. Every few hours, we were getting the emergency alerts for flash flooding. With all the thousand things that are going on in the world, that high pitched sound seems to be wearing all in its own, and cuts through to be just too much.

All of that is very real. It can be physically dangerous, and assuredly is, and it is also spiritually enervating. And for those that hear this message now, or read it later, we are through it. If your home took damages or you are in need, and you need help, please reach out. Our community will partner with you to figure out how to help.

The song we are about to hear, and we’ll return to it again one more time, has been written onto the tablet of my heart when it comes to the after math of storms. Those 4 days later, after Sandy, when we could finally descend 11 stories from our apartment, because the East River had finally receded enough to go outside; we walked around our neighborhood and there was massive destruction in the East Village. But we managed to find a patch of rose bushes in our public garden that were unscathed and fully in bloom. Join with us at home in singing, or sit back and meditate into the song.

… (queue I know this Rose will Open)…

We have a shared pain in two historic moments this past week. The last of our soldiers have left Afghanistan – a war that has seen 4 different presidential administrations – and images of Afghani’s desperately trying to flee the country before the arrival of the Taliban. 46,000 civilians have been killed by all sides over these past 20 years.

And in Texas, we see again, the dangerous practices of Christian Theocracy. Women (and all those with a uterus) are being denied their constitutional rights, and their religious rights, to have control over their own bodies.  I call it Christian in name only, for it does not resemble the teachings of Jesus in any fashion whatsoever. Jesus was on the side of the immigrant, the refugee, peace, healing, the most vulnerable. None of his core teaching are honored by American Christian Theocracy. As the old quote goes, fascism will come draped in a flag and bearing the cross. And this new Texas law, is about power, pure and simple – not about ethics or morality.

I put these two historic moments together now because they resonate in painful ways. It’s hard to know what will come next. I know in the States, it will mean for us to organize, organize, organize. I recently read of Rev. Daniel Kanter, the senior minister of our large church in Dallas, Texas, say to the effect (and I’m only slightly paraphrasing here), that ‘Unitarian Universalism needs to be a firewall against harmful religion here.’ (end paraphrase.) And this blending of partisan politics and religion is dangerously harmful for medical reasons, for emotional reasons, for reasons of abuse, and personal agency, and on and on.

I also am seeing a disturbing trend of soundbytes, and pundits, and memes suggesting that Texas is our Taliban. That’s Islamophobic, although I get what the point is meant to mean. Yet, it lets us off the hook for our own White Supremacist Christian Theocracy. We need to name the problem for what it is, or we won’t solve the problem. Pretending it’s something that it’s not weakens are effectiveness. And we are going into a time, or continuing into a time, where we need to be very, very effective – before this spreads to other states. 

And we know how to be effective; we saw it in our last UU the Vote. The Rev. Daniel Kanter, who I just paraphrased, serves the very UU church that helped sponsor the plaintiff in Roe v Wade. We know how to be effective.

Join with us at home in singing, or sit back and meditate into the song.

… (queue I know this Rose will Open)…

I’ll close with the words of my colleague, Rev. Joanna Fontaine Crawford who also serves in Texas: 

Spirit of Life, God of Many Names, Source of Love,

As Summer slowly comes to close, and the air turns toward crisp,

help us to find a breath before the crush of the year of work and learning returns anew.

Teach us to pace ourselves;

to remember to find times of quiet and stillness;

to appreciate one another,

returning to the places that nourish our souls

so that when we reach out,

when strive for family and home,

we do so knowing who we are,

with kindness and care.

In the life of our nation, we remember this Labor Day weekend,

all the activists and organizers who helped lift our country up to be its higher self;

through offering more fair work,

both in time and in safety.

May we find new ways to build an economy that treats us all with equity and compassion.

We especially hold in our hearts this hour the refugees from Afghanistan who are fleeing the return of the Taliban to power, after our 20 years war.

Mother of Grace, teach the nations new ways to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable with speed and diligence. We ceaselessly pray for this.

May our hearts not be hardened to the plight of those far from our gaze.

And we pray that our own nation, built upon the dreams and struggles of generations of immigrants and refugees,

find the spirit to renew our former pledge to all the tired,

and all the wretched in need – with a sense of humbleness;

For we have forgotten where we came from,

when we ignore another who is lost and far from home.

We hold in our hearts all those impacted by Hurricane Ida, which ravaged New Orleans and the surrounding regions, on the 16th anniversary of Katrina. We hear this is the worst storm to hit the area since the 1800’s. May we stay present to the immediate needs of our neighbors hit hardest, and may our nation commit to addressing the root causes of global climate change. It’s impacts spread so far north even into our corners where our region experienced numerous tornadoes – far from normal to us.

And we grieve for the state of Texas, which through partisan chicanery, has undermined a core democratic principle of our nation, taking away the rights of women to have full agency over their own bodies. Inspire us to channel our rage into organizing, to stoke hope and commitment, and connection.

And through this all – let us remember Tomo Hillbo’s widom from moments ago – that the thorns, whether we want them there or not, sometimes give cover for something new to grow. In the spirit of Rosh Hashana, and this sweet new year, amidst such a fraught time, may we find sweetness in how we grow among these many thorns so that new life can thrive after a rough year has passed.

One of the things that has helped me to continue push my limits with exercising is my Apple watch. I used to have a Fitbit but it died. I like the Apple watch much better, although you need an iPhone to go with it and as it ages there is never enough memory for the updates. What I like most (except for the “Dick Tracy” style phone calls which I love) is that the incentive goals change over time, depending on what exercise levels you are currently meeting. I have met all the mostly challenge goals this year, except for November. I can’t remember why I didn’t meet that one or what it was. This month, my watch wants me to walk or hike a total of 149.8 miles. In May (the last time the challenge was in miles), I only needed 145.8 miles to meet the challenge. I also try to close all 3 activity rings each day. My current streak for doing so is 158 days.

None of this does the complete trick to maintain my weight, of course. I also have to watch what and how much I eat. And that is a struggle, a harder one than walking 150 miles in a month. Particularly after a long hike, I feel entitled to a calorie heavy meal. We did 11 miles on Friday so I had steak frites, two martinis, and split a dessert for dinner. It was wonderful, but my weight is up again this week. I am still bouncing around 150, however, so no panic, just some continuing concern. Maybe there is a different balance I need to find. Maybe slightly less exercise? When I exercise more than usual I get hungrier than usual and can too easily eat more than I actually need. So maybe the steak frites were OK, but also maybe I should have had only one martini. Or maybe, instead, next time I can just skip the olives. Or only have one olive in each martini. Every little bit helps – AND a sense of humor is ALWAYS important!

L’Chaim!

My average weight this week is up 1.2 pounds for a total loss of 171.4

Tomorrow is officially Labor Day in the United States, a Federal Holidaycelebrated on the first Monday of September since 1894.  For most people it is just the last hurrah of summer, an occasion for one last cookout and the gateway to fall and football season.  In most cities and towns, the labor movement is not even perfunctorily acknowledged.  The press uses the occasion to annually either write the obituary of unions or to denounce them as powerful and greedy bullies, depending on the political inclination of the outlet.

While most of us working schlumps are grateful for the day off (if we get one), I for one, wish I could officially celebrate Labor Day with virtually the whole rest of the world on May 1.  International Labor Day was proclaimed by the Second International in honor of the memory of Chicago’s Haymarket Martyrs at the suggestion of none other than American Federation of Labor (AFL) chief Samuel Gompers himself and which quickly spread around the world.  American unions celebrated it too.

But within just a few years Gompers was at the heart of a deal that substituted the September observance for May Day, a few crumbs from the Boss’s table, and a pat on the head by the Civic Federation in exchange for a promise to oppose labor radicalism and the growth of industrial style unionism in rapidly expanding basic heavy and the extractive industries—mining, forestry, agriculture, etc.

It is true that a September Labor Day observance pre-dated the 1886 Haymarket Affair.  In 1882 the New York Central Labor Union, made up of skilled craft unions belonging to a prototype of the AFL and lodgesof the rival Knights of Laborcooperated in a call for a giant parade followed by picnics, games and amusements, and educational talks.  It was designed to showcase the prideand power of the labor movement and also to press for the chief demand of labor reformers—the Eight Hour Day—the same causethat would be marked by an attempted nationwide General Strike on May 1, 1886, an event that led up the attackby police on a worker’s rally in Chicago’s Haymarket on May 4 and the bomb blast blamed on the mostly German and anarchist leaders of the local labor movement.

New York City officials, eager to appeaseworkers after a number of local strikes were suppressed with violence, gave their official approval to the parade.  On September 5, 1882 an estimated 30,000 workers marched in military order behind elaborate banners representing local unions of all of the trades, job shops, and Knights of Labor lodges.  It was an impressive display, but despite later claims by the AFL that observance of Labor Day spread quickly, only a few other cities, mostly in New York, began holding September celebrations. 

In the meantime, huge May Day parades and rallies spread across the country.  But the late 1880s and early 1890s were the beginning of a nearly 40 year period of virtual open class warfare with worker’s strikes being violently suppressed by local, state, and federal authoritiesand armies of private goonsand strikebreakers.  And workers often fought back with equal violence.  Episodes like the Homestead Steel Strike with its running gun battles between Pinkertons and workers, the nationwide Pullman Strike of 1882, and virtually continuous battles in the coal fields and hard rock mines nationwide, made many fear for revolution or civil war.

Democratic President Grover Cleveland, who ordered out the Army to crush the Pullman Strike, wanted a symbolic peace offering to Labor without actually granting the movement any of its demands. 

Republican king pin Ohio Senator Marc Hanna, soon to anoint William McKinley as the next President, was even more ambitious—he proposed a pact of cooperation between capital and “responsible labor.”  He offered Gompers, the Cigar Roller’s Union chief who headed the AFL, a seat in his new Civic Federationalongside the robber barons and captains of industry.  Hanna did not make the same offer to Grand Master Workman Terrance V. Powderlyof the Knights of Labor, who personally opposed strikes and advocated arbitration of disputes, because the members of Knights lodges included unskilled workers clamoring for recognition in heavy industry.  Gompers AFL would be allowed to pursue organizing skilled workers strictly by trade but not organize the great mass of unskilled, largely immigrantworkers.  Gompers would also be called on to use his unions to oppose labor radicalism, and even to break strikes led by unions outside the grand agreement.

With Gompers in his pocket, Hanna engineered enough Republican support in Congress to get Cleveland’s official Labor Day proposal passed.  Cleveland signed it in to law just six days after Eugene V. Debs’s industrial union of railroad workers was smashed in the end of the Pullman Strike. 

Within a few years all states either aligned their existing Labor celebrations with the Federal holiday or enacted state proclamations echoing the U.S. call. 

Meanwhile authorities everywhere tried to suppress May Day observances, which continued to be supported by militant unionists and radicals of every sort—social democrats, anarchists, and Marxists.  The Knights of Labor withered away, but aggressive industrial unions, especially in the mining industry, continued to fight both the bosses and the AFL’s attempt to divide the aristocracy oflabor from the mass rank and file.  In little more than a decade the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) would be formed to intensify that battle.

During the Depression and the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrats became the party of labor.   Labor Day became the official kick-offof Democratic election campaigns. Labor Day parades and rallies often seemed more of a platform to launch candidacies than a labor union celebration.

Even that has faded as the percentage of Americans in unions continued to shrink year after year after a high tide in the early ‘60’s.  By the Clinton era, Democrats continued to get support from labor, but seemed to try to disassociatethemselves from it, shunning identification as the party for of labor in favor of being seen as the champion of the Middle Class.

As half-assed a holiday as Labor Day is, I hope we all will take a moment to thank the American Labor movement for largely creating that Middle Class.

Please join us on Sunday (5 September 2021) at 9:00 AM for our adult religious education class via Zoom.

We have completed our White Fragility book study group using the book by Robin DiAngelo.

This week we continue our exploration of the 8th principle and anti-racism as we look at environmental racism in the US.

Rev. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign calls on us to end the silos that have so often been characteristic of the movement to remediate climate change and other social justice movements.

If we Unitarian Universalists truly believe in the interdependent web of all existence, we need to take a hard and honest look at how climate change along with all the related threats to our environment affect us all but affect most severely those who are already most marginalized among us.

All Souls Director of Religious Education Susan Caldwell will be setting up parent meetings at various times next week with the goal of offering convenient times for everyone to participate.

We want to hear what works best for your family as we start the year in religious education.

Watch our website and the All Souls Religious Education Facebook Group for updates.

Our September 2021 Give-Away-the-Plate recipient is North Louisiana Interfaith.

North Louisiana Interfaith is a non-partisan political organization made up of religious congregations, non-profits, and other institutions throughout Northwest Louisiana.

All Souls has been a member congregation since 2005.

Interfaith leaders work together on issues that most concern the people in our institutions which arise out of house meetings where we listen to each other’s stories.

We work on issues at the local level and statewide level through our affiliate organization Together Louisiana.

Two ways to donate:

Online — Go to our donation site using this link.  If you are paying your pledge, select “2021 Pledges” and enter that amount for your pledge contribution.  Then select “Collection Plate” to give the amount you would like to give to North Louisiana Interfaith.  All online collection plate contributions for the month of September 2021 will go to North Louisiana Interfaith.

Offline — Please send your give away the plate contribution checks to All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, 9449 Ellerbe Road, Shreveport LA  71106.  Please put “North Louisiana Interfaith” on the memo line of the check if  you want to have 100% of this check go to North Louisiana Interfaith.  If you want less than 100% of the check to go to North Louisiana Interfaith, please put the amount you want going to North Louisiana Interfaith on the memo line.

 UUA President Susan Frederick-Gray made a speech on 09/02/21 about something she calls "Ingathering". She reviews the obvious impact that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on congregations. There is no question that the experience of "church" has changed for most people from all religions and denominations around the world.

And where does this experience of the social disruption leave us UUs as a matter of faith? There was not much described. The statement seems to be more about cheerleading and maintaining organizational morale than about carrying out the mission of nurturing spiritual development in individuals, groups, communities and the world.

Unitarian Universalism is more than membership in a social club. It can be a lived faith which is actualized in our daily lives. How has our UU faith helped people manage themselves given the various stressors that the pandemic has contributed to the lives of individuals and communities?

Let me count the ways.

To be continued

In 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus went toe to toe in what Eisenhower feared could be the nation’s second Fort Sumner moment—a spark that could ignite a second Civil War.  All the ingredients were there including long building and bitter Southern resentment of Federal meddling in the cherished traditions of segregationand White supremacy,a defiant governor and inflamed White population, equally intransigent neighboring states that might leap at the opportunity to join a rebellion, and both executives had armed military forces under their command.

Under the circumstances it was understandable that the Republican President had significant qualms about taking confrontational action.  But the old general was deeply steeped in ideas of Constitutional responsibility, a chain of command, and adherence to the rule of law.  He might not have been wildly supportive of the Brown v. Board of Education decision that mandated and end to “separate but equal” public schools.  He might even have had qualms about its sweeping reach and effect on civil tranquility—Ike was never entirely clear on the depth of his personal commitment to Civil Rights.  But he was absolutely clear on the rule of law and considered it his sworn duty at President to uphold established law no matter the hazard. 

Faubus bet everything on the chance that a man born in Texas to a Virginia bred mother would not act against White people.  He would regret that gamble.

On September 4, 1957 Faubus mobilized the state National Guard to block 9Black students from beginning classes at Little Rock Central High School.  The nine students, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo, were all legally registered at the school after the local Board of Education had voted unanimously to follow the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and desegregate the school.

The local chapter of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) had carefully recruited the students, picking only outstanding students with excellent attendance records and “respectable” families. The Mothers’ League of Central High, a thinly disguised front for the White Capital Citizen’s Council, had appealed to Faubus in August to block the Board’s decision to integrate the school.  The Governor supported the group’s appeal for an emergency injunction to block integration to “prevent violence.”  Federal Judge Ronald Davies denied the request and ordered that school open with the students.

Faubus went on television on September 2, the eve of the scheduled opening of classes, to announce his call upof the Guard, again supposedly to prevent violence.  The School Board asked the nine students not to attend the first day of school, but Judge Davis ordered the Board to proceed on September 4.

Guardsmen circled the building, and a mob of hundreds of white protestors clogged the surrounding area.  Guardsmen turned back one group of students.  Fifteen year old Elizabeth Eckford, approaching alone toward a different entrance was also turned away.  As she turned to walk to a bus stop, she was surrounded by the mob.  “They moved closer and closer,” she later recalled, “...Somebody started yelling ... I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd—someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.”  She finally made her way to the bus stop and escaped, but her ordeal was captured by national television cameras and still photographers.

The Board again appealed to Judge Davies for a relief injunction.  He again refused and directed U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. to file a petition for an injunction against Faubus and officers of the Arkansas National Guard to prevent them from obstructing his court order to desegregate the school.

 As legal maneuvering continued, tension in the city mounted. On September 9 the Black students did get some supportfrom the Council of Church Women who asked the Governor to remove the troops and allow desegregation to proceed.  They announced a city-wide prayer service for September 12.  Members of the council were threatened with violence. 

Meanwhile Democratic Congressman Brook Hays arranged a meeting between the Governor and President Dwight D. Eisenhowerat his vacation home in Newport, Rhode Island.  Faubus refused to back down.

On September 20 Judge Davies issued a direct order to cease interfering with the enrolment of the Black students.  Faubus recalled the Guard and left the state for a Southern Governor’s Conferencewhere he hoped to rally support.

On Monday, September 23 Little Rock Police were left to contend with a snarling mob of over 1000 people. The Black students slipped into the building by a side entrance while the crowd was distracted bybeating four black reporters covering developments.  When the mob discovered that they were inside they threatened to storm the school.  Once again the nine students were sent home for “their own safety” with police protection.

Eisenhower had enough.  When Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann appealed for Federal support for his overwhelmed police, the President was ready to act.  He nationalized the Arkansas National Guard to take it out from under the command of the Governor although he was not entirely sure that senior Guard officers would obey the order or that the Guard troops might not mutiny and declare allegiance to their state. 

In a move unprecedented since Reconstruction, Eisenhower ordered the elite 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. 

His decision to use those troops was highly significant.  The 101st was based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky but several other units were nearer.  The bloated Army was near it peak of peace time manpower with the height of the Cold War and near universal service via the draft.  But only a handful of elite divisions were fully combat ready and more important highly disciplined under the most trusted officers.  And most of those were deployed with NATO in Germany or in Korea.  Other units were what might be called the Beetle Bailey Army, barely trained beyond basic and mired in the boredom of camp life.  They were viewed as an on-duty reserve that could be mobilized and trained in the event of a war crisis.  Some of those units might have been regarded as lax if deployed.  No one would think that of the Screaming Eagles.

The next day, September 27, troops took up positions and escorted the students into the building.

Federal troops continued to escort the students daily for a week.  The majority of the troops were withdrawn and duty transferred to the Guard under close supervision of Regular Army officers on October 1.  Students first attended school incivilian rather than military vehicles on October 25 and all Federal troops were finally withdrawn in November.

The students were enrolled, but their ordeal was far from over.  All were harassedand threatened by white students in the school.  Melba Petillo had acid thrown in her eyes. Minnijean Brown was assaulted several timesand eventually suspended and expelled for dropping a bowl of chili on an assailant in the lunchroom.  All students were completely ostracized by their white classmates.  School authorities eventually also suspended more than 100 white students and expelled four.

Despite the distraction, at the end of the school year Ernest Green became the first Black student tograduate from Central High.

But it was not over.  Faubus closed not only Central High but all four Little Rock high schools for the 1958-’59 term.  When courts ordered them re-opened in September of 1959 only two of the original Little Rock 9, Carlotta Walls and Jefferson Thomas, came back.  They both graduated in 1961.

Other Southern Governors, notably Alabama’s George Wallace would continue defy Federal school desegregation orders, but the knowledge that the government was willing to call out the Army to enforce the desegregation undoubtedly prevented much future violence.

The confrontation between Eisenhower and Faubus was portrayed in the 2012 film Lee Daniels’ The Butlerwith Robin Williams as Ike.  Faubus was never seen.

How do people practice their “spirituality”?

Everyone who has felt the power of truth, the kindness of goodness, or the loveliness of beauty has had an experience of spirit. The only reason such common yet profound experiences are not universally identified as spiritual is that our collective understanding of spiritual experience remains underdeveloped.

McIntosh, Steve. The Presence of the Infinite . Quest Books. P.2

People who report that they are “spiritual” but not “religious” usually have no articulate answer when asked what their statement means. What does it mean to say that one is “spiritual”?

It usually means that the person has some sort of apprehension of a Higher Power of some sort but this apprehension does not lead to any deliberate, purposeful, and intentional practice to cultivate more of the spiritual in their lives.

Steve McIntosh suggests in the passage above that people who seek the truth, do good things, and pause to savor beauty when they see it are practicing spirituality.

1. What do you think of these ideas about seeking truth, doing good, and savoring beauty as being spiritual practices?

2. When and how do you engage in these practices and what are the benefits you have experienced from doing so?

Infinite Transcendent Source

But as we will explore, what all authentic spiritual experiences have in common is this connection to a quality of being that is best described as infinite. Within the context of spiritual experience, the idea of the infinite includes not only a mathematical infinity of quantity—boundless, endless, unlimited, immeasurable, and eternal—but also a metaphysical infinity of quality—unified, whole, complete, perfect, self-sufficient, and largely beyond definition or conception. Yet even though the infinite is largely transconceptual and elusive, it can be directly experienced by humans.

McIntosh, Steve. The Presence of the Infinite . Quest Books. P. 1-2

Simply put, spirituality is our experience of our Transcendent Source. It is what UUs call the interdependent web of all existence.

1. When have you experienced your oneness with the Ground of Being?
2. How can you best describe it?
3. While this experience is personal, sometimes we share it with others. This experience has been called “empathic reverberation.” Jesus said, “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I will be.” Jesus is not talking about Jesus the person, Jesus is talking about Spirit as when He said, “I and the Father are One.” Have you experienced Oneness with others?

If you’re wondering how to help people who are being hit by Hurricane Ida, we’re here to help!

It can be hard to know who and what organizations to donate to because you obviously want financial resources to get to where it can be most useful. For those purposes, we’ve reached out to a few New Orleans community members that members of the BLUU OCB have long standing relationships with and asked which organizations or groups would they recommend contributing to. These are trusted sources that are distributing money on the ground currently or will be in the coming months. The recovery from Hurricane Ida is going to be a very long one.

BLUU will be continuing to vett and add to this list of groups and organizations.

A few notes about the listed groups and organizations:

*If you are able to and want to donate to mutual aid funds, these are a powerful way to quickly get money into the hands of individuals and families who need support immediately. They often don’t have arduous or complicated application and disbursement processes. These are also not tax-deductible donations.

*If you are wanting to support an organization, we will list a few options that are tax-deductible donations.

Please choose the organizations and groups that speak to you and your heart. We’ll be sharing these groups through posts on social media in the days ahead and hopefully giving a little bit of context or info for each one. Please share and invite others to support in this time of need.

Also please be aware that most organizations are being run right now by staffers or volunteers who have left the city. The city has no power and water is on a boil warning. So their websites may not reflect what has happened however their longstanding methods by which to donate are functioning and they will get the money. For many orgs you can follow on Instagram or elsewhere to be able to get updates.

BLUU has started an individual fund for students at George Washington Carver High School. Through a contact at the school we’ll be distributing funds raised to individual students through PayPal and Cash App. You can give to this specific effort by clicking here.

The House of Tulip is co-founded and led by trans folks and offers support services for trans and gender nonconforming communities, including some mutual aid. Please follow them on Instagram at @houseoftulipno and they have listed other ways to give (the usernames must be exact, sadly some people are trying to scam people by imitating and coming up with usernames that are close — but these are the correct ones AND if you want to be certain you can always give through their website):

CashApp: $HouseOfTulip

Venmo: @HouseofTulip

Paypal: Paypal.me/HouseOfTulip

Broad Community Connections is a community-led and community-based organization that is working on the revitalization of a historically Black neighborhood. They are gearing up to support those in need in the wake of Hurricane Ida. Including support of businesses.

The United Houma Nation There are many small and rural tribal nations that have been hit hard by the hurricane and will need support. Some tribal nations are offering mutual aid disbursements.

The Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe main page and the giving link here.

Imagine WaterWorks does many things including distributing mutual aid.

For more specific mutual aid giving opportunities please visit the following links displayed below from the Instagram account @mutualaiddisasterrelief

If you want to volunteer remotely, need assistance, or send supplies to Louisiana:

Please donate and help. The power is out across many areas of Louisiana. And people need help. You can also visit https://www.disasterassistance.gov/ for federal government assistance. On this site, you can look up a city and state or zip code to see if the area is currently declared a disaster due to flooding, wild fires, and hurricanes and apply for assistance.

Thomas Reese, a senior analyst with Religion News Service, who earned a doctorate in political science from UC Berkeley, has written a short and helpful essay analyzing the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Early in his essay, Reese points out that the Trump administration made an agreement with the Taliban declaring that the United States would be leaving, and that the Biden administration is finally implementing that agreement. (This was a helpful reminder to me here that both Democrats and Republicans agreed that it was time to leave Afghanistan; it must have seemed a truly hopeless situation if those two deeply polarized parties actually agreed we had to get out.) Moving quickly past blame and recriminations, Reese’s essay gets to what I think is the heart of the issue:

“What we and our allies should learn from Afghanistan, and what we should have learned from Vietnam, is that the United States military cannot save countries from themselves. If their leadership is corrupt, if their government does not have popular support, if the country is divided by warring ethnic or religious factions, if there is civil war, the American military cannot solve their problems. In fact, history tells us that American troops often make matters worse by using tactics that cause disproportionate collateral damage and by making the local military dependent on us.”

This will be hard for many Americans to hear, but it’s obviously true: our military can’t solve every problem. Our leadership, and our electorate, needs to learn this lesson before we get involved in yet another mess like Vietnam or Afghanistan. Reese ends his essay by advocating for morality in diplomacy:

“Political realists argue that morality has no place in foreign policy, but their tactics have consistently failed. It is time to try a moral strategy that uses diplomacy rather than guns, and fights corruption rather than tries to bribe elites to do our bidding.”

I agree with Reese. Back in the 1970s, the Unitarian Universalist church of my childhood was riven by conflict over Vietnam. Some members of the church thought the war in Vietnam was a moral stand against communism. Some church members thought the war in Vietnam propped up an immoral South Vietnamese regime and used immoral methods. When they called Dana Mclean Greeley as their new minister in 1971, they hoped for someone who would offer guidance out of this intra-congregational conflict. Greeley didn’t take sides on Vietnam. Instead he explained that in the nuclear era, war can no longer be considered a reasonable, sensible option. A few months after the United States pulled out of Vietnam, he preached a sermon which was even more pointed:

“War is insanity in this day and age. It is total destructiveness; it is total immorality; it is total waste. The end of war should be our goal today. Negotiation should be our commitment. We ourselves ought to be both wiser and more ethical than our fathers, but we are not.”

Back in 1975, Greeley called upon us to learn how to be ethical. Now in 2021, Reese calls upon us to be moral. I agree with them both. Rather than using the military to try to solve problems, our goal should be — as Greeley said so many years ago — to end all war.

On August 31, 1920 Station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan broadcastthe first news report Americans ever heard on that newfangled doohickey, radio.  The station had just gone on the air for the first time less than two weeks earlier, on August 20.  The Detroit News owned the infant operation but seemed either a little ashamed of it or unsure if they had just thrown good money into a mere fad.

In fact, the station was issued an amateur license by the United States Department of Commerce Bureau of Navigation, the agency then responsible for radio regulation, instead of the experimental license issued to other early commercial broadcasters.

The Scripps family owned newspaper hired Michael DeLisle Lyons, a teenage whiz kid and tinkerer to build a transmitter in the Detroit News building and had him apply for the amateur license in his own name. He built a transmitter licensed from a design by radio pioneer Lee de Forest.   Lyons was an employee Clarence “C. S”. Thompson, a New York City associate of de Forest and the owner of Radio News & Music, Inc.  which was attempting to market broadcast services to newspapers.  The Detroit station turned out to be their first and only customer.  As an amateur station it broadcast on the fringe of the available spectrum designated then as 200 meters, the equivalent of 1500 AM.  

Later that year young Lyons and his brother Frank built that nation’s first radios for police prowl cars for the city of Toledo, Ohio.  When in their first use of operation radio communications led to the quick arrest of a prowler and the story went national it, spurred other departments to adoptthe bulky, balky new technology.

The infant station’s news broadcasts were read by newspaper staffersand adapted from the content of the paper.  At first the company would not allow broadcast of any news that had not already hit the streets in print for fear of “giving away the product.”

Few homescould hear them anyway.  The audienceconsisted mostly of radio hobbyists including other amateur broadcasts who were becoming known as HAMs and those who built their own crystal sets.  Home receivers with amplificationand which did not require headphones were about five years in the futurewith the introduction of the vacuum tube.

Despite its limitations, the Scripps family was encouraged by a small but enthusiastic response.  They applied for a commercial license and on October 13, 1921, the station was assigned the call letters WBL broadcasting at 833 AM, with weather reports and other government reports broadcast at 619 AM.

On March 3, 1922 the stations call letters were changed to WWJ.  In the following year the Department of Commerce re-organized its assignments of frequencies and dropped the requirement for a separate frequency for weather and government reports.  WWJ’s was changed three times during the late 20’s before settling at 920 AM in 1929.  A war time shuffling of frequencies in 1941 moved the station to 950 AM at which it continues to broadcast to this day.

The station has maintained a regular schedule of news broadcast through all its incarnations of call letters, frequency or ownership to this day.  Since the mid-70’s the station, now a CBS Radio network affiliate, has broadcast as a 24 hour a day newsand talk station.  It remains a Detroit institution and is frequently the highest rated radio station in its market.

To state the obvious: There was no good way to lose Afghanistan to the Taliban. A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one. Either way, there was no hope of an end to the war that didn’t reveal our decades of folly, no matter how deeply America’s belief in its own enduring innocence demanded one.

– Ezra Klein, “Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew from Afghanistan Was the Problem“

This week’s featured post is “Power Move“, a review of Charles Blow’s book The Devil You Know.

This week everybody was talking about Afghanistan

Tomorrow is President Biden’s deadline for getting American forces out of Afghanistan. The US announced yesterday that it was ending its airlift of Afghans from the Kabul airport. It estimates that about 250 Americans are still to be removed, plus the forces protecting the airport, and that around 280 Americans have decided to stay for now. (Don’t ask me what they’re thinking.) 117,000 people, most of them Afghans, have been airlifted out of Afghanistan since August 14.

The Taliban has largely cooperated with this effort, but a suicide bomber from a rival Islamist group, ISIS-K, killed 180 people outside the airport Thursday, including 13 members of the US military. An American drone strike destroyed a suspected car bomb Sunday; at least nine civilians died in the explosion. Rockets were fired at the airport today, but no casualties were reported.

The reason there’s no featured post about Afghanistan this week is that I can’t improve on what Ezra Klein said.

As I discussed last week, it’s been maddening to watch so many of the architects of this 20-year disaster go unchallenged on TV while they pretend the only problem is the “competence” of the Biden administration. Apparently, everything would be fine if Biden had just kept the war going for a while longer. And even if he had to end it, there was some clean and clever way to get all the right people out before the roof fell in.

Klein isn’t buying it:

American policymakers and pundits routinely try to rescue the reputation of bad ideas by attributing their failure to poor execution. … Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure.

… I will not pretend that I know how we should have left Afghanistan. But neither do a lot of people dominating the airwaves right now. And the confident pronouncements to the contrary over the past two weeks leave me worried that America has learned little. We are still holding not just to the illusion of our control, but to the illusion of our knowledge.

He points out something I don’t hear anyone else saying: Afghanistan is an example of too much bipartisanship, rather than too much polarization.

At least for my adult life, on foreign policy, our political problem has been that the parties have agreed on too much, and dissenting voices have been shut out. That has allowed too much to go unquestioned, and too many failures to go uncorrected. It is telling that it is Biden who is taking the blame for America’s defeat in Afghanistan. The consequences come for those who admit America’s foreign policy failures and try to change course, not for those who instigate or perpetuate them.

The bipartisan trust in American power and good intentions leads us to imagine that our intervention can only do good, and that any part of the world that captures our attention will benefit. But Klein quotes Ben Rhodes’ observation that Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya are all arguably worse off than when we stepped in.

This is the deep lacuna in America’s foreign policy conversation: The American foreign policy establishment obsesses over the harms caused by our absence or withdrawal. But there’s no similar culpability for the harms we commit or that our presence creates. We are much quicker to blame ourselves for what we don’t do than what we do.

And finally, our fixation on military power causes us to overlook the non-military ways we could help others: We could aggressively vaccinate the people of poorer countries against Covid-19, or fight the perpetual plague of malaria. We could open our doors to refugees fleeing oppression. We could build schools. And we could do it all at a fraction of the cost of fighting a war.

If foreign-policy bipartisanship was to blame for getting us into Afghanistan, it’s gone now. Republicans have taken any cheap shots at Biden they could find, including calling for his resignation after Thursday’s suicide bombing.

Political leaders used to unite behind the president during foreign crises. (Recall the post 9-11 consensus, when President Bush’s approval briefly went over 90%.) Even moreso, former presidents used to avoid direct criticism of their successors. With that in mind, it’s hard to know how to respond to Trump’s current shamelessness. We expect it by now, so it’s not news. And yet, ignoring it doesn’t seem right either.

This week, Trump and his people have been doing everything they can to distance themselves from their own Afghan policy. Biden, after all, is just carrying out the agreement Mike Pompeo signed with the Taliban. If Biden’s withdrawal seems too abrupt, Trump wanted to leave even more abruptly: Last October he called for all our troops to be home by Christmas.

Now, of course, Trump is imagining that he would have handled all this differently. Not only would everyone have gotten out safely, without leaving any equipment behind, but we wouldn’t have given up the Bagram Air Base at all. “We would have had Bagram open because we always intended to keep it. … We should have kept Bagram because Bagram is between China. It has total access to China, Iran, and Afghanistan.”

Trump’s immaculate withdrawal plan is like his “beautiful” healthcare plan that would have covered everyone and been better and cheaper than Obamacare. It exists only in his fantasies, and in the minds of his gullible followers.

Remember: When Trump pulled our troops out of Syria, he didn’t rescue any of the Kurds who had helped us. He left equipment behind and abandoned bases which were then occupied by the Russians.

When you heard about Rep. Seth Moulton’s quick trip to Afghanistan, you may have thought, “I wonder if his constituents understand what that was all about.” Answer: No, we don’t. We also didn’t know what he was thinking when he ran for president or tried to oust Speaker Pelosi. My best theory is that some oracle once told him he had a grand destiny, and he’s been acting on that assumption ever since. But he should have gotten a second opinion.

and the pandemic

The summer surge of new cases continues to round off, as if approaching a peak. The two-week increase is now 20%, compared to 36% last week and over 60% the week before. The total number of Americans hospitalized is now over 100K, and still rising at the rate of 24% over two weeks. 30K of those are in either Florida or Texas, whose governors seem to be doing everything they can to help the virus spread.

Deaths are averaging just under 1300 per day, with about 450 in Florida or Texas. The death toll from the beginning of the pandemic is 637K, a number that resembles a major war.

The question now is whether the start of school (and the filling of college football stadiums throughout the land) will give the surge a new boost. Consider this anecdote from California:

An unvaccinated elementary school teacher who took off their mask to read to students ended up infecting more than half of them last May — and they went on to infect other students, family members and community members … In the classroom of 22 students, 12 became infected — including eight out of 10 students in the two front rows.

Examples like this point out the common sense behind masking: If some barrier had just slowed down the virus particles coming out of the teacher’s mouth, maybe at least the kids in the second row would have been safe.

But why mask or vaccinate when you can use a “miracle cure” intended for farm animals? The ivermectin craze has really gotten out of hand. It’s always hard to get reliable estimates of the number of people who try an underground remedy, but it looks like a lot of folks.

A recent study examining trends in ivermectin dispensing from outpatient retail pharmacies in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic showed an increase from an average of 3,600 prescriptions per week at the prepandemic baseline (March 16, 2019–March 13, 2020) to a peak of 39,000 prescriptions in the week ending on January 8, 2021.1 Since early July 2021, outpatient ivermectin dispensing has again begun to rapidly increase, reaching more than 88,000 prescriptions in the week ending August 13, 2021. This represents a 24-fold increase from the pre-pandemic baseline.

And that’s just the people who are getting the human version. (Ivermectin has a legitimate use as an anti-parasitic drug; that’s probably what the pre-pandemic 3,600 prescriptions per week were.) The drug is also sold as a de-wormer for farm animals — and it’s flying off the shelves.

Many feed stores across North Texas told WFAA they are sold out of ivermectin. [farm store operator Matt] Meredith said his supplier told him they can’t get it for him. “Nobody’s got it,” Meredith said. “You can’t even order it online.”

Poison-control centers in Texas say their ivermectin calls have more than quintupled. That’s probably because:

The drugs produced for humans are different than the drug made for livestock, which is “highly concentrated and is toxic to people, and can cause serious harm,” the Mississippi State Department of Health said in an alert Monday.

If it has never occurred to you to dose yourself with some veterinary concoction, you may wonder what this is all about. Simply this: right-wing stupidity. Apparently, the people who think vaccines are unsafe and masks are a Marxist plot also think “Good old pig de-wormer. What harm could that do?”

The thought that ivermectin could have some use against Covid is not crazy in itself. The drug has anti-viral effects in a petri dish, but unfortunately tests on people haven’t panned out.

A quick look at this data suggests a reason why: The doses and concentrations necessary for antiviral activity are much higher than are safe for humans, and would be toxic to human life as well as viruses. If this sounds familiar it’s because the same misapplication of in vitro science has been used to promote hydroxychloroquine and disinfectants like bleach.

Funny that this article mentions hydroxychloroquine. The same group that pushed hydroxychloraquine — American’s Frontline Doctors (though their “About Us” page just mentions one doctor: founder Simone Gold; I don’t know who those other white-coated people are) — started pushing this too. Then Fox News chimed in, and Senator Ron Johnson, and the usual collection of know-nothings that your cousin Jerry follows on Facebook. And now people are stealing drugs from their sheep.

If there’s one thing conservatives hate, it’s when liberals imply that they’re stupid. But you know what? Liberals don’t do stupid shit like this. We just don’t. Back in the early days of the pandemic, we acted out our panic by wiping down our groceries before we put them away. It turned out to be a waste of effort, but at least it didn’t hurt anybody or stop us from doing sensible things too. I’ve never heard a Democrat say “I don’t need a vaccine, because I wipe down my groceries.”

So if you’re the kind of clear-thinking Republican who doesn’t like being lumped together with these yahoos, let me point something out: Hillary Clinton warned you. The point of her infamous “deplorables” speech was never that all Trump voters were deplorable. (Fox News turned it into that, but that wasn’t what she said.) That speech was targeted at people like you, and the point was: Look who you’re associating yourself with. In another 2016 campaign speech, she quoted a Mexican proverb: “Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are.”

So look at the horse-paste eaters, you smart, sophisticated Republicans. Those are your people.

Matt Yglesias calls attention to some interesting data from the Federal Reserve: Restaurant sales are now above pre-pandemic levels, but restaurant employment is still below pre-pandemic levels.

and the hurricane

Ida hit the Louisiana coast yesterday on the 16th anniversary of Katrina. CNN covers this kind of news much better than I do.

and the Supreme Court

As it had signaled it would do, the Supreme Court tossed out the Biden administration’s attempt to extend the pandemic eviction moratorium. The ruling doesn’t address the questions of whether a moratorium is a good idea, or is constitutional. It just disputes that existing law gives the CDC the power to declare one.

The Government contends that the first sentence of §361(a) gives the CDC broad authority to take whatever measures it deems necessary to control the spread of COVID–19, including issuing the moratorium. But the second sentence informs the grant of authority by illustrating the kinds of measures that could be necessary: inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of contaminated animals and articles. These measures directly relate to preventing the interstate spread of disease by identifying, isolating, and destroying the disease itself. The CDC’s moratorium, on the other hand, relates to interstate infection far more indirectly: If evictions occur, some subset of tenants might move from one State to another, and some subset of that group might do so while infected with COVID–19. …

We expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’ ”

I’m not in the habit of agreeing with the Court’s conservative majority, but I think they’ve got a point here. A year and a half into the pandemic, Congress has had plenty of time to either declare a long-term eviction moratorium itself, or to delegate that power to the CDC or some other agency. It hasn’t done so. The problem here isn’t the Supreme Court and it isn’t the Biden administration. As I’ve observed before, the dysfunction of Congress forces the other two branches to over-reach.

When considering an executive branch claim of power, it’s worth asking this hypothetical question: How would I feel about this power in the hands of an administration I didn’t like? If the CDC has broad authority to do whatever it finds necessary to deal with a public-health emergency, could a Trump-appointed CDC head have used that authority to, say, cancel the 2020 elections? I’m not sure, but the possibility creeps me out.

Also, we tend to think of landlords as rich corporations, and probably the owners of most rental properties are. But a lot of landlords are middle-class people who have a large chunk of their net worth invested in properties they rent to one or two households. (I live in an apartment attached to the back of a friend’s house. My wife and I are their only tenants. After moving to town when I was a toddler, my parents rented out the house on their 160-acre farm.) A nationwide eviction moratorium does a lot more than just stick it to the fat cats.

This week’s second important case concerned the Trump administration’s remain-in-Mexico plan for people seeking asylum at our Southern border. I’ve thought it was always questionable whether that policy really meets our treaty obligations to give refugees a hearing, but that wasn’t the issue here. The Biden administration has tried to end the program, but the State of Texas sued to keep it in place. Technically, the policy has been on hold anyway since March, 2020, due to Trump administration Covid restrictions at the border.

A district court granted Texas an injunction, keeping the policy in place while the legal process plays out. The administration asked for a stay of that injunction, and the Court denied it. The denial is just a paragraph, so there’s not a lot to go on here. Vox tries to flesh out what it all means, but comes to the conclusion that the decision makes no sense.

but I want to tell you about a book

The featured post reviews Charles Blow’s recent The Devil You Know: a Black power manifesto.

and you also might be interested in …

The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection is taking an aggressive approach. Wednesday it asked for documents from eight federal agencies. The word “sweeping” appeared in many articles about the requests, which centered on “archived communications from the Trump White House“. The Committee is also seeking records from Facebook and Google “on policy changes social media companies made, or failed to make, to address the spread of misinformation, violent extremism and foreign influence, including decisions to ban content.”

We don’t know yet whether anyone is going to fight these orders, and if so on what grounds.

The effort to sanction lawyers who filed baseless lawsuits in support of Trump’s Big Lie continues. Wednesday, a federal judge in Michigan ruled against seven Trump lawyers, including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood.

[US District Judge Linda] Parker is ordering the lawyers to reimburse the attorneys’ fees that the city of Detroit and Michigan state officials paid in seeking the sanctions. The lawyers must also take legal education classes, the judge said, and she is referring her decision to the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission, and “the appropriate disciplinary authority for the jurisdiction(s) where each attorney is admitted,” for potential disciplinary action.

Rudy Giuliani has already had his license suspended in DC and New York.

The gist of the judge’s opinion is that the lawyers made claims their affidavits didn’t support, failed to vet their affidavits for credibility, and made false claims about the laws they were invoking. Judge Parker wasn’t buying the lawyers claims of ignorance about the complaint they signed their names to or the flimsiness of the evidence they provided.

Plaintiffs’ counsel may not bury their heads in the sand and thereafter make affirmative proclamations about what occurred above ground.

… Although the First Amendment may allow Plaintiffs’ counsel to say what they desire on social media, in press conferences, or on television, federal courts are reserved for hearing genuine legal disputes which are well-grounded in fact and law.

The officer who shot Ashli Babbitt revealed his identity for the first time and did an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt.

Babbitt, the only person killed by police during the January 6 riot, has become the Horst Wessel of the violent Trumpists. Her shooting was captured on video, so there is no doubt what happened. She was part of a violent mob trying to break down a door to get into the House chamber, where many congresspeople were still present. Officer Michael Byrd was behind the door with gun drawn and clearly visible through the glass, when the window was broken and Babbitt began to climb through.

But Trump called the shooting a “murder” — so much for “Back the Blue” — and Babbitt is considered a martyr for the Trumpist cause.

Byrd argues that the shooting saved lives, which seems obvious to me.

The Boston Globe’s list of the 25 best TV episodes of the 21st century is a conversation starter. Your list may differ, but the main thing I gleaned from their list was an appreciation of just how much amazing TV there has been these last 21 years. I can’t think of any TV series from my youth that could compete with “The Wire”, “Mad Men”, “The Americans”, “Game of Thrones”, or “The Sopranos”.

One federally funded Covid program makes the “seamless summer” school lunch option available year-round. Rather than paying for free lunches for low-income students, the government offers free lunches to everyone. The program has a variety of goals, mostly relating to the unpredictability of food insecurity during the pandemic, but one effect is to remove the stigma of free lunches. You don’t have to announce that you’re poor in order to get one.

408 school districts in Wisconsin are eligible for the program, and one is opting out. Waukesha wants to go back to a system where 36% of kids get free lunches and the rest don’t.

Karin Rajnicek, a school board member, said the free program made it easy for families to “become spoiled.” Darren Clark, assistant superintendent for business services, said there could be a “slow addiction” to the service.

As a taxpayer, I suppose I ought to be horrified that some hedge-fund manager’s kid might be eating free fish sticks or sloppy joes on my dime. Strangely, I’m not.

and let’s close with something timely

The Holderness Family’s music parodies have been a great help in staying sane during the pandemic. As a body of work, their songs express the mood swings of an ordinary family muddling through a historically difficult time. This video makes Katy Perry’s “Firework” the platform for a rant against the paperwork parents have to fill out if they want to get their kids back into school.

And if you’ve forgotten what school at home was like, there’s a video for that too, based on Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week”.

Charles Blow wants Black people to reverse the Great Migration and form majorities in the Southern states.

One day in 2013, New York Times columnist Charles Blow was at a conference on civil rights, when he heard 86-year-old Harry Belafonte ask “Where are the radical thinkers?”

On the walk back to the Times’ Midtown offices, … it occurred to me that maybe I had been thinking too small, all my life, about my approach to being in the world and conceiving my role in it. I had to remember that a big idea could change the course of history.

The result was The Devil You Know: a Black power manifesto, which came out in January but had somehow escaped my notice until recently. Blow’s big idea is indeed big: Black Americans in the North, particularly young adults looking for a place to establish themselves, should move to the South, for the purpose of forming a Black majority in several Southern states.

This would be bigger than just electing a Black mayor or governor somewhere. The entire political power structure would know it was answerable to a Black majority. For the first time in American history, Blacks could focus on ending White supremacy through their own power rather than on compromising their goals to get White cooperation.

Those same majorities could elect two senators per state, and those senators would all know that they could not stay in office without maintaining their Black support.

I am not advocating for a Black nationalism, but a Black regionalism — not to be apart from America, but stronger within it.

Blow is very frank about the reason to take this radical approach: If the issue is achieving true equality, everything else has been tried and hasn’t worked. Abolition didn’t do it. Moving north during the Great Migration may have opened some economic opportunities and allowed an end-run around Jim Crow, but the North had its own forms of racism. The civil rights movement achieved an on-paper legal equality, but all the major gaps remain in wealth, income, education, home ownership, incarceration, and even life expectancy.

He describes at length the generations of effort to form majority coalitions with sympathetic Whites: from Booker T. Washington’s attempts to promote Black virtue and education in order to convince Whites that his people deserved their favor, to W.E.B. Du Bois’ vision of a “talented tenth” that would blaze a trail into the professions and into positions of power, all the way up to Barack Obama’s audacity of hope. Blow wants to be done with waiting and hoping; he wants Black people to have the power to shape their own destiny.

Black colonization of the South isn’t a philosophy or an intellectual posture. It’s an actual plan.

Blow grew up in a majority-Black town in Louisiana and went to college at Grambling, an HBCU. Throughout his formative years, being Black felt normal to him. He was not an outsider or an interloper or someone who had to prove he deserved to be wherever he was. He then went north to achieve success in White-dominated institutions like The New York Times before returning south to live in Atlanta. He sees the South as a cultural homeland, not just for himself, but for American Blacks in general. The South, horrific as its racism has been at times, is the devil they know.

His logic often resembles that of Nikole Hannah-Jones, who chose historically Black Howard University over University of North Carolina after a tenure battle, and brought Ta-Nehisi Coates with her.

I really wanted to take my talents and the resources I could bring and bring them to an institution that was actually built for Black uplift and Black excellence, that wasn’t built in opposition to the work that I want to do and me as a human being.

Like Hannah-Jones, Blow seems to be done with proving himself to Whites, and wants a plan for Black equality that doesn’t rely on convincing Whites to overcome their racism.

For me, that was one of the most fascinating aspects of reading this book. Blow is writing to convince other Black people, so I am not his target audience. I suspect that’s why the book is as short and readable as it is: He can appeal to Black common sense — about the police, about the centrality of racism in America history and culture, about the role of the South in African-American consciousness, etc. — without marshaling arguments to help Whites catch up. So I can be a fly on the wall as Blacks talk to each other.

This in itself is a lesson in White privilege: It’s strange and even shocking that an NYT columnist would write a book not targeted at us. But those outside of privileged classes must have that experience every day.

Growing up

We are almost at the end of our year of study of the workbook of A Course In Miracles. A Course In Miracles is one path of many which guides spiritual development. ACIM is appropriate for Unitarian Universalists because of its nondenominational nature.

ACIM is based on a metaphysics which most people are not familiar with unless they have advanced in their spiritual development. It would appeal to people in the upper half of Fowler’s stages of faith development, stages 4, 5, and 6. These stages involve the taking of personal responsibility for one’s spiritual well being and not relying exclusively on one religious identity.

This stage can be called simply “growing up.”

We all grow old because of our biological inheritance but whether we grow up or not is a matter of the soul. 

At Unitarian Universalism A Way Of Life our mission is to help people grow up. Will you help us by sharing this material with others and discussing it as a means of encouraging each other’s spiritual growth?

This week I contributed to the negative-Covid-test statistics. It turns out I had a cold, which is one reason why there’s no featured post this week. The other reason is that Ezra Klein’s article “Let’s Not Pretend that the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem” already said what I wanted to say about that issue. I’ll quote from that in the weekly summary, and add a few late-breaking-news details as tomorrow’s deadline on the Afghan airlift approaches.

In addition to the usual pandemic stats, the summary also contains a perversely satisfying rant about the ivermectin craze. (I suppose I could have broken that out into its own post, but I’m not all that proud of how snide it gets.) Then there’s the hurricane, and a couple of important Supreme Court decisions, one of which I even agree with.

Like last week, there’s a book section. I discuss Charles Blow’s surprisingly radical book The Devil You Know, where he floats the idea of reversing the Great Migration to create Black majorities in several Southern states. Since he’s trying to convince other Black people — the point is to get them moving in, not White people moving out — reading his book as a White man gives me a fly-on-the-wall feeling. The rarity of that experience is a reminder of my privilege: Most people who write books write them for me.

And I’ll close with a Holderness Family music parody about back-to-school paperwork.

I’ll predict that the weekly summary will post around 11 EDT.

Molly Ivins, the extraordinary newspaper columnist, wit, and the enemy of foolishness, vanity, and avarice at every level of government, was born on August 30, 1944 in Monterey, California.  But she was raised in and around Houston, Texas and was a passionate Texan all her life from the tip of her head to the paint on her toenails.  

Her father was an autocratic oil company executive and she grew up in privileged circumstances.  At her tony private prep school she wrote for the school paper and enjoyed performing in stage productions.  Whatever she tried her hand at was pursued with the ardor of her admittedly big personality. 

After an unhappy freshman year at Scripts College, she transferred to Smith, a Seven Sisters college that brought her close to the love of her life, Yale student Henry “Hank” Holland, Jr.  When he was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1964, Ivins was crushed.  She never found anyone who would measure up to his memory and stayed single the rest of her life, dedicating herself to her studies and career.  After a year of study in Paris, she graduated in 1966 and went on to earn a master’s degree at Columbia Journalism School the next year. 

Her first job was with Minneapolis Tribune.  After a stint as the first female police reporter in the city, she covered a beat called Movements for Social Change, where she notes that she wrote about “militant blacks, angry Indians, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers.”  She had met her people.  

In 1970 she left a perfectly good job to return to Texas to write for The Texas Observer, a progressive bi-weekly and burr under the saddle to the Austin establishment.  She became co-editor of the paper and the chief political writer, specializing in the doings of the legislature.  Before long her pithy accounts of that colorful body were being re-printed nationally and Ivins was soon contributing op-ed pieces to the New York Times and Washington Post and becoming a popular speaker on college campuses.

In 1976 the Times hired her, supposedly to loosen up their staid writing style.  She certainly did that, often clashing with editorsover her colorful, salty language.  She was made Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief, which would have been quite an honor if she was not also the entire bureau covering 9 states—states that the editors hardly seemed to know existed or cared to know much about.  Her clashes with editor Abe Rosenthal were legendary. 

She was delighted when the Dallas Times Herald offered her a position as a columnist.  She became such an irritation to Dallas city authorities and others with lots of wealth and influencethat the paper sent her to Austin.  After the Herald folded, Ivins moved to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram where she continued her Austin-based column and her relentless attacks on cupidity.  From her seat in Austin, she chronicled the rise of George W. Bush, who she referred to as the Shrub.  When he was elected President, Ivins ended her 19 year run at the Star-Telegram and wrote a nationally syndicated column carried in more the 400 papers. 

In 1999 she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer.  She battled the disease with typical ferocity and good humor, twice being declared cancer free only to have the tumorsreturn.  In December 2006 she took leave from her column to again undergo treatment. She wrote two columns in January 2007, but returned to the hospital for further treatment then died at her Austin home on January 31, 2007, at age 62.

Here is what I wrote in a blog entry the next day:

Flags at half mast, folks. Molly Ivins, a true American hero has died.  When we can least afford to lose her.  She was just about the only major liberal voice in the press who did not sound like, at least occasionally, a prig, twit, or snob.  She never forgot ordinary working people and their lives and they knew it

With keen insight, shrewd wit, and unparalleled Texas charm she belled the fat cats of politics.  From ordinary petty grafters in the state legislature all the way up to George W. “Shrub” Bush himself, no miscreant escaped her attention.

She fought up to the end.  Knowing she was dying she filed her last column in mid-January.  It ended:

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to stop this war. Raise hell! Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge [to the Iraq War]...We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘STOP IT NOW!’

Amen, sister!

Many Unitarian Universalist espouse pluralist theories of religion. What is a pluralist theory of religion? According to S. Mark Heim, such theories “attempt to transform religious diversity from an apparent embarrassment for claims to religious truth into supporting testimony for one truth subsistent in all faiths: (“Pluralistic Theology as Apologetics,” ch. 4 in Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion,Orbis: 1995, p. 123).

This is the familiar argument that while all religions might be different in specifics, they all have the same goal. One analogy used is that all religions are paths up the same mountain — the paths start from different places, and take different routes up the mountain, but they all wind up at the same summit. That’s what a pluralist theory of religion is.

Back to Heim:

“There is a great deal of discussion today about ‘post modernity’ and about the possible changes which may follow the dethroning of North Atlantic views of history, knowledge, and justice from their supposed universal status through a recognition of valid alternatives from other cultures. Insofar as such a transformation were actually to take place, pluralistic theologies would seem to be among the most likely casualities, defensively structured as they are around the presumed universality of the codes of modern rationality. Ironically, pluralistic antidotes to Christian particularism may prove to be much more culture and time bound than the theologies they condemn. The very religious traditions pluralistic theologies wish to affirm may find on the whole they have as much to fear from the pluralists’ embrace as the exclusivists’ denial.”

Ouch. Take that, Unitarian Universalists. Heim is telling us that we can’t have our commitment to rationality, which is a Western invention, and at the same time claim a commitment to pluralism, since by claiming the universalist of rationalism we’re undermining the very pluralism we claim to support. Heim continues:

“The primary challenge to pluralist theologies is to make explicit their case for the global normativity of the Western critical principles that determine their univocal definitions of religion.”

Fire season started quite awhile ago this year, but the air quality had been pretty good on the bay area until this week. Yesterday, we went to the coast for our hike, where the air was better. It was a hot hike though – interlaced with the joy of hiking with our daughter and also a tragedy on the trail. A man died of a heart attack while biking in the heat and we witnessed the paramedics and rangers rushing to the scene. Later we passed his covered body under a solitary tree, waiting for the coroner to arrive. Later still, on our way back, only the tree remained to mark the spot. As my daughter said, dying is never good, but there are worse ways than to be out in nature, doing something you love.

I do worry if nature will survive, however. Humankind has been far from kind to our planet. I wrote this poem this week as the smoke began to drift across the sky.

Waiting for the Sunrise

I hiked 22 miles this week as well as using the stationary bike and swimming. We ate out twice. Live goes on. I feel lucky to be alive even in these stressful times. Maybe especially in these times.

L’Chaim!

My average weight this week is down .8 pounds for a total loss of 172.6

Hurricane Idais gathering strength as it barrels north in the Gulf of Mexico and will slam into the Louisiana coast as a strong category 4 stormabout 1 pm this afternoon.  Passing west of New Orleans the worst of winds of more than 150 mile per hour and an expected storm surge of up to 17 feet at the mouth of the Mississippi and 8 feet upriver at Lake Pontchartrain are expected to be catastrophic.  It is exactly 16 years since Hurricane Katrina wrecked its devastation.

Hopefully the Big Easy and other vulnerable Gulf communities will be better prepared this time around.  Lessonsof that big storm, reinforced by three storms that slammed the same area last year.  Sea walls and levees have been reinforced and raised.  Residents are more apt to positivelyrespond to calls for early evacuations and plans for those evacuations are said to be better.  New Orleans and other areas have lost as much as a quarter of their pre-Katrina populations somewhat easing the pressure.  City and State resources have been pumped up.  And perhaps most critically the Federal response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will be in the hands of competent and experience professionals fully backed by President Joe Biden who unlike George W. Bushactually believes that government can function.

On the other hand, Louisiana is already in the grips of one of the worst Coronavirus Delta variant outbreaks in the country.  Its hospitals are already overwhelmed.  Masking, social distancing, and sanitation protocols, only tepidly supported by the Republican governor and legislature will be impossible to maintain especially in crowded shelters and on evacuation busses.   Vaccination rates are low.  A sharp spike in new infections is likely just as hospitals are least able to deal with critical cases.

There is still political and social tension between the Democratic city government and the Republican controlled state that can easily scuttle cooperation and lead to new rounds of blame shifting and finger pointing when things go wrong.

Systematic racism is the political and cultural order of the day along the Gulf Coast.  Poor Black residents may still be denied equal access to emergency aid and be blocked from evacuation through or to wealthy white enclaves.

We can hope for the best but must be ready for the worst.

A look back at Katrina reminds us of an enduring rage and sorrow.

On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast with the eyejust east of New Orleans.  Winds had diminished and the storm had been downgraded from a Category 4 to a Category 3 and there was some hope that the city and surrounding Parishesmight be spared the destruction predicted earlier in the week.  Although wind damage was severe, a lot of folks breathed deeply after the brunt of the storm moved past.

But the storm surge sent as much as 15 feet of water inland floodingthe low lying coast from the Texas border to nearly Pensacola.  It pushed up the Mississippi and into Lake Pontchartrain.  Within a few hours the levy system protecting the city broke in several places and water inundated most of the city.  Especially hard hit were the low lying neighborhoods along the canals and directly under the levies, including the largely Black and impoverished 8thand 9th Wards.  By 11 p.m. Mayor Ray Nagin described the loss of life as significant with reports of bodies floating on the water throughout the city.

As horrible as the situation was, it was only the beginning.  Evacuation orders had encouraged many of those with vehicles to flee north.  But the highways were soon clogged and those lateto leave were trapped.  No plans had been made for the hundreds of thousands of city residents without transportation, or the aged and ill.  The poor were essentially trapped in the city.  And as they drowned talking heads on television scolded them for not heeding the evacuation orders.

The story of the immediate misery of the next few days has been toldand retold and is far too vast to be recounted here.  Suffice it to say the disaster unmasked incompetence at every level of government compounded by a blasé racismeager to blame the victims.  The response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), headed by political toadies and lickspittles, became a national scandal.  But it was the inevitable result of George W. Bush’s administration which had as its highest goal to provethat government is inherently incapable of managing things efficiently.

The disaster created a diaspora.  Eighty percent of the New Orleans population fled.  Five years later less than half had returned.  And much of the city, particularly the Black Wards away from the restored tourist areas, remained a waste land.

The youth group of my church, then known as the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Woodstock, spent a week there in July 2010, nearly five years after the storm, doing service projects.  They brought back video and photographic evidence of the distressing situation.  There will be work rebuilding and restoring homes in those districts for hundreds of youth groups for years to come.

When historians look back on the disaster and its long aftermath years from now, they may well conclude that this was the moment when the traditional cocky confidence of American exceptionalism bit the dust and the Empirebegan it precipitous decline.

University of Mississippi students hold a bullet ridden Emmett Till historical marker before carrying it to a Confederate monument on campus. 

 The horrific and unthinkably brutal lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year old Chicago boy visiting rural Mississippi on August 28, 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White woman still challenges America’s racist character.   This year on the anniversary the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture announced that it was putting on display a bullet riddled historical marker from the site where Till’s mutilated body was thrown into a river weighted down with a 70 pound cotton gin fan blade.  It was the third of four markers vandalized, shot up by self-proclaimed Ku Klux Klansmen who posed for social media photos with their handiwork.  It was replaced a fourth time by a bullet proof marker which was also vandalized but not destroyed.

Before arriving at the Museum, the marker played a key roll in the bitter and divisive movement to remove Confederate monuments from public places.  In 1919 students at the University of Mississippi carried Till’s marker through campus after a panel discussion hosted by the Emmett Till Memorial Commission to Memorial for the Confederate War Deadwhich had been the target of on-going protests demanding its removal—part of a wave of such protests sparked by Black Lives Matter Movement.  That movement owed its inspiration in no small part to Emmett’s mother Mamie who insisted that his horribly disfigured body be displayed in an open casket at his funeralto show “what they did to my boy.”

Mamie Till's decision to display her mutilated son's body in an open casket funeral helped rally the Civil Rights Movement in the South.

In 1955 Till’s martyrdom helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement.  Although I don’t recall his name being mentioned at Dr. Martin Luther King’s milestone March on Washington for Jobs and Justice exactly eight years later in 1963 that event, broadcast liveon national television was a testament on how far the movement had come in just a few years.

But it also inspired the Klan, White Citizen’s Councils, and other night-riding terrorists.  The failure of local courts to convict the known perpetrators of the outrage convinced white supremacists that they were untouchable and had the full support of the wider community.  That led to years of lynchings, assassinations, assaults, bombings, and mob intimidation executed with impunity.   

Eventually Federal intervention and enforcement, no matter how reluctant, shifting public opinion, and the simple weariness of many white Southerners with the cycle of protests and violent reprisal that was hurting the businesses.  Slowly a much ballyhooed “New South” emerged that grudgingly accepted integrationand Black voters with significant political power.  Old Firebrands and Alabama Governor George Wallace changed their tunes.  The Klan went back underground seldom to be mentionedor acknowledged.

Emmett Till, left, was linked to Trayvon Martin, and Mike Brown whose deaths helped spark the Black Lives Matter Movement.

The overflowing outrage at police executions of Black citizens and the street confrontations of the Black Lives Matter Movement ripped theband-aid off an old scab.  The Klan and other white nationalist who had never really gone away but who operated on the fringes of society were empowered again by the Trump Era and the dog-whistle of “Make America Great Again.”  Attacks on Confederate monuments brought them to center stage as defenders of tradition and heritage.  Since Charlottesville violent confrontations with anti-racists and anti-fascists have become common.  Scores of groups swelledin membership.  Demanding their “First Amendment right to bear arms” often with the support and complicity of right wing state and local governments, has turned them out in great numbers in combat gear and armed with automatic weapons.  They even became emboldened to attempt coup d’état last January at the Capitol.  That comic opera putsch may have been premature, but they are laying the groundwork for a second insurrection.

Emmett Till is once again a convenient symbol and rallying cry for both sides of the great divide.  Not only was the river site marker defaced, but another historical marker at the site of the general store where Till allegedly insulted pure white Southern womanhood.  Has also been shot up on multiple occasions.  One of the markers is now on exhibit at The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.

No one is yet raising monuments to Till’s murderers or to the current crop of terrorists, but it may only be a matter of time. 

Note—For a full review of Emmett Till’s life and death, his mother’s crusade, and the search for justice visit my 2015 blog post The Legacy of Emmett Till 60 Years Later.

Please join us on Sunday (29 August 2021) at 11:00 AM for “Live Into” 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 August 2021 give-away-the-plate recipient is YWCA’s Dialogue on Race.

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.

Our Sunday afternoon Zoom religious education class for children will take a break on 29 August 2021.

As the COVID-19 Delta variant continues to spread in our community and seems to affect children more seriously, we are trying to be mindful in our planning of outdoor activities (taking into account the Louisiana summertime heat as well).

Watch our website and the All Souls Religious Education Facebook Group for updates on our 12 September 2021 religious education event.

Please join us on Sunday (29 August 2021) at 9:00 AM for our adult religious education class via Zoom.

We have completed our White Fragility book study group using the book by Robin DiAngelo.

This week we continue our exploration of the 8th principle and anti-racism as we look at environmental racism in the US.

Rev. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign calls on us to end the silos that have so often been characteristic of the movement to remediate climate change and other social justice movements.

If we Unitarian Universalists truly believe in the interdependent web of all existence, we need to take a hard and honest look at how climate change along with all the related threats to our environment affect us all but affect most severely those who are already most marginalized among us.

Please join us next Wednesday (1 September 2021) at 12 noon for our weekly Zoom lunch.

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

Due to the impact of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, we have begun to broadcast a livestream video of our Sunday morning worship services.

This worship video will be available live and in recorded formats.

For our livestream video of our worship services, we are using Facebook Live.  One does not have to log into Facebook or have a Facebook account to view this video.

You can find the 22 August 2021 worship video here.

Please join us on Saturday (28 August 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.

Dear ones –

So here I am in my bed, thinking of all the things that people have done for me —

Doctors have been paid to get me the referrals, medicines, therapies, and consultations I need.

Friends have made donations so that we can order food.

Another friend brought a casserole. (I think Jack Mandeville is leaning into his South Carolina roots, what do you think?)

My mom (hi, Joyce Buck!) has come to help Julie and me with cooking, cleaning, and all the things that will ease Julie’s burden a bit. And Morgan came a while ago and will be here again.

The Council of Third Degree Initiates of Stone Circle Wicca (USA) made a ceremony for me, honoring the work, musical and otherwise, that I have done with them over the years, as well as offering healing and strength from the four Elements.

(In that same ceremony, our comrade Jonathan White was also standing at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, a place from which he had watched the blood-red moon rise the night before. As he said, “The Daughter giving birth to the Mother.”

I have written here about how empowering it is to be asked to help. People like it. They like, in their strength and abundance, to be able to show love in substantive, concrete ways. I know I do. I enjoy loving on others. Buying Julie a dress that fits and is one of her good shades of green has made me happy for days and days. I am so proud. I know I did something that helped her, made her happy, and let her know I was paying attention and had her in mind.

Furthermore, and what THIS missive is about is that, even when asking for help is hard, even when the ask seems too big, I am finding that it is generally worth it. The hardest one of these asks has been speaking to my friends in Stone Circle Wicca. We have another dear friend and Initiate who is in dire health straits — more dire than mine — and I am very aware of that.

But I was and remain so aware of how important connection is. I was and remained so aware of how much I needed it and how little I was getting it. I felt alone in my pain and in my healing, and I knew where I needed to turn.I knew what I wanted, what I hoped for, and what was out there. So Julie, bless her, pushed me to ask for what I wanted. Though I desperately feared a no — that indication that now is not the right time — I knew in my heart that if I heard a no, it would be an invitation to practice.

But I did not get a no. I got welcoming inquiries about what I needed and that it was okay to have asked. In Stone Circle Wicca, our ceremonies respond to a range of human needs. Sometimes those needs are to celebrate the turning solar year, to over devotion under the full moon or in the dark of the new moon. Sometimes the need is driven by faerie whim — the sense that we need to lighten our spirits and bring levity to a situation.

But my set of needs was different. My set of needs was very clear. I needed to feel blessed, held, loved by those I love. And I longed for their prayers for healing.

And they did it, friends, they did it.

There’s a little aphorism that Julie and I often quote: “Some kind of help’s the kind of help that helping’s all about. And some kind of help’s the kind of help we all could do without.” You know that second kind, I’m sure. When someone butts in and decides what you need without asking. Ugh. I hate it. It makes me vaguely anxious, just typing about it. I’ve experienced it recently, and it’s just not fun. And I know that I need to be careful about being pushy in that way, myself. It’s true that nurturing is in my character, but nurturing is not always the way to go.

So I am so grateful to my friends and co-religionists for their inquiry. For that gentle asking about what I really needed and wanted — so they could give it to me if it was in their power.

And, as I’ve said above, they did.

So this is the blinding flash of the obvious, friends: Not only is helping good for the ones who are doing it, but — hello?! — it CAN work out for the one who dares to ask. Yes, it’s lovely to have folks volunteer out of the kindness of their hearts, or even because they’re getting paid. That can be really lovely, both of those, each in their own way.

But dare to ask, beloveds. Consider what you need, and dare to ask. Because asking to have our needs fulfilled by means we think are possible, even if improbable, can lead to beautiful gifts, and a lovely exchange for all.

I don’t look self-sufficient at all, I don’t think. But still, it was hard to ask for that ceremony. We often are so afraid of seeming weak, of being vulnerable, that we forget what love means. That we forget we are worthy of love.

Dearest, you are worthy of love. And because you’re worthy of love, you’re also worthy of help. The kind of help that helping’s all about.

This can be a hard teaching, eh? So I encourage you, wherever you are in this equation, to PILE on, to DRENCH yourself in compassion. No matter what we do, we’re doing the best we have with the tools we can reach at the time. Be gentle, gentle, gentle. Let us together be persistently gentle, and so be willing to ask for the help we need and long for.

Blessings, my loves, blessings –

~Catharine~

Sean Callahan, an awe struck admirer and authorof the book Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer noted, “The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Lifestaff as ‘Maggie the Indestructible.”  But the pioneering photographer and war correspondent turned out to be not quite so indestructible.  In 1953 at the height of her creative powers and fame she began to notice alarming symptoms which turned out to be Parkinson’s Disease, then untreatable.  She endured a slow deterioration which forced her into semi-retirement by 1957 and ended all of her work by 1968.  She endured with the disease for 18 years before dying of it in near poverty on August 27, 1971 in Stamford,Connecticut.

Margaret White was born in New York City on June 14, 1904.  Her father, Joseph White, an immigrant secularized Polish Jew who was a naturalist, engineer,and inventor.  Her mother was Minnie Bourke, an American born Irish Catholic.  Both parents, however, eschewed their birth faiths and were ardent free thinkers.  The family, including young Maggie and sister and brother, were comfortably middle class, and soon left the city for the leafy small town of Bound Brook, New Jersey, a historic burb on the Raritan River in the north central part of the state.

Maggie, like her brother and older sister, worshiped her brilliant father, a perfectionist with high expectations of his offspring.  Her artistic mother was also a feminist who imbued her with the notion not to allow herself to be limited by customary gender roles.  All the children were imbued with a mission to serve humanity, even save, the world through relentless self-improvement and achievement.

While a student at Plainfield High School, Margaret picked up a passion for photography from her father who was fascinated by cameras and interested in nature photography.  After graduation from high school, she was interested in becoming a professional photographer—a business with few successful women practitioners—but followed her father’s advice to pursue science.

In 1922 White enrolled at Columbia University in New York to study herpetology—the study of snakes and reptiles.  But while at Columbia she took photography classes with Clarence Hudson White, founder of the Photo-Secession movement with Alfred Stieglitz which re-invigorated her interest in the medium.  Her time at Columbia, however, was cut short by the sudden and devastating death of her father after one semester.

White never returned to Columbia.  She restlessly moved from school to school driven by her often impossibly high expectations of the institutions, her own perfectionism, and a bristling refusal to bow to any restrictionsplaced on her as a woman.  Romance and its failure may also have played a part. White married fellow student Everett Chapman in 1924 and divorced him just two years later. She studied successively at the University of Michigan, Perdue, and Western Reserve University inCleveland, Ohio, before finally settling in comfortably at Cornell, in Ithaca, New York.  Perhaps it helped that Ithaca reminded her of her New Jersey home.  When she graduated she left a remarkable portfolio of campus photos for the student newspaper which concentrate on buildings and architectural detail.

Despite the odds against her, White was determined to pursue a career as a photographer.  A year after graduating from Cornell in 1927 she established her own commercial photography studio in Cleveland, Ohio where she specialized in architectural and industrial work.  Symbolically, she abandoned her married name and the adopted the hyphenated name Bourke-White to preserve her independence and honor her mother equally with her father.

In her early days Bourke-White struggled to get commissions.  Her breakthrough came when she got a job from the Otis Steel Company to document their production process.  Even though she had been hired by the company, their security agents tried to block her access in the shaky grounds that steel was a defense industry and photos of production could risk the national security and plant superintendents and foremen worried that a mere woman could not stand the intense heatand danger of being close to blast furnaces and molten metal.  She got her way around these objections with flirtatious eyelash batting, and when that didn’t work, terrifying bullying.

Once in the plants Bourke-White quickly discovered technical challenges.  She set up what she thought were brilliant, dramatic shots of steel being pouredthen discovered in the dark room that the black and white film she was using was not sensitive to the glowing red and orange of hot steel—the molten metalcame out nearly black in prints.  She solved the problem by lighting her shots by having assistants hold magnesium flares which produced a brilliant white light.  The aids sometimes had to be positioned dangerously close to the flowing steel and showering sparks, but she was heedless of their—and her own—safety.  The results were stunning.  No photographer had ever before captured the dazzling drama of hot steel.  When the shots were published, Bourke-White was recognized as a master of her medium.