"Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout"

Merry Christmas and All the Joyful Holidays

2009-12-22T21:29:20Z

“Christmas in Woodstock” by Harold Rail

At Christmas I no more desire a rose,
Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled shows;
But like of each thing that in season grows.
--William Shakespeare

With love for all. Keep this season of miracles and light always in your heart!

--Patrick Murfin

U. U. Congregation of Woodstock Opens Award Winning Sexuality Program to Area Youth

2009-12-16T00:33:21Z

Beginning the second week of January the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Woodstock, 221 Dean Street, will offer the award winning sexuality education program “Our Whole Lives” (OWL) to 6^thand 7^th grade level students.

“Because this is such a unique and worthwhile program, we would like to extend the offer to students in the wider community,” said Religious Education Director Sam Jones. “Space is limited, but we can accommodate seven or eight additional students.”

Unlike traditional sexuality curricula which mostly focus on the mechanics and physicality of sexuality, OWL includes the values of self-worth, sexual health, responsibility, justice and inclusivity for all genders. It addresses moral dilemmas and peer pressure when it comes to making wise choices in various life predicaments.

The OWL curriculum was jointly developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ but does not include religious instruction. The program is widely used not only in the two denominations, but in secular settings as well.

The program is being offered in Woodstock at no charge, but the purchase of the book will be necessary. There is also an optional Parent Manual that compliments the course and encourages open discussion within families.

To receive an information packet call the church office at 815 338-0731 or e-mail office@uucofwoodstock.org with your mailing information.

Now Get We Build Temples in the Heart Direct from the Author (Me)

2009-12-08T20:38:35Z

Looking for that perfect stocking stuffer? Willing to read poetry without academic requirement or a loaded gun held to your head? In either case have I got a deal for you! I just received three cases of my 2004 collection We Build Temples in the Heart published by Skinner House Books of Boston.

The book has enjoyed a moderate success, which in poetry means sales in the dozen. Now you can have an autographed copy, value guaranteed to soar if I drop dead and inexplicably become famous.

I’ll send it to you for only $8 per copy or 40% off for five or more plus $2 shipping. E-mail me at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net with your order and delivery information. I will contact you about how to send a me a check.

End of shameless plug.

LAW SCHOOL PROF BRING “POEMS FROM GUANTANAMO” TO MCC

2009-11-27T21:40:17Z

Marc D. Falkoff, Ph.D., a professor of law at Northern Illinois University will bring voices of detainees at Guantanamo Bay to a program at McHenry County College on Thursday, December 3 at 7 PM in the Conference Center.

Since Falkoff 2004 he has been a principal lawyer in the habeas representation of seventeen prisoners being held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of involvement with terrorism. For this work, he was named the Charles F. C. Ruff Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year in 2005. He received the Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award in 2007 from the Southern Center for Human Rights and in 2008 was the recipient of the Bill of Rights in Action Award from the Constitutional Rights Foundation in Chicago.

Falkoff writes and speaks frequently about the rule of law in the context of the war on terror. The book of prisoner poetry he edited, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, was a bestselling anthology translated into a dozen languages. Abused, desperate and isolated, Guantánamo prisoners turned to writing poetry as a way to preserve their humanity. Despite the Pentagon's efforts to suppress the poems, Falkoff and a dedicated group of pro bono lawyers succeeded in giving the detainees a voice.

According to Falkoff, a very real problem exists, "politics rather than principle reigns at Guantanamo." His presentation will discuss torture of the prisoners, the false information elicited, the disarray of evidentiary files, and the telling resignations of key military prosecutors.

Following the program, he will be available to sign books.

The program is part of the on-going Current American Issues Information Seminar Series sponsored by The Student Peace Action Network (SPAN), Pax Christi, and the McHenry County Peace Coalition. It is open to the public and admission is free.

For more information call 815 943-7611 or e-mail molly_mcq@hotmail.com .

CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE GAULRAPP TO SPEAK TO McHENRY DEMS

2009-11-13T20:14:51Z

Mayor George Gaulrapp

Freeport Mayor George Gaulrapp will be a special guest at the Democratic Party of McHenry County meeting at 7 PM on Wednesday, November 18, at the McHenry County Farm Bureau Building, 1102 McConnell Road in Woodstock. Gaulrapp has announced his candidacy for Congress in the 16th District, a seat now held by Republican Don Manzullo.

Gaulrapp is in his second term as mayor of the western Illinois city, a manufacturing hub in an agricultural region. He cites jobs as the major reason for challenging the incumbent. “Jobs will solve the problems with unemployment, jobs will solve the reduction in good housing stock, jobs will solve problems for the social service agencies who have been drained economically," Gaulrapp recently told a Rockford television station.

Prior to his election as mayor, Gaulrapp served as a Freeport alderman for eight years and has been a long time community leader. His business experience includes 29 years in the dental laboratory and supply industry and several years with E*Trade Solutions Group.

This is the third time in three elections that Manzullo has been challenged by Democratic mayors in his district. In 2006 former Galena Mayor Richard Auman mounted a challenge. In 2008 Barrington Hills Mayor Robert Abboud made a run. "It is a telling indictment when responsible municipal leaders from all corners of his congressional district challenge a powerful incumbent," said McHenry County Democratic Chair Kathleen Bergan Schmidt.

The public is invited to attend the meeting.

Dem Senator, Governor Candidates to Debate at Rockford Event

2009-11-10T02:32:23Z

Democratic voters in northern Illinois will have a rare opportunity to see the major candidates for Governor and U.S. Senator in the February primary. The Northern Illinois Coordinated Campaign Committee (NICCC) will present debates by candidates in both races in Rockford on Sunday, November 15.

Governor Pat Quinn and challenger Comptroller Dan Hynes will face off at 3:45 PM at the Radisson Hotel, 200 S. Bell School Road, Rockford. After a buffet dinner at 5 PM, Senatorial candidates Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, David Hoffman, and Cheryle Jackson will take the stage.

The NICCC is made up of the Democratic Parties of McHenry, Boon, DeKalb, Ogle, and Winnebago Counties.

Tickets for the debates and dinner are $25 or $200 for a table for eight. Individual tickets will be available at the door. Tickets and tables can also be reserved with a check made out to the NICCC, P.O. Box 785, DeKalb, IL 60115. Call 815 756-9103 for further information.

A Light Goes Out—Rev. Forrest Church

2009-09-25T15:41:10Z

September 23, 1948 — September 24, 2009

News came yesterday of the passing of Rev. Forrest Church one day after his 61st birthday. It was not unexpected. Church had been fighting a brave—and very public—battle with esophageal cancer. First diagnosed in October of 2006, he long out lived his first terminal diagnosis. But in February of 2008 he informed his congregation that the cancer had returned and was terminal.

His final year and a half were a study in grace, courage and wisdom. I last saw him shortly after his announcement on speaking tour in support of his great book So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State. At that point it was something like the 22nd book Church had written or edited. It would not be his last.

Church made the experience of facing his own mortality an opportunity to share a life time of reflection in his next book Love & Death: My Journey through the Valley of the Shadow. He expected that to be his last book, but as he outlived his doctor’s expectations he found time to finish at least one more book, The Cathedral of the World—A Universalist Theology which will be released by Beacon Press later this fall.

The new book reportedly sums up Church’s thoughts on religion, faith, and God in a single volume and definitively framing his theological teachings.” Raised in Unitarianism he evolved an expansive universalist theology fit for the 21 Century. This book is eagerly awaited by all of us who care deeply about our faith.“

Forrest Church was first and foremost a minister. He held the prestigious pulpit of All Souls Church in New York City for thirty years and continued to serve as “Public Minister” after stepping down as senior pastor. It was from that pulpit that sprang remarkable sermons, many of which became the nuggets around which his many books were built. A brilliant and original thinker as well as a gifted preacher he became a leading voice in American religion. He became a familiar voice and face on radio and television and his books reached an audience far beyond the members of his Unitarian Universalist faith. Not since the heyday of Preston Bradley in Chicago has a minister of our tradition been reached such a broad audience. And one might have to go back to Theodore Parker in ante-bellum Boston to find one more widely influential.

As a minister Church, the son of the great liberal United State Senator from Idaho, Frank Church, was an advocate of engaged, thoughtful social action.

Along the way Church co-authored Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism with his friend John Buehrens, which has become the standard “catechism” for those exploring our faith.

As a man, minister, philosopher, theologian, historian, humanitarian, and teacher Forrest Church will be missed. But his legacy will endure.

Diversity Day 2009: We’re In This Together! Set for This Sunday in Woodstock

2009-09-23T19:30:48Z

Diversity Day 2009:

We’re In This Together!

On Woodstock Square

September 27, 2009

Diversity Day 2009: We’re In This Together! will be held this Sunday, September 27 from 1 to 4 PM on the Square in Woodstock.

For the 13th annual festival will take note of “The tough economic times that have taken a devastating toll on our community and nation while the world remains in turmoil,” festival Executive Director Patrick Murfin explained. “Sometimes fear and anxiety cause groups to turn on each other and bigots seek to exploit those fears. But in times like these we need each other more than ever. Our festival is meant to rally the whole community regardless of race, religion, national origin, language, gender, sexual orientation, age or ability in mutual respect and celebration.”

The festival program will feature live entertainment and inspiring messages from individuals and organizations working together in the face of adversity.

Musical and performance acts include The Frothy Boys, a ebullient men’s doo-wop a cappella ensemble; legendary McHenry County story teller Jim May; blind singer/guitarist Pierre Berube; pianist Matt Chopin; the Bolivian folk dancing of Corazon Boliviano Grupo de Danza Folkloria director by Julieta L. Bolivar; and folk music by Keith Johnson and Judy Matzen.

Murfin will be joined by his long time festival co-host Gloria Urch in introducing featured speakers. Joe Blanco, coordinator of the Woodstock PADS site will talk about homelessness. Suzanne Hoban of the Family Health Partnership Clinic will speak on healthcare and Julie Biel-Claussen of the McHenry County Housing Authority will discuss the challenges of finding affordable housing.

An annual highlight of Diversity Day is the Peace and Justice Award presented to an individual or individuals who have advanced the causes of justice, equity and compassion in our community and the world. This year the recipient is Thomas Dincecco who has dedicated his retirement years to service to those in need. Among other activities, Dincecco is the coordinator of the Direct Assistance Program (DAP) of the Woodstock Community Ministry which provides emergency grants to those who fall between the cracks of the safety net. The award will be presented by last year’s recipient, Sue Rose of the Housing Department.

Carlos Acosta of the McHenry County Latino Coalition will present this year’s recipients of the organization’s Scholarship Awards, sponsored by State Farm Insurance.

The festival also includes table displays with information from non-profit organizations, social service providers, government agencies, issue advocacy organizations, religious groups, political parties, and businesses.

Diversity Day 2009: We’re In This Together! Is organized by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Woodstock. Admission is free and open to the public.

For information contact Murfin at 815 814-5645, e-mail divday@sbcglobal.net, or visit http://diversityday.blogspot.com/.

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Woodstock Unveils New Monument Sign

2009-09-20T20:00:29Z

The Rev. Dan Larsen accepts the new, handmade monument sign for the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Woodstock from artist Gale Harris.

The members of the gather around the new sign.

The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Woodstock dedicated a new monument sign in front of the church at Dean and South Streets during worship services on Sunday, September 20.

The congregation, formerly known as the Congregational Unitarian Church, changed its name this summer to better reflect its identity as a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA.) It is the fourth name used by the congregation since its founding as the First Congregational Church of Woodstock in 1866.

Gale Harris created a ceramic image based a stained glass window designed and made for the church building’s centennial celebration in 2006 by Pam Lopatin. The congregation’s long time symbol, The Tree of Life, is shown with the Flaming Chalice of Unitarian Universalism nestled in its branches.

Harris hand fired each element of the image, including the multi-colored leaves, and then assembled them on the colorful plaque.

Members of the congregation posed for a group photo during the service.

Oh, Mary, we hate to see you go...

2009-09-17T16:57:17Z

Coming home late from a meeting last night, I opened my Facebook page and was confronted with the death of Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary. Other members of my graying generation were already sharing their grief, and, of course posting links to some favorite songs.

The news was unexpectedly and exquisitely personally painful. In recent years I had encountered the trio mostly on their ubiquitous PBS specials which the local station trotted out every year to reliable drain the wallets of Baby Boomers come pledge season. But in reality they never left me. Their music has always been in my head and on my tongue. As a school janitor alone in the gym I sang 500 Miles while mopping the floor. No report of a soldier’s death in a far off land fails to set off Where Have all the Flower Gone?

Together Mary, Peter Yarrow, and Noel Paul Stookey formed the most commercially successful folk music act in history and were part of the driving force behind the second folk revival in the early ‘60’s. The famously fussy folk purists of an earlier generation, who insisted that only song “collected” in the field were worthy of the genre, rejected them as mere popularizes. And some later critics derided them for the very slick, pop style that propelled their songs to the top of the music charts.

But with roots deep in the Greenwich Village scene of the late fifties, they were as authentic as any “urban” folkies. Mary, a lanky blonde with an enchanting voice was already singing—and recording—with Pete Seeger as a teenager. She and Peter Yarrow in particular were steeped in the activist music of the tradition of Woody Guthrie, The Almanac Singers, The Weavers, and Seeger.

By the time music impresario Albert Grossman brought the three together as an act, each member of the group was well grounded in the music. Together, beginning with their first album in 1962, they introduced millions to Seeger’s music. They would do the same for another Greenwich Village folkie, the scruffy, ragged Bob Dylan. Teenagers, who were not yet ready for Dylan’s raspy styling, sang along with the trio to Blowin’ in the Wind. Later they would do the same for other singing songwriters like Gordon Lightfoot and John Denver.

Their cultural reach was enormous. Mary’s long, strait hair and bangs were adopted as many girls—or more—girls in the ‘60’s as Farah Fawcett’s tresses were two decades later. The goatee, signature facial hair of ‘50’s era beatniks, suddenly started sprouting from many adolescent chins, including the shockingly orange version from my own.

But we of a certain age treasure the memory of Mary and her boys not just for the performances and records, but because they lived the values that they sang about. They were always there for any cause. They sang for Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez and at countless benefits and demonstrations. Yarrow himself was one of the organizers of the mammoth 1969 March on Washington against the War in Vietnam. We knew them because they were so often with us in our struggles.

After a long and successful run the trio broke up in 1969. Each had their own interests to pursue, but Mary’s sometime prickly personality contributed. Mary and Peter each continued their commitments to social justice and peace. They would re-unite after seven years at a Yarrow organized protest of nuclear weapons. They resumed limited touring—and performing together for numerous causes. Their activism was not limited to the stage. Mary, her mother, and her daughter were once all arrested together outside the South African Embassy protesting apartheid.

They struggled to continue on in recent years as Mary battled leukemia. Tours were interrupted for treatments, including an apparently successful bone marrow transplant after which they resumed performing, sometimes with a weakened Mary singing from a chair. Their last performance together was in May. Mary died of complications from chemotherapy. It would have been a point of pride with her that she did not let the cancer itself kill her.

What Peter and Paul will do now, I don’t know. Certainly no other voice can take Mary’s parts. She was just….irreplaceable.

Terry Link Speaks Tonight at McHenry Dems Meeting

2009-09-16T14:44:55Z

Illinois State Senator Terry Link

State Senator Terry Link (D-30), a candidate for Lt. Governor will be a featured guest at the September meeting of the Democratic Party of McHenry County at the McHenry County Farm Bureau, 1102 McConnell Road in Woodstock at 7 PM, Wednesday, September 16.

Senator Link has served since 1997 and is the Majority Caucus Chair. He is a recognized leader on tax and financial issues.

Link is also Chair of the Lake County Democratic Central Committee and has led a Democratic resurgence in that once reliably Republican county. He has supported the growth of the McHenry County party. In the crowded field of Lt. Governor candidates, Link is sometimes regarded as the voice of the Collar Counties.

The McHenry County Democratic Party will continue to invite candidates to speak through the primary. The county party does not make endorsements in the primary.

The meeting is free and open to the public.

The Death of Mine “Enemy”—Sharing Grief, Outrage, and Humanity

2009-09-14T17:17:14Z

James Poulillon was murdered for doing this.

The murder of anti-abortion crusader James Pouillon the other day in Owosso, Michigan has occasioned much discussion—and some back and forth accusations of hypocrisy.

Yet another of the lone, crazed gunmen who have become a staple of our culture shot Pouillon as he held up his graphic anti-abortion signs outside the local high school. He was a regular feature there and at other locations around the community.

The murder, one Harlan James Drake, reportedly lived mostly in the cab of his over-the-road semi touching base in his home town a day or two a month. But he had enough time to draw up a list of men to be eliminated. Pouillon was on the list. But so was a local gravel pit owner, who was also killed, and a real estate agent who escaped harm because Drake was arrested before he could get to him. Motive for any of the violence was at best murky. Police report that Drake told them it was not Pouillon’s views that marked him, but the graphic images on his signs, which Drake did not think was suitable to showing to high school “children.” But apparently blasting the life out of a crippled (on oxygen and in a wheel chair) eccentric in front of those same “children” was just fine.

Poulillon’s blood was hardly dry on the grass by the school before he was elevated to martyred saint by the anti-abortion movement. Fair enough. And outraged charges of hypocrisy were leveled against pro-choice organizations for not being as vocal in their outrage as for the death of “baby killing” Dr. George Tiller. Of course, they hardly gave those organizations time to answer their phones, let alone formulate a response. When the response came, it uniformly condemned the killing and disavowed any violence against pro-life activists. Most staunchly defended the free speech rights of Pouillon as well.

The UU Blog-o-sphere has taken up the subject. Self described conservative UU bloger Bill Barr at Pfarrer Streccius predictably took up the taunt tying it to the UUA’s new Standing on the Side of Love campaign. Paul Oakley at Inner Light, Radiant Life echoed a challenge to UUs, including President Peter Morales to publicly speak up. Chalice Chick doubted that the murder could be considered a hate crime, a term she has little use for any way.

At the risk of sounding like I am chiming in only because the smugly moralistic Bill Barr has called me out, I want to make it clear that murdering folks for their opinions, for the exercise of their rights to free speech, or just because they belong to some class of people we have come to hate is an abomination. No matter which “side” does it. Period.

While it is true that neither side can be wholly responsible for their most delusional supporters, both sides need to tone down the rhetoric which empowers the loonies among us. We are drifting to civil war in this country. That drift is made easier by the fact we don’t even see each other as human beings any more, just monsters promoting some hideous evil. And who doesn’t want to “wipe out evil.”

But neither am I going to lay down a line of perfect moral equivalency here. In the abortion confrontations no organized pro-choice group that I know of has advocated violence against their opponents. Some of the most well know, if extreme, leaders of the anti-abortion movement have been talking for years about “rivers of blood needed to cleanse the country from its sins.” And thus far Poulillon is the only known casualty on their side. Several murders, bombing, arsons, assaults and relentless threats and acts of intimidation have been committed by anti-abortion crusaders.

Randall Terry and his ilk cried crocodile tears over Dr. Tiller. Rest assured that I, at least, consider James Poulillon’s life, worth and dignity just as precious at the doctor’s. A hate crime is a hate crime no matter the hater, no mater the victim.

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

--John Donne

A Message to Congress Re: Health Care Reform

2009-09-09T22:20:00Z

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

--Bob Dylan

Another Thought on the Working Class Virtue of Solidarity

2009-09-08T19:46:49Z

After reviewing the post of my sermon on The Working Class Virtue of Solidarity, it is glaringly apparent that I missed a major point. It was probably due to a combination of working under a deadline while exhausted and an attempt to keep the talk to a manageable length.

Any way, in reviewing solidarity in the context of Western—particularly Christian—tradition, I left out any explanation for it in other contexts. Jews, for instance, have traditionally had an exquisite sense of solidarity, as their singular contributions to the labor movement around the world and many other justice issues attest. They developed that almost instinctive behavior in direct response to their own history as a people.

Like wise one of the greatest success stories of solidarity in action—the non-violent movement for Indian independence led by Mahatma Gandhi—did not even spring from a Western tradition.

And as the Indian experience; the American movements for women’s rights, Civil Rights, and full inclusion of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender folks in all levels of society; and the Anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa all attest, solidarity is not just limited to the labor context.

Solidarity is the response of the week and marginalized to overwhelming power. Individuals learn that no act of their own can truly change their condition of oppression and exploitation. Those in power have the means, and an overwhelming motive, for ruthlessly slapping down any one who dare pop up in opposition. But members of oppressed class come to realize one simple truth: They can’t kill all of us. Not only that, they discover that together they represent a resource without which the exploiters cannot continue to reap wealth and benefits. Their power lies in both their number and in the dependence of the powerful on them.

Also, the weak and excluded look for allies. They recognize others in similar condition and seek to make common cause with them for the benefit of both.

Solidarity relies on group identity and group consciousness. It does not necessarily negate the individual, but it demands the individual acknowledge a wider loyalty than his or her immediate self-interest.

In the words of an old proverb, solidarity demands simply the commitment of “One for all and all for one!”

So for us to employ that working class virtue today, we must identify who “we” are, identify the forces that oppose our aspirations, and make the commitment to unite in struggle.

The Working Class Virtue of Solidarity: A Labor Day Worship Service

2009-09-06T19:09:19Z

Call to Worship:

Times are hard and getting harder. Few among us sitting here have been untouched by the economic collapse that has turned our safe, secure world upside down. If we have not lost our jobs, had our wages or hours slashed, lost the value of our homes and investments, we have loved ones who have and we live in gnawing dread that we are next. If soup lines do not stretch around the block and broken men in gray overcoats and battered fedoras do not shuffle forlornly by, it seems only a matter style and time until something very like those old grainy scenes are visited upon us again.

In other times and other circumstances Thomas Paine wrote that “These are the times that try men’s souls.” And Shakespeare lamented the “winter of our discontent.” They aptly describe our common condition today.

These times challenge our old assumptions about ourselves, our communities, and our place in the world. We no longer feel we are the captains of our own destiny. The gulf that divides our old identities as beneficent givers of alms to the less fortunate and the alien recipients of that charity has collapsed. Suddenly we are not us and them.

To survive—even to thrive—in such a time calls us to turn, quite unexpectedly, to a new way of being, and a new ethic. It is time for us to consider the unique working class virtue of solidarity.

Sermon—The Working Class Virtue of Solidarity

We have to start somewhere. This is a sermon on working class virtue of solidarity, so maybe the best place to start is by asking what solidarity really means. Like so many other things, it is easier to say 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 by right receive support 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.

The roots of solidarity are ancient. Most fundamentally they can be found in the variations of the Golden Rule that, famously, can be found among all of the great religious traditions

Let’s go back to that fellow Jesus, an itinerant preacher in a dusty and insignificant corner of the Roman Empire a long, long time ago. We only know of him maybe third hand. The oral stories of his life and teachings only got written down nearly a century after his death and reported resurrection. Depending on who was telling the tale, the message that he preached was either a narrow call for Jewish renewal and rebellion against Roman authority, or an expansive new message of hope for all humanity. Hundreds of years latter squabbling Bishops would pick just a few among many “gospels” and declare them authoritative. And since that time many interpretations of the words attributed to him in the approved stories have been offered—and often bloodily fought over. So it is hard to declare with certainty what he said or meant.

But if he really did say the things attributed to him in the Beatitudes and elsewhere, then to my ears, he was talking about something very like solidarity. He was arguing for a mutuality of respect and support. Elsewhere the story is told thus:

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

Christians, who came to believe that Jesus—on whose life, teachings and behaviors they were supposed to model their own—were thus powerfully instructed in the rudimentary basis for solidarity.

But the question is, to whom did this concern apply? Jesus and his disciples considered themselves observant Jews. For them the poor and the sick were their own people, Jews like themselves. The prisoners were likely not just common criminals, but Jewish victims of the occupying Romans. And who was the stranger? The parable of the Good Samaritan taught that even despised aliens were capable of kindness and were thus worthy of respect. Yet the Samaritans were Semitic kinsmen who had lived cheek to jowl with Jews for centuries and whose religion was a variant from the same root stock. Jesus did not preach about the Good Roman, Greek, Egyptian or Babylonian whose people and cultures were seen as historic enemies and oppressors of the Jews.

When Paul and others transformed the Jewish sect that had grown up around the memory of Jesus and took it to the Greeks, Romans and other Gentiles, the pool of those who were included in the community of concern was greatly expanded. But after the defeat of the paleo-universalists of Egypt and the Levant who argued that Jesus’ sacrifice saved all humanity, the Church codified itself as the sole legitimate custodian of the Truth in the West, sharing authority with the waning temporal power of the Roman Empire.

Under this formula it was critical that only those who were “saved” i.e. members of the Church constituted the community to whom succor and support were due.

And now the very Jews from whom Jesus and his disciples sprang, were branded, by virtue of their status as “Christ killers,” the ultimate outsiders unworthy of aid or support and deserving of suppression and persecution.

After the collapse of the Empire when the Church was consolidating itself as the only unifying power in the West, it adopted for itself the duty of providing charity and alms to the poor and sufferings—as long as they were loyal to the church. They ruthlessly suppressed all other agencies of support save the occasional direct gift of a noble to a vassal or serf. Private agencies for mutual aid were crushed, their adherents often fell victim to the Inquisition. Thus the simple teachings of Jesus were subjugated to the political needs of the church.

It took the worst natural catastrophe in Western history to change things. The Black Death swept Europe in successive waves over nearly two hundred years. By some accounts it depopulated the continent by as much as two thirds. And the Church, for all of its power was helpless against it. But the sudden loss of population empowered the survivors in startling ways. Those with skills—masons, weavers, smiths of all sorts, coopers, wainwrights and others—suddenly found themselves unteathered from traditional relationships and free to travel anywhere they found their skills in demand. They set up guilds to protect their craft secrets, but also for mutual aid and to protect them from the demands of the Church and of the crumbling feudal civil authority. Membership in the guilds created new wealth and a new locus of power. And in turn the guilds encouraged the establishment of city and town governments to protect their interests from the land based aristocracy. The growing independence of the city states and the growth of a burger class challenged the Church as the sole dispenser of charity and thus de-legitimized its endless accumulation of wealth, fueled by the corrupt sale indulgences and participation in Feudal land holding. Thus Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Of course the invention of the movable type printing press in the middle of all of this changed things, too. With a printed Bible available relatively cheaply and an expanded class of literates, the Roman Church lost its authority as the sole interpreter of scripture.

Increasingly reformers including John Calvin in Geneva and John Knox is Scotland maintained that scripture itself, not the Church was the authority. But that meant that each reader must interpret for him or herself the meaning and intent of scripture. That led to no end of doctrinal squabbling—and not a little bloodshed. But it elevated the Individual.

The Enlightenment took the ideas of late Renaissance Humanists like Erasmus, and enthroned reason and the individual side by side as the highest authorities. Our own founders were the direct inheritors of the Enlightenment, particularly its Scottish variant. Thus Jefferson’s great declaration speaks of “inalienable rights” and cavalierly calls for the “severance of the bonds” that had tied the colonies from the previously undisputed legitimacy of the English Throne on the basis of those rights.

And philosophers like Adam Smith would find in the rise of Protestantism and in the Age of the Enlightenment a justification for a whole new economic system which would become known as Capitalism and would be described in the Twentieth Century as the product of the “Protestant work ethic.”

On the whole this new individualism and the vigorous emerging capitalism that accompanied it, had little room for the old charity of the Church or any tolerance for emerging alternatives. Indeed the poor were seen as shiftless and sinful, poor because they did not possess the strength of character to succeed. Strict Calvinists sometimes held that wealth was a sign of God’s approbation and that the wealthy might be wealthy because they were among the tiny fraction humanity, the Elect of God, who were destined since the dawn of creation to be saved. Thus the poor were not only immoral, they were damned by birthright.

There were some countervailing tendencies. Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan “Commonweal” implied an obligation to each other among its members. The Pilgrims in their “Mayflower Compact” and the Puritans with their church covenants recognized mutuality—but only among the subscribers and members of the group. No responsibility to “strangers” was recognized.

Half of our tradition, the Unitiarians, have their roots among those New England Protestants and, to a lesser degree, among the national Founders, who were often Deists in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the erstwhile Unitarian minister and Transcendental philosopher, took individualism to new heights in his most famous essay, significantly titled “Self Reliance.” “Insist on yourself; never imitate... Every great man is unique,” he opined. Every man/woman could build his character by dint of appreciation of his or place in the cosmos as received directly in moments of Transcendent experience, and application of steely resolve. But he believed that, while all humans possess the potential for self-realization, in practice only those who belonged to a class allowing for the leisure to ready, study and speculate could effectively could actually achieve true self reliance. Thus the great unwashed legions of the laboring classes and the poor were at best children who should rely on enlightened to look after their interests.

Emerson, like his Unitarian contemporizes, was a social reformer. He shrewdly observed, “Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.” He advocated many reform movements, including abolition and contributed to the private charities that were springing up around America, the “voluntary associations” that Alexis de Tocville in Democracy in America identified as the critical counter weight to heedless individualism in a democracy.

When the early Unitarians responded to the rapid growth of the urban poor in Boston, they created the Beneficial Fraternity, commonly know as Benfrat. This was one of the first forerunners of what became the settlement house movement. It offered direct relief to the poor, but also tutored children and adults alike. It even operated chapels that were widely attended among the poor. But the Unitarians never allowed these chapels to become self governing congregations. Ministers were appointed to them and worshipers given no role in either running the affairs of the chapel or in supporting it. Nor were the ragged worshipers welcomed into the many existing congregations in Boston. It never occurred to the generous hearts of the benefactors that the poor might be capable of managing their own affairs—or their own spiritual development.

On our Universalist side things were somewhat better. After all if a loving God will eventually gather all souls to his bosom, then his grateful children on earth should be willing to do the same. They participated in—and often led—the same social reform movements and some of the same charities as the Unitarians. But they welcomed the poor and the wretched into their congregations as equals, encouraged them to found and maintain their own congregations, Famously although abolitionists and early women’s rights advocates can be found in both camps, the Universalists often even embraced blacks and women as leaders, not just as passive recipients.

Meanwhile working people were developing their own institutions. Most early unions had two sources. The first was basically an extension of the old guild system. It strictly followed craft lines. But when master craftsmen morphed into capitalists employing journeymen and bound apprentices the employees and bondsmen often united against them. This was the model of British craft unionism, and, to a lesser extent, the American craft unions that eventually evolved into the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The word solidarity began to crop up. But it was solidarity within the craft. Workers of one craft felt no compulsion to support workers of another, even when they might be employed on the same job or in the same industry

The other source was the beneficial societies, brotherhoods and lodges that were created often in support of “the widows and orphans of the brothers and the lame and aged in their need.” Some of these societies were ethnic like the Loyal Order of Hibernians among the Irish. Others were organized within an industry or across a community. They often aped the popular Masonic lodges with mysteries, rituals, and secret wisdom of their own. But if workers gathered for mutual support, it was no stretch for them to come together under the auspices—official or unofficial—of these lodges and brotherhoods to confront their employees to address grievances, demand reductions of hours and boosts in pay.

In the dangerous Pennsylvania coal fields, where any dissent was ruthlessly suppressed by employers, Irish miners came together in the Hibernian lodges to create the super secret Molly MaGuires who terrorized their bosses with blasting powder and assault until they were finally penetrated and broken up by an Irish Pinkerton detective.

The first truly national American labor union, the Knights of Labor, was just such a fraternal organization complete with its own mysteries and ritual. But its lodges admitted workers of all industries, skilled and unskilled alike, immigrant and native, and sometimes even including non whites. Its leaders, including Grand Master Workman Terrance V. Powderly, abhorred strikes and sought to prevent them. But the members thought otherwise and freely exercised the option. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, while not called by the Knights was spread and supported by its lodges.

It was in the Knights, and in the anarchism, socialism and other working class movements developing in Europe, that the modern concept of solidarity was honed and developed.

The Russian Anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin laid out the basic principles in his classic book Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. For the first time he argued that commonality of interest and mutual support was a positive trait in evolution both among animals and among humans. Mutual aid countervailed against “the law of fang and claw,” and the Spenserian corruption of Darwin’s theory into the ruthless “survival of the fittest” then used to excuse exploitation of the working and poor classes.

Karl Marx applied the same idea and based his hope for liberation of the masses on the basis of solidarity of the working class across all artificial divisions.

Internationals—global associations of working class union and political organizations—began to promote solidarity across borders as a way to end wars. Workers, they argued, should not be “recruited to shoot holes in each other just because they wear different uniforms.

Of course the dream of international solidarity to end war was shattered by the First World War when the labor unions of Europe and the extensive Socialist Parties by in large failed to rise up against the war and sometimes enthusiastically enlisted in patriotic support of their various Fatherlands.

In the aftermath of the dreadful carnage of that war, the dream revived. But now it was identified with the new Bolshevik regime in Russia. Communism became the international bugbear of the ruling elites across the globe. And although the apparent success of the Revolution in Russia appealed to many workers, the eventual realities of Stalinism dimmed their enthusiasm.

Capitalists everywhere furiously attracted every demonstration of working class solidarity as part of the “Red menace.” In this country it let loose the worst repression in our history, the Red Scare of 1918-20, during which thousands were deported, labor unions and socialist organizations suppressed, and hundreds jailed—including the entire leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World and the man who had attracted three million votes for President of the United States in 1912, Socialist Eugene V. Debs.

In Europe it was even worse. Fear of Communisms was the door through which the Fascists and Nazis swept to power unleashing their own forms of “White terror.”

Debs may have been the most articulate advocate of solidarity. He said:

“We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; 'Am I my brother's keeper?'…Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.”

Since that time we have gone through much, including the Great Depression, war on an unspeakable global scale, unprecedented prosperity, a civil rights revolution, the women’s movement, more war, and now economic emergency again. All during those years the advancements that have changed world for the good have come through the exercise of solidarity. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, all recognized its power. Their victories would have been impossible without it.

Conversely, the ills we have suffered have occurred when solidarity failed, when we allowed ourselves to be divided against each other by race, religion, language, age, or sex. Certainly the beneficiaries of inequality recognize the value of solidarity—and practice it among themselves.

The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko asked with exasperation, “Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?”

Now, to survive and thrive we must turn away from unmitigated individualism without losing respect for the individual. We must observe true solidarity in our community, nation and the world or we are all doomed to an ugly future.

Maybe Holocaust survivor Ellie Weisel said it best:

“This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.”

--Patrick Murin

Viral Activism Hits Facebook

2009-09-04T08:01:33Z

Yesterday morning I noted a message from a Facebook friend that:

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

In the next couple of hours the same message popped up from other friends, many of whom were not directly connected. I updated my status. All through the afternoon more and more friends were doing the same. These folks included the usual political types and included many of liberally inclined Unitarian Universalist acquaintances, but also just a cross section of folks I have known over a long life.

There were many positive comments to the posts, and “likes.” Of course there were a few negative comments, some of them quite harsh and paranoid. But they were overwhelmed by a wave of out-of-no-where grass roots activism.

The phenomenon was not limited to my small circle. It was sweeping Facebook and Twitter as well. It got noticed—by Time.com, MyDD, WireTap Blog among others. Even President Barack Obama’s own Facebook Page gratefully acknowledged the swell of support. At my last visit to his page his entry had generated 72,791 “likes” and 6,970 comments.

Yet this did not originate with him or Organizing for America, issue advocacy groups like Health Care for America NOW!, or the vast activist network of MoveOn.Org, although participants in all of those are undoubtedly involved. No one has yet identified the first post. But it has spread on its own simple power.

People are tired of the screaming, lying and bullying, and of the vacillations in Congress and in the White House. They want their voices heard. And in this simple, dramatic way they have—if only for a moment—drowned out rants of Faux News, the Orwellian double speak of insurance industry shills, the obstructionism of the incredible shrinking Republican Party.

Good for us.

Seventy Years Ago Today

2009-09-01T16:17:18Z

W. H. Auden

The beginning of unimaginable horror is hard to pin down by date. Was it the first shattered glass of a Jewish shop? The war by proxy in Spain? The get-out-of-jail-free card dealt by Neville Chamberlain? A secret split of the swag to be by ambitious empires? Or earlier. The reveries of a failed artist in a lonely bed? The rotting heart of Western Civilization itself?

Let’s pick a day. This one will do. BIG THINGS HAPPENED. The world, pardon my pun, wobbled on its Axis. All it took was the body of an unlucky prisoner swathed in a Polish uniform at an obscure border radio transmitter. Cheaper than allowing a battle ship to sink. Presto! You have a war. Not just any war. Still, to this day THE War.

Far away in a smoky bar and lubricated by cheap whiskey, a poet marked the occasion.

September 1, 1939

By W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

What’s Really in the Health Care Reform Bill?

2009-08-28T15:36:25Z

HEALTH CARE REFORM BILLS

Truth and Fiction

Current American Issues

Information Seminar Series

SPEAKERS:

Jane Hansen, Family Nurse Practitioner

David Borris, Illinois Main Street Alliance

Hal Snyder, M.D.

John Gaudette, Illinois Director, HCAN

America's health care system is a disaster causing vast amounts of suffering and unneeded expense. Now is the time to work together to correct its' many flaws, however myths perpetuated by the health industry itself appear to be derailing this process by creating confusion in the public discourse. We have assembled a panel of experts to help sort fact from fiction. Jane Hansen who holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a BA in economics from Wellesley will begin the evening by presenting an overview of the current health care system. This will provide a better understanding of the present health care crisis facing our country. David Borris, proprietor of Hel's Kitchen Catering, will address the need for reform in the health care industry to assist small business owners. Dr. Hal Snyder is a volunteer organizer with Health Care for America Now who has studied the various bills in Congress. He will dispel the many myths circulating throughout our country and tell the truth about the reform legislation and what it will do for us. Illinois Director of Health Care for America Now John Gaudette, will explain what's happening in Congress and how we can have a say in the outcome. If you have questions regarding the pending legislation in Congress, please join us.

McHenry County College Conference Center

Wednesday, September 9, 2009 at 7:00 pm

Sponsored by Pax Christi, The McHenry County Peace Coalition,

and The Student Peace Action Network

UU Blog-o-Sphere Sizzles—Of Covenants, Blasphemy, and Atheists

2009-08-25T20:20:16Z

Theism (Christian variation) and Humanism—Can they co-exist in Unitarian Universalist congregations? From the Centennial Windows at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Woodstock, Illinois.

My, my. Peacebang, one of the most popular and esteemed contributors to Unitarian Universalist blogging, sure stirred the post with her recent post Who Initiates the Covenant? In an innocent sounding theological reflection, she argues that “The ancient covenant tradition that comes to us from the Hebrew Scriptures through the Christian Scriptures and to the congregational Puritan church that established our polity is one wherein the covenant is ALWAYS initiated by God, never by God’s people.” She rejects out of hand any suggestion that a covenant (for a church or congregation) can be an agreement by its members to walk together in common purpose.

Why is this important? Because evolving UU thought has become more and more concerned with covenantal relationships as the basic building blocks of an Association based on rigid congregational polity. It is the covenants of each member congregation that establish them as units entitled to be respected and accepted in a free Association. And individuals have no formal place in Unitarian Universalism except in so far as they subscribe formally to a member “covenantal community.”

Peacebang is a superb scholar, as well as a gifted minister and prolific writer. She is currently engulfed in writing her doctorial dissertation on the topic of covenants. After spending four years on the subject she has STRONG opinions on the subject. And that’s fine.

But, whoa! In her passion, she has stepped off the deep end. To wit: “We cannot create covenant without reverent hearts. To attempt to do so is, in my opinion, a blasphemy. I just said BLASPHEMY! But dern it, I mean it.”

She tries to soften the blow to the many Unitarian Universalist Humanists who would be repelled by—and would never join in—a covenant initiated by God or any euphemism for God. She does so by blithely telling agnostic or atheist UUs what they should put up with: “I think it’s possible for non-theists to accept that some spiritual force greater than ourselves calls us out of our individual concerns to do the work of growing, healing, serving, learning, celebrating, grieving and repenting.”

At least one UU Humanist is having none of it. MoxieLife is positively plaintive in her response post Is There No Room in the UUA for an Atheist? She responds: “I think it is a huge leap for members of my denomination to expect me to warp my view of both humanism and atheism to accept a "force greater" in our lives. If I were to suggest that they move their idea of God to the realm of fairy tale I think they would be offended.”

MoxieLife sees this as the latest assault on non-theist UUs. A second generation humanist UU who grew up in a congregation where God was, at best, a question mark and more likely an affront to “rational thought,” she finds herself increasingly a stranger in congregations “moving into a new age of spirituality.”

Her teenage offspring, who grew up in UU religious education, feels the same alienation. They have stopped attending services. She fears if PeaceBang and others like her insist on affirming a covenant to which she cannot subscribe, she will be permanently deprived of a congregational home. She asks “why can't there be room for those of us who come from the long tradition of humanists? Why must we change to your needs? I am a second generation UU, my daughter a third and it feels like that might be the end of the line for our family. Is that ok with the UUA? Is that ok with you?”

I have some thoughts for both bloggers. First, Peace Bang.

I know what it’s like to fiercely cleave to a useful definition and challenge any one who tries to stretch it in unusual or uncomfortable ways. I used to fight tooth and nail against those who wanted to use “fundamentalism” as a description of any extreme and intolerant version of a religion. It deluted the usefulness of the original, very specific, definition—a tendency in American Protestantism dating to the early 20^th Century embracing absolute Biblical literalism and a personal relationship with God. It did not mean simple orthodoxy or conservatism. That definition invited a liberal religious response with in American culture. But it was a useless endeavor. Fundamentalism has become “extremism coupled with the rejection of any other view with in any sect or philosophic tradition.” It happened because we had no concise word for just such a concept and so extended the Christian term as analogous to other religions. Now even I sometimes write about things like “congregational polity fundamentalism.”

Likewise the esteemed Alice Blair Wesley used to rail against the term “denomination” as applied to the UUA. We are an Association of congregations, she would insist. Denomination implied a much different organizational principle. And she was correct, as far is it goes. But for lack of a better word commonly understood both within and outside our own bailiwick, most of us now use denomination to describe our particular sect among a plentitude of sects.

Language, particularly English, evolves. Words flow down hill to fill hollows and make pools where they will. We have no French Academy to defend us from the encroachments of “le drugstore,” no word police with the power to punish those who scratch a new ditch and divert the stream. You may as well join Lear on the heath to rage against the storm.

People—and congregations—will use covenant however they damn well please.

More troublesome, PeaceBang, is your use of the powerful word “blasphemy.” As a believer, you know that blasphemy is an insult and offense against God Him/Her/It self. It is a sin of arrogance more deadly than any offense against another mortal. The blasphemer is cast out from the community of the holy. He or she becomes “the other,” the enemy, something less than human. That way leads to the stake of Servetus

Abner Kneeland, now considered a minor UU saint, was the last man in America jailed for blasphemy in 1838. Let’s leave blasphemy where it belongs—moldering in a past best le.ft behind

As for MoxieLife:

I understand your pain. The transformation of the familiar is almost always painful.

For a few decades Humanists were the dominant voice in Unitarianism and then in the UUA. Once triumphant, by the 1950’s they were often less than gracious to the lingering minority of Theists. They often ran roughshod over congregations banishing “God talk,” expurgating hymns, spurning prayer. They drove more than a few ministers from their pulpits for being insufficiently zealous in the refutation of “mystic-tristic bullshit.” And they often demanded that the entire Association, including congregations with a nostalgic fondness “magical thinking,” bow to their exquisite sensitivities.

But, as you have noted, things are changing. Even though most UUs still describe themselves as Humanist, the hard edge has been knocked off. They are apt to hedge the term with modifiers. They are more apt to embrace a tolerant, bemused agnosticism than an adamant all-or-nothing atheism. They share with the general culture, a yearning for spirituality and often find ways to embrace something “Greater” without acknowledging theism.

Many folks were astounded a few years ago when Rev. Bill Sinkford successfully argued for greater use of the “Language of Reverence” with only a modest, if furious, rear-guard action by old line Humanists. Indeed many Humanists found new ways to accommodate both the language and the increasing numbers Theists of one stripe or another who were sharing the pews with them. Some found refuge in the awe and wonder for the universe expressed by Carl Sagan and later developed into The Great Story. Other found no theistic forms of Buddhism and Taoism acceptable.

But to the committed rationalist Humanist of the old stripe it is all disgraceful trimming and surrender to popular delusion as a form naked marketing.

The trouble is your loss at a transforming, living religion, is re-playing a repetitive theme. In America the first generation Unitarians—William Ellery Channing et.al.—offended the orthodox within the New England Standing Order. That first generation was hardly yet gray when the Transcendentalists upset their apple cart. And so it would go, one generation’s radical reformers would become the beleaguered guardians of timeless tradition. The Humanists in their time supplanted the genteel respectability of the rational Christianity advocated by the Eliots and the old Brahmin establishment. Yet none of the new transformation, however powerful, ever fully supplanted the earlier ones. They eventually learned to live, however uncomfortably, together. What makes you think that Humanism can defy this evolution and freeze Unitarian Universalism into a kind of rational orthodoxy?

Humanism in our traditions flourished from three sources. First was 19^th Century Free Thought which matured through the short lived Free Religious Association in the east and which thrived in many congregations in the Mid west that were part of the Western Unitarian Conference. Many of these congregations maintain a Humanist flavor to this day. Second are those congregations founded as part of the Fellowship Movement, which planted small lay, led congregations in many areas of the country where liberal religion had previously seldom thrived. These congregations became beacon for outcasts in regions, like the South, with a dominant church going culture. They provided cover to heretics and needed re-enforcement for otherwise isolated individual. Finally, in large numbers of secularized Jews infused congregations with the Humanism of Felix Adler.

By the time of the consolidation of with the Universalists in 1960 these three sources had spread over much of the movement. Pockets of Unitarian Christianity, particularly in the old tribal homeland of New England remained. But they--and the supposedly backwards Universalists--were expected to slowly shrivel and eventually disappear in the face of superior, rational Humanism.

But it never really happened that way. The rise of Feminism and the Ecology movement in the denomination each contributed new strands of spirituality divorced from traditionally patriarchal Old-Man-In-The-Sky God that most Humanists had been rebelling against. Stubborn Universalism refused to die and began to take root in even the stoniest of Unitarian hearts. And there was no escaping the general cultural influence of New Age religion, particularly on the West Coast. Like it or not, “Spirituality” has been the incoming tide of UUism for nearly twenty years.

These kinds of sea changes in our movement have often followed the ministers. Young ministers, enrapt of Ralph Waldo Emerson, brought Transcendentalism to all corners of the country. A wave of Humanist ministers, many of them returning war veterans, washed over and transformed Unitarianism in the Post War years. Now every seminarian new minister I meet subscribes to some form of Theism, many embracing some sort of Christian identity. They begin to fill even the most Humanist pulpits and slowly coax their congregations to acceptance of “the new reverence.”

So should an old school Humanist be discouraged? Take heart. This, too, shall pass. Our new congregations and our new ministers are no more immune from the general culture than were earlier generations. The New Atheism has asserted itself in a number of recent best selling books. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Americans describing themselves as “unaffiliated,” including self-confessed atheists and agnostics as well as those too reticent to admit it, now fall behind just Catholics and Southern Baptists in total numbers. From a growth standpoint, it may be better to market Unitarian Universalism to theses discontents than to Theists who can find many havens.

My guess is another generation may find Spiritual UUs gnashing their teeth over the triumph of some kind or evolved and re-branded Humanism.

In the mean time, how can we live together? Well, that brings us back to those covenants. The ones where we agree to walk together for mutual support in our individual quests for truth, meaning, and justice in our lives. They just can’t be handed on down from on high by somebody’s idea of God.

Contrasting Worldviews—Carolyn Quinn Guest Blogger

2009-08-22T22:20:10Z

Carolynne Quinn

Carolyn Quinn (nor relation to the governor) attended two events this week that I would have loved to attend, but had to work instead. Work is the curse of the activist class. I have made the trip to Springfield several times and would have loved to hear the scuttlebutt about how next year’s races are shaping up. But more important would have been the chance to stand up for Healthcare Reform right here in Crystal Lake. That event was organized by a local outfit stitched together from local Tea Baggers, Minuteman anti-immigration zealots, and paranoid gun worshipers. In McHenry County that makes them as respectable as the Bishop’s wife. The Northwest Herald, an editorial opponent virtually any reform breathlessly covered the event. So did conservative blogger Cal Skinner who had been promoting the event.

This week I attended 2 events, both held in the bubble of their own opposite ends of the political spectrum. The Democrats held their annual Governor’s Day rally at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield. Lots of rah-rah, go Democrats stuff. The Patriots United group held an event they billed to the media as a town hall meeting in Crystal Lake but denied to attendees that it was any such thing. “This is the regular monthly meeting of a private entity,” according to a woman who sold me a ticket. The moderator of the event announced that that they were nonpartisan. According to their website they are purely libertarian. Nonpartisan my eye.

Here is my take on the two.

Gov. Pat Quinn

Gov. Pat Quinn: “When [JFK] said, 'A rising tide lifts all boats, notice he did not say a rising tide lifts all yachts”

Iowa Gov. Chet Culver, Keynote Speaker at the Illinois Democratic County Chairmen’s Association (IDCCA) brunch before the Fair rally: “We believe in public policy solutions. While they are the party of 'Nope' - we are the party of ‘Hope.’”

Congressman Manzullo consulting with insurance lobbyist Ryan Brauns. The platform principles of Patriots United an allegedly “nonpartisan” group were in plain view. I approve of the transparency-just not the principles...

Cong. Don Manzullo (R-IL16): “This 1000+ page of legislation is designed to put private insurance companies out of business and drive medical doctors into other professions.”

Crystal Lake Mayor Aaron Shepley and a vice president of Centegra Health System, McHenry County’s near monopoly hospital system: "Speaking as a former lawyer, the proposed bill is purposefully vague - which is legalspeak for 'We can do whatever we want.'" "What's primarily wrong with the [healthcare reform] bill is that it doesn't address tort reform; not one word about tort reform in the document.”

Gov. Pat Quinn: "The stronger our people, the stronger our state. What the people need to be stronger right now is jobs."

Gov. Chet Culver: “On the first day of drivers' ed. you learned that if you want to go backward you put it in ‘R’ and if you want to go forward you put it in ‘D.’”

Cong. Don Manzullo: “The number of MDs who have been driven out of business because they cannot afford to pay for malpractice insurance is outrageous. The should not have to fear losing everything in the blink of an eye.”

Mayor Aaron Shepley: “Medicare does not pay very much relative to the cost of hospitals' expense. What makes people think they should get to have a baby for a $10 co-pay?”

Ok. Here are my questions to these politicians:

To Gov Quinn: You hit the nail on the head in terms of what I need to be stronger right now is a job. While I see progress toward new jobs in construction, green job training and car sales, I don't see so much progress for most people in my generation which represents the biggest chunk of the population. We are too young to retire and too old to start a new training from scratch. What do you propose to help us?

To Gov Culver: Great job helping the people of Iowa to learn how to move their politics Forward into Drive. Loved your rousing speech. But can I see the map of where we are going with all this hope and drive with a capital D? Is our president the only one with a map?

To Cong Manzullo: Good thing small business has you on their side. Good thing you don't want to see doctors, insurance companies and pharmaceuticals driven out of business. What about workers like myself who barely make enough money to pay bills and are in the same boat of not being able to afford insurance? Are you okay with it that people like me should have to fear losing everything in the blink of an eye? Are you okay with millions of people whose business is their home being driven out of that business?

To Mayor Shepley: Great to know my mayor is not intimidated by a legal document / proposed legislation. I like to see how you printed it on both sides of the page and organized it into a binder. Less waste of paper and energy to make that paper. No need to be overwhelmed by words just because there's a lot of them. As a teacher, I’m with you on that. My kids could read a thousand page book in 6th grade. Happily. And they don’t get paid $500/hour to do it…

So, since you don't approve of people getting Medicare because it costs the hospitals too much, and you don't approve of Medicaid because poor people are basically welfare queens or illegal immigrants who ‘don’t deserve” it: Will the city of Crystal Lake now provide healthcare to people who need strep throat tests, mammograms, measles vaccinations, TB tests, swine flu vaccinations or other needed treatment? It would be good to tell my neighbors who lost everything including their job, their insurance and their house - all in the blink of an eye - that the mayor of Crystal Lake has a plan to take care of them so they won't overburden the hospitals or the taxpayers.

Meet Me At the Fair

2009-08-06T16:59:21Z

Brian Meyers, Mary Earlenborn, and Bob Kaempfe took the McHenry County Democrats booth at the McHenry County Fair out for a test spin the other night.

The McHenry County Fair started yesterday in Woodstock. This year it is celebrating the 60^th anniversary of the fair’s revival after a long hiatus through the Depression and the Second World War. In 1949 it started out as a 4-H Club youth fair. By the next year local farmers were on board and the event officially took the name it has today.

McHenry County was one of the most fertile agricultural areas in Illinois back then. It supported a huge dairy farming industry that not only made Harvard the Milk Capital of the World but that supported dairy processors across the county daily shipping tons of milk to Chicago and the Mid West market via Northwestern Rail Road. Soon Henry Wallace’s passion for corn genetics paid off with McHenry County becoming one of the nation’s leading producers of hybrid seed corn.

Dairy farming has virtually vanished from the county now, although major milk processors remain. Suburban sprawl has eaten up most of the farm land south and east of Woodstock. Family farms are under pressure, and agribusiness is here to stay. Young farmers can’t afford their own land and many rent several widely separated fields. Newer forms of agriculture including organic vegetable gardening, Christmas tree farming, and various agri-tourism gambits now help keep remaining small farmers afloat. But most farm land, including the “wide open” spaces in the western half of the county are dedicated to feed corn and soy beans. And with the demand created by ethanol production, corn is beginning to squeeze out the soy beans, even in years like this where cool, wet weather has been disastrous for the corn crop.

Most 4-H Club members are now not farm kids, but the children of those new suburbanites living in the county’s towns and subdivisions. But agriculture still reigns at the fair. The dairy, beef, swine, and sheep pavilions are still at the center of the fair and their redolent aroma settles over everything on a hot August day. Proud 4-H members still vie for ribbons and winning livestock still goes on the auction block at the end of the fair.

This year the Fair Board is re-emphasizing it farm roots by trying to present the fair with a unified theme, Where Does Our Food Come From? Fair promoters hope to educate new folks about the industry that now annoys many of them who get caught behind slow moving farm vehicles on county roads or decry the whiff of manure from the century old farm next door to their shiny new subdivision.

Of course there are plenty of other attractions. A new Miss McHenry County was crowned last night as the very first queen, Marilyn (Thomsen) Moore 20 other former winners looked on. There will be junior and senior level talent competitions, just like there have been every year since the Original Amateur Hour was wowing the folks on radio and infant television. Of course there will be pavilions jammed with craft, cooking and other competitions; a carnival midway; plenty of places to buy corn dogs, elephant ears, ice cream, cotton candy and other fair delicacies; and exhibition of historic tractors; commercial exhibitors in quasi-air conditioned buildings and spread out along dusty paths. There will be a bull riding event, a tractor pull and a demolition derby.

But the bloom has been off the fair for several years now that it is cramped into less than half of its original grounds. The rest was sold off for commercial development. Gone are the Grand Stands where a certain tier of national touring acts—country and rock performers with a hit or two in the last decade or two—put on shows and where full scale rodeos and horse races could be put on. Now spectators sit on ramshackle temporary bleachers open to blazing sun and torrential rain alike over seeing a tiny mud-pit area. Many outdoor exhibitors have abandoned the fair which has had to place them far from the main attractions and no clear circuit for visitors to take. And after a failed, one year experiment in which a beer tent was erected in the most obscure corner of the grounds far removed from everything else, you still can not get a tall cool one. Attendance has been sagging year after year since the fair’s truncation.

New fairground are said to be possible in five to ten years on land reclaimed from gravel mining adjacent to the new minor league ball park just outside of Woodstock. This is if the Fair Board can finally strike a deal. But the crotchety and stubborn farmers who make up the board have proven time and time again that they cannot get it together. After a decade of fighting with the City of Woodstock over road access issues, at least two other ambitious plans for building new facilities have fallen through.

Still, the McHenry County Fair is a great time and a great tradition. Give it a visit. And while you are there, stop by the Democratic Party of McHenry County booth in Building C. I’ll be there tonight from 2-9 PM

Pennsylvania Gym Shooting—Yes, It Was a Hate Crime

2009-08-05T20:41:46Z

George Sodini, the crazed lone gunman du jour.

The Pennsylvania Gym Shooting—note how quickly these things acquire proper titles—is just another event in a familiar parade of American gore. Another heavily armed loner/psycho lets loose with real fire power. Result—tragedy, carnage, and a blip on a 24 hour cable news cycle.

That the event garnishes that much attention is because the victims were mostly (I haven’t seen the usual photo gallery of victim photos) middle class suburban white women. Their killer was the lone white loon down the block. Black kids sprayed with automatic weapons on the streets of Chicago with similar body counts hardly make it to the front page of the local papers, let along mention by well coifed national news readers.

This event will be somewhat marginalized because it is assumed to be, perhaps, an over aggressive case of domestic violence. By some accounts an intended target, and perhaps one of the victims, was a former girl friend or a woman who had spurned shooter, George Sodini. And domestic violence, however worthy of a passing tsk-tsk or a third-rate basic cable movie staring the second lead of a 1980’s sit-com, is far too routine to hold our interest—or our indignation—for long.

But what if we look at this another way. What if this is the same kind of hate crime as say the Knoxville Church Shooting, the Abortion Doctor Murder, or the Holocaust Museum Shooting? The gunman in this case shared a lonely and alienated life, a history of mental problems, a violent temper, unlimited access to weapons—and most importantly--a clearly defined “enemy” to be destroyed. In each case, and in others like them, the shooters left behind screeds, manifestos or statements elevating their actions in their own eyes to a noble, self-sacrificing blow for vengeance.

In Sodini’s case he left a web page, since taken down by the authorities, that clearly outlined his grievances, his targets, and even the place and method of attack. Sodoni hated women—all women—for a life time of perceived slights and rejections.

What, pray tell, is the difference between misogyny, hatred for liberals, anti-Semitism, anti-abortion fanaticism, homophobia, racism, or any of the other group based hatreds and their attendant ideologies that motivate carnage in America?

Maybe Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Rielly, Ann Coulter, or Michael Savage have not been overtly winking and nodding at violence against women. That might be too much even for them. But all of them let slip the occasional disdain and contempt for uppity women. And the general American culture from slasher films to rap music (not that these folks ever listen to that) to popular country music ballads (which they probably do) enshrines such violence, especially when “the bitches had it coming” for alleged wrongs and slights.

So let’s acknowledge this for what it is: a hate crime. And let us adjust our outrage accordingly.

Ready to (groan) discuss UUA Governance?

2009-08-04T21:10:56Z

The traditional Banner Parade of opened the 2009 UUA General Assembly in Salt Lake.

Over on Election-L, the Unitarian Universalist Association’s e-mail discussion list on elections, there has begun a lively discussion of governance reform proposals and possibilities—at least lively for those whose eyes don’t glaze over and drop into a coma over the sheer wonkery of it all. The list, where the recent UUA Presidential campaign was fought out with some passion and not little heat, was due to be shut down. But participants wanted to keep it open to discuss issues arising from the election, including how the UU should conduct future elections and transact it business. And after a flurry of e-mails re-hashing the election, tearing the scabs off of recent wounds, and a bit of name calling, the list has settled down, quite usefully to do that.

In response to a discussion about how we select/elect delegates to our General Assemblies, Chris Walton (a.k.a Philocrites)and who is the esteemed editor of UUWorld posted a summary of the proposed “reforms” to apportioning General Assembly delegates submitted by the Fifth Principle Project. By the way, this is just one of several proposed sweeping changes in the report. Walton wrote:

…One of its proposals is to scale back the total number of delegates to
approximately 2,000. (In the last election, approximately 5,000 delegates
were eligible to vote; of these, 3,550 delegates actually cast ballots in
the presidential race.) The proposal would give delegate status to one
settled minister per congregation (totaling approximately 600 votes). Lay
representation would look like this:

1-250 members = 1 delegate (for 810 votes using 2009 certification data)
251-550 members = 2 delegates (for 278 votes)

551-1000 members = 3 delegates (for 132 votes)

1000+ members = 4 delegates (for 28 votes)

There would no longer be delegates representing the UUA's three associate member organizations (the UU Women's Federation, UU-United Nations Office, and UU Service Committee), and UUA trustees would no longer have delegate status…

…The task force will make its final recommendations to the board in January 2010, and the board may introduce proposed bylaw changes to the 2010 General Assembly.

The following was my 2 cents—O.K. 75 cents—worth of commentary to the proposal.

The Fifth Principle Project proposal still has some significant problems in accurately reflecting the membership in congregations and the power of reserved ministerial votes.

We would still have unequal representation. Like the United State Senate, this plan empowers small congregations disproportionately, especially considering that probably nearly than half of these congregations hover around 100 members or less. Meanwhile our very largest congregations, while few in numbers, would have their lay delegations capped at 4 although under the previous un-capped system they would have been could have doubled or tripled that number. Hardest hit is the Church of the Larger Fellowship which could have been eligible for 14 lay delegates if they were apportioned on increments of at least 250 members.

Now in some ways this disproportionate power given to small congregations might be a good thing given the fixation of harboring growth mainly in large congregations that was the mantra of thinking in recent years. Small congregations rightfully often felt ignored and slighted. Still, if I was a member of a large, vigorous congregation with or without a church building, I might feel pretty damned disenfranchised myself.

Defenders of this proposal argue that total delegates must be capped to keep policy making GA's (as opposed to possible alternate year educational/social/spiritual gatherings) to keep it manageable and keep expenses down. They also point out that many of the smallest fellowships seldom send delegates to GA anyway unless it is close to home, thus somewhat mitigating the disparity. Fine, but that is like saying that we have no problem not representing the members of congregations too small or too poor to send delegates. Perhaps the absentee ballot procedure would help those, but that currently only applies to the election of officers and not for any other business of the GA.

Well then, maybe the addition of the ministerial votes will help even things out. A lot of small congregations either do not have a minister or are not served by a "settled minister" which means no interims, "consulting" ministers, or community ministers associated with a congregation (remember when they were supposed to be the wave of the future?). Then there is the fact that many congregations have more than one called and settled minister plus credentialized Religious Educators with advanced degrees. Does only the "senior" minister get a vote? What about co-ministers with no senior recognized. The addition of these other, congregationally based, ministers might at least theoretically make up for the discrimination in lay delegates among larger congregations.

But all of this merely tinkers around the edges of the real problem. Why have a General Assembly where all delegates lay or recognized ministerial each exercise only one vote?

Why not allow the lay delegates of each congregation, no matter how many are permitted, be empowered to cast votes equal to their last certified membership report? This is hardly a radical or revolutionary proposal. Many organizations, religious bodies included, have operated on this basis for decades. It should not even offend the most devoted acolyte of Congregational Polity Fundamentalism to allow individual congregations to be proportionately represented by delegates of their choosing.

And congregations could bind or instruct delegates at their own discretion. They could choose a winner's-take-all allocation of votes for President and Moderator, or they could instruct their delegates to cast them proportionately to the vote of the members. Congregations could bind delegates on any or all issues or could choose to let them divide and exercise the congregations's total vote at their discretion. Those choices would be left to the congregations. Like wise absentee ballots would reflect the total congregational membership under the same terms.

The only real objection to this is that it would be cumbersome and lead to multiple, time consuming roll call votes. Of course rules could be adopted that would limit representational votes to elections and maybe a handful of issues that are taken up only with advance placement on the Agenda including a period of congregational discussion and consulting. Less binding business, organizing, house keeping and procedural votes could still be conducted with each delegate exercising one vote. Also, modern electronics could make it very simple to cast weighted ballots without having to resort to oral roll calls or card counts by tellers.

As to ministers, under such a proportional representation system, I am perfectly fine with allowing all ministers in full fellowship and high certification DREs, whether currently serving a congregation or not and including retired ministers have one individual vote each. This recognizes their importance and contributions, but does not give them a block of votes more than equal to one quarter of the entire voting pool (600 out of 2000) as under the Fifth Principle Project proposal.

Whose ox is gored by this proposal?

A Question About Books

2009-08-01T22:24:03Z

I was recently asked to become the co-moderator of the UUA’s Newcomers e-mail list. That’s a list for folks who are interested in Unitarian Universalism or new to it can come to ask even the most basic questions without feeling embarrassed. It is also a place where a lot of folks share their faith journeys that brought them to consider becoming UUs. An amazing number find us first by being diagnosed as Unitarian Universalists after taking the famous BeliefNet Quiz

For several years, I served as an “old timer” on the list to be available to answer questions and direct seekers to resources. Then I got this “promotion.”

I’ve was asked to post a question for discussion once a month. This is the topic for August. I thought it might interest more than just the newcomers. Feel free to play along. And it you know anyone who might find our Newcomers list useful, send them on over to join the fun. Here is what I wrote to the list:

One of my favorite UU bloggers Peacebang started a lively discussion on her page about “pop spirituality” books and other books that “have changed my life.” Check it out that post here.

What about it? Do you read books like The Alchemist, The DaVinci Code, The Four Agreements, The Purpose-Driven Life, The Celestine Prophecy, The Power Of Now , The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Eat, Love, Pray, The Shack, The Sparrow, The Secret etc.? Do you find any meaningful in your life? Did you find any offensive or off-putting?

And what about non-spiritual or religious books. Many of us have had our lives most profoundly changed by novels, poetry, biography, and other non-fiction. Can you share some of those titles with us?

I’ll get things started. I, frankly, don’t get much out of a lot of pop spirituality. Some of it, like The Secret, profoundly offends me. But that’s just me. Your results may vary.

I have had my life changed by many books. At a discussion at church recently I mentioned just one of them. The Moon is Down is a slender, nearly forgotten novel by John Steinbeck. I read it in high school many years ago as the Vietnam War was raging. The story is about a sleepy Norwegian mining village that has been occupied by the Nazis during World War II. The villagers join in an underground resistance movement despite the fact that their beloved Mayor and Doctor are being held hostage and will be executed if the railroad from the mines is sabotaged. Of course it is. Meanwhile, before they are executed the Doctor reminds the Nazi commander that his attempts to squash resistance are futile. “The flies have captured the flypaper.” That one phrase has stayed with me all of these years and has often fueled my own resistance to oppression.

OK. Now it’s your turn.

USA TODAY Discovers Job Losses Now Hitting Older Men

2009-07-30T21:53:58Z

I was grabbing my daily morning jolt of java at the convenience store on my way to work this morning when a headline in the USA Today caught my eye. Tough Times for Older Male Workers the headline screamed. Now I don’t usually read that newspaper, but I made a note to check out the story on line when I had time. I have. My reaction?

No shit, Sherlock! This is common, painful knowledge in my wide range of geezer acquaintances many of them either out of work, scraping by part time as fry-cook wages, “consulting” (translation: dead broke and willing to take on any crap you will send my way for peanuts) or live in terror that the ax is about to fall.

Gray haired white men—usually the safest workers in a recession—have been taking a special beating. While their numbers still are well below, say young Black men, they have risen alarmingly while minority women and others have fared better than in previous down turns.

I know that sympathy for this “privileged” class may be limited—particularly by those have been buffeted hardship time and time again. But these supposed lords of the universe deserve at least a moment’s sympathy.

Mainly because most of them never were “lords of the universe.” As the USA Today article succinctly points out:

“The recession has hit older men hard because job loss has been concentrated in male-dominated fields, such as construction, manufacturing and finance. The decline of unions, which protected employees with seniority, has played a role, too.

“‘The bloodletting has been in parts of the economy where men work...’”.

While the finance sector may include some former millionaire bankers and hedge-fund speculators, most of the displaced are middle-manager paper pusher sorts.

Men usually get little sympathy for their economic plight—we are expected to suck it up, pick ourselves up, get with it—but because these are disproportionately former “breadwinning” family men, plenty of women and children are under the hammer too.

In fact, long suffering wives may even have it worse. Many are now primary breadwinners, although wages for women generally still lag behind men. And many had left the work force or worked part time. While they may find it easier to get work than their spouses, it is apt to be low paying and lack benefits. On top of that they are stuck with their depressed husbands—most of whom are not conditioned to be “help meets”—at home. Fair or not, many of them are probably still doing the cooking, cleaning and such for Mr. Helpless.

I have fared better than most. I have a full time job. But I am a theoretical “independent contractor” and get no health insurance or any other benefits. I was recently able to quickly find a second job as a third shift gas station/convenience store clerk three nights a week at about a buck an hour over minimum wage, also with no benefits. But together, working about 62 hour a week, I make significantly less than when I was involuntarily retired as a head custodian for a public elementary school four years ago.

But at least I am working, so I suppose I should shut up and stop whining. It’s the manly thing to do.

But if you have a moment, shed a tear for my grizzled brothers, the aging Baby Boomers with too much time on their hands, too little hope, and a long wait to die.