Category: Arts & culture

Why I won’t be wearing a safety pin

Another social media maelstrom, this time over the wearing of safety pins: Straight white people are wearing safety pins as a symbol that they are allies to people of color, BGLQQT people, Hispanic people, other marginalized or oppressed groups. Some people like the idea, some hate it.

I don’t have a strong opinion about whether anyone should wear a safety pin or not, but I know I won’t be wearing one, and here’s why:

A significant part of my career as a minister has been cleaning up after clergy sexual misconduct. This has turned out to be a complicated business: there are more than a few misconducting ministers who have a lot of power in Unitarian Universalism, and these ministers have a lot of friends. They have gotten very good at shutting down victims of ministerial misconduct, and shutting down those of us who stand by those victims.

Often these misconducting ministers, and their friends, talk about how they want to end ministerial misconduct. Then they’ll say that we have to do it the right way — we can’t rush, we can’t do any damage to those talented ministers who committed misconduct. In the end, this means they will resist any change in the status quo with all the force at their disposal, all the while talking as if they want real change.

Thus I have learned to pay little attention to what people say. Instead, I watch for those who stand up to sexual misconduct even when it is inconvenient, those who do something even when they think no one is looking.

As a corollary, I also assume that no one should trust me. Just because I’ve done a little bit of work on clergy misconduct, I do not expect victims of clergy misconduct, or anyone else fighting this battle, to claim me as an ally. It’s too easy to tell stories about yourself and make yourself into a hero; therefore anything I say about myself can be discounted. If you see me doing the work, then you can count me as an ally — but only for just as long as I’m doing the work.

As an example of what I mean, I had a conversation with a powerful UU minister this past summer. This person said that they were staunch advocates of cleaning up clergy sexual misconduct. Yet it quickly became clear that they knew little or nothing about how one actually cleans up after clergy misconduct; and it quickly became clear that they were allied with some ministers who have actively resisted change, that they had been mentored by older ministers who have been documented as having committed misconduct. This minister said they were a staunch ally to those of us working to end clergy misconduct; I believe they honestly thought they were helping end clergy misconduct; but their words and their deeds were not aligned.

That’s why I won’t be wearing a safety pin. I don’t want to be one of those well-meaning white people who have convinced themselves they’re anti-racists when they’re not. I don’t want to be one of those well-meaning straight people who think they’re fighting homophobia, but they’re not. I’m not looking to set up false expectations for myself; I already know I fall short, and I’m sure I fall short by a much greater distance than I’d like to think.

I’m not going to judge you if you wear a safety pin; we’re all doing the best we can, and me trying to judge you is just another way of falling short myself. But for my part, I’d rather be judged on what I do; that’s a course of action that won’t be particularly comfortable, but I suspect the lack of comfort will do me good.

Revolution

Carol just sent me my horoscope, which quotes Rebecca Solnit on the necessity of revolution:

“I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small, and I feel that we’ve lost if we don’t practice and celebrate them now, instead of waiting for some ’60s never-neverland of after-the-revolution. And we’ve lost the revolution if we relinquish our full possibilities and powers.” — Rebecca Solnit, interview by Benjamin Cohen in The Believer, September, 2009.

And this reminded me what Adrienne Rich said about poetry and social change back in 2006:

“Poetry has the capacity — in its own ways and by its own means — to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still-uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on owndership and dispossession, the subjection of women, torture and bribes, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom — that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the ‘free ‘ market. This ongoing future, written off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented: through collective action, through mahy kinds of art.Its elementary condition is the recovery and redistribution of the world’s resources that have been extracted from the many by the few.” — Adrienne Rich, Poetry and Commitment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 36.

Statement from California legislative leaders

Our legislative leaders here in California have issued a joint statement on the presidential election. This statement, issued by California Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de León nd California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, says in part:

“California has long set an example for other states to follow. And California will defend its people and our progress. We are not going to allow one election to reverse generations of progress at the height of our historic diversity, scientific advancement, economic output, and sense of global responsibility.

“We will be reaching out to federal, state and local officials to evaluate how a Trump Presidency will potentially impact federal funding of ongoing state programs, job-creating investments reliant on foreign trade, and federal enforcement of laws affecting the rights of people living in our state. We will maximize the time during the presidential transition to defend our accomplishments using every tool at our disposal.” Read the complete statement.

The statement also points out that California has the largest economy of any state — and there’s an implication that the reason we have the largest economy is that we actually believe in science (including climate science), and welcome diversity.

It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens here in California, now that the Democrats have a supermajority. California is headed down a very different path from the path that will be taken by Republican-dominated Washington. Want to bet someone starts printing bumper stickers that read, “Don’t blame me, I’m from California”?

Naomi Klein: The Democrats done it

In an opinion piece in The Guardian, Naomi Klein gives her analysus of why Trump won the presidential election: Kalein puts the blame squarely on the Democratic party, who embraced neo-liberalism:

“Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

“At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.”

I think Klein is on to something here. When you realize that a moderate like Bernie Sanders looks like a socialist to most Americans, you realize just how far to the right the Democratic Party has gone. Klein notes that the neo-liberalism embraced by the Democrats has not provided much in the way of benefits to a lot of people.

And Klein offers a way forward:

“People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together. Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people’s agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.”

So I looked up The Leap Manifesto referenced by Klein. It’s not perfect, it’s obviously targeted at Canadians — but it’s pretty good.

Something like the Leap Manifesto written by and for progressive U.S. residents would be a great place for us to start rebuilding democracy here in the U.S.

“All you, to whom adversity has dealt a final blow”

As we think about the the necessity of rebuilding a foundering democracy, a democracy currently dominated by rancor and hate, I can’t help thinking about one of my favorite songs for activists.

Back on December 24, 2008, I wrote about how this song literally saved someone’s life; and how it is a song that could serve as a non-theistic anthem. But I recently found a Youtube video of Liam Clancy singing this song — Clancy was best known for his rendition of the anti-war song “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” — and perhaps what he says is the best possible introduction to the song:

“I think it was Bertolt Brecht [says Clancy] who said one time, ‘With a man’s dying breath, he should be prepared to make a fresh start.’ That’s what this next song is about, although it’s supposedly about a ship that went down in the sixties, a ship called the ‘Mary Ellen Carter.’ There’s a lovely last verse to it which is the moral of the whole thing. And it’s a verse that I will tell you because, like myself, you may get solace from it on occasions of tragedy… It says:

“‘All you, to whom adversity has dealt a final blow,
With smiling bastards lying to you, everywhere you go,
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain,
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

“‘Rise again, rise again,
Though your heart may be broken and your life about to end,
No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend,
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.'”

And in a later post, I’ll write about some of the ways we can make democracy rise again.

 

Video still of Liam Clancy speaking

Above: Liam Clancy saying, “Rise again”; video still from “The Mary Ellen Carter” as sung by Clancy (click on the photo for Clancy’s rendition of the song).

Or to hear a video that first tells how the song saved Robert Cusik’s life, and then to hear Stan Rogers himself singing the song (Rogers starts singing at 1:35), click here.

Hooray for the rule of law

Speaking as a religious leftist, here’s a brief word to my liberal friends about the rule of law.

We just had an emotionally and politically divisive election. Yet the rule of law has held out: we will all quibble about the details, but while the election may not have lived up to many people’s ideals for a fair election, for the most part the election was fair. And then I think back to Massachusetts politics, where for many years the president of the state senate had close ties to organized crime, and where politics was very dirty and very personal (see: Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, The FBI, and a Devil’s Deal, New York: Public Affiars, 2000) — and Rhode Island politics, where it was rumored that half the state legislature had Mob ties, and where the governor was convicted of blatantly illegal activities. By those standards, the recent presidential election looked like a Sunday school outing.

Actually, having supervised some pretty unpleasant Sunday school outings, maybe I should change that analogy.

Bad analogy aside, the point is that for the most part the existing laws and court opinions held sway. You may have preferred it if there were different laws on the books, and different court opinions (I certainly would prefer that), but for the most part, the rule of law has held.

So this is not an apocalyptic scenario. Carol and I read to each other at night, and right now we’re reading “A War in 1935” by Evelyn Waugh, from When the Going Was Good (Penguin Books, 1946/1976), in which he describes the Italian invasion of what was then Abyssinia; that situation represented a breakdown of the rule of law, and was mildly apocalyptic. I’m also reading (on my own), the Letters of Pliny the Younger, in which he describes some of the truly horrible events during the reign of the emperor Domitian, a reign during which people could be put to death on mere suspicion of an unpleasant thought about the emperor. And then, look at the coverage from Syria: that really is an apocalyptic scenario, in which the rule of law has completely broken down.

I don’t like the results of the recent presidential election, but at this point I prefer it over the 1972 presidential election, when, under the direct leadership of Richard Nixon, the rule of law did break down. Or consider the Teapot Dome scandal during Warren Harding’s presidential administration. Or Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court in order to get the rulings he preferred. Or, for that matter, the breakdown of the rule of law detailed by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow.

So far, the rule of law is holding out pretty well. I would prefer that some of the current laws on the books were different, but in my case that mostly means that I need to get off my ass and stop working too many hours at my job and do my duty as a citizen of a democracy and get involved in elections and legislation. Nor do I have any illusions that the rule of law can be taken for granted; this again means, in my case, that I need to get off my ass and do my duty as a citizen of a democracy by attending city and county meetings, getting involved in voluntary organizations that amplify my solo voice (this, by the way, includes involvement in a local UU congregation).

If I don’t like the results of an election, then I need to stop spending time in the echo chamber of social media, stop anesthetizing myself by watching too many Youtube videos, and actually go out and do something.

That’s my two cent’s worth. Your mileage may vary.

No lines, plenty of angst

Carol and I just voted. No lines, no waiting. No anxiety — at least, no anxiety in the voting process itself.

Photo of my "I Voted" sticker

Today’s Daily Journal, our local freebie newspaper, reports that the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Belmont, Calif., is hosting a “stress-free zone” this evening — a place where you can go and not talk about politics, and not look at media. Rev. Michael Arase-Barhau of the church suggests people bring knitting, a book to read, adult coloring books, whatever.

Carol and I have a different destination in mind: we’ll be going to sing Sacred Harp music at Inder’s house in Oakland. And last night, we went to our congregation for a song circle organized by VJ, in the spirit of election eve song circles (the difference was that ours allowed any gender to participate). I don’t do adult coloring books (maybe I should), but singing works for me as a way to reduce anxiety.

It’s not just the presidential election. Here in Silicon Valley, we have a number of local ballot initiatives for rent stabilization measures. These initiatives are proving to be divisive. In our congregation, we have people on both sides of the rent stabilization issue, and while there isn’t any visible rancor, there are definitely some people who know not to talk local politics with each other.

Maybe this is the biggest problem. Here in the U.S., we lack skills in talking about disagreement. You either agree with someone, or you refuse to talk with them. You don’t like Hillary Clinton? then you won’t talk to a Clinton supporter. You don’t believe in God? then you’ll refuse to talk to Christians. We Americans believe in competition rather than collaboration; in market-based decisions rather than wisdom-based decisions; in individual rights rather than communal good.

No wonder we’re anxious.

Election research in California

We have 17 statewide ballot initiatives/referenda to vote on this year, some of which are confusing as hell.

Fortunately, the UU Justice Ministry of California (formerly the UU legislative Ministry, a less-politically-correct but more accurate name) has come up with an excellent one-page summary of 2016 ballot recommendations.

blognov0616

The best thing about this is that it summarizes the ballot recommendations of 15 different advocacy groups, including the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, Jewish and Christian faith-based legislative groups, and other groups. I found this very helpful as I try to make my way through the confusion of ballot initiatives.

Methinks Uber doth protest too much

A London Employment Tribunal has ruled that Uber is in the transportation business, not the software business; and that Uber is an employer, not a service that connects independent contractors to customers.

If you like reading legal documents, this decision is worth reading: the Tribunal is both witty and brutally critical of Uber. Here’s one quote from the decision, Case nos. 2202550/2015, paragraph 87 (the entire decision is online here:

“In the first place, we have been struck by the remarkable lengths to which Uber has gone in order to compel agreement with its (perhaps we should say its lawyers’) description of itself and with its analysis of the legal relationships between the two companies [i.e., between Uber B.V., and its subsidiary Uber London Ltd.], the drivers and the passengers. Any organisation (a) running an enterprise at the heart of which is the function of carrying people in motor cars from where they are to where they want to be and (b) operating in part through a company discharging the regulated responsibilities of a PHV [Private Hire Vehicle] operator, but (c) requiring drivers and passengers to agree, as a matter of contract, that it does not provide transportation services (through UBV or ULL), and (d) resorting in its documentation to fictions,36 twisted language37 and even brand new terminology,38 merits, we think, a degree of scepticism. Reflecting on the Respondents’ general case, and on the grimly loyal evidence of Ms Bertram [lawyer for Uber] in particular, we cannot help being reminded of Queen Gertrude’s most celebrated line: ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’ 39

“36 Eg the passenger’s ‘invoice’ which is not an invoice and is not sent to the passenger
“37 Eg calling the driver (“an independent company in the business of providing Transportation Services”) ‘Customer’ (in the New Terms [of service]). This choice of terminology has the embarrassing consequence of forcing Uber to argue that, if it is a party to any contract for the provision by the driver of driving services, it is one under which it is a lient or customer of “Customer’.
“38 Eg ‘onboarding’ for recruitment and/or induction and ‘deactivation’ for dismissal
“39 Hamlet, Act III, sc 2″

The Tribunal doesn’t come right out and say that Uber is lying. But the Tribunal does state, for example (para. 89), that “Uber is in business as a supplier of transportation services,” not as a technology company. The Tribunal quotes with approval the following paragraph from a North California District Court judgment: “Uber does not simply sell software; it sells rides. Uber is no more a ‘technology company’ than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs.”

And the Tribunal later states (para. 93) that Uber “is precluded from relying upon its carefully crafted documentation because, we find, it bears no relation to reality.”

And further, the Tribunal calls Uber’s legal arguments (para. 96) illustrative the phenomenon of “‘armies of lawyers’ contriving documents in their clients’ interests which simply misrepresents the true rights and obligations on both sides.” So while the Tribunal does not say that Uber is lying, the Tribunal makes it very clear that Uber is not telling the truth.

As you’d expect, Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the British Trades Union Congress, speaks more harshly of Uber. Calling Uber and its ilk purveyors of “sham self-employment,” O’Grady said, “For many workers the gig economy is a rigged economy, where bosses can get out of paying the minimum wage and providing basics like paid holidays and rest breaks.”

This is pretty much what the Tribunal said in its decision, except more politely.

All this reveals a dark side of Silicon Valley: a significant part of the Valley’s vaunted “innovation” actually relies on armies of unscrupulous lawyers contriving documents to avoid legal requirements designed to protect workers and consumers. So thank goodness for the scrupulous lawyers who help expose the facts when Silicon Valley does not tell the truth.

BBC News offers more on this story here.