NO VOTES WITHOUT DEALING WITH GLOBAL WARMING

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Some don’t want to hear bad news about global warming and climate change, but the good news is that we can make government take care of it by making clear that our votes depend on strong environmental action. “Sí, se puede,” yes, we can, Obama’s rallying cry, applies to protecting the environment that sustains us and our families.

Let’s start with some good news. There’s a new malaria vaccine. And vaccine makers have become so adept that several anti-Covid vaccines competed in record time. But the bad news is that more healthy people on this planet will aggravate global warming, killing many more in horrible deaths from starvation, de-hydration and fire, on a scale beyond any Biblical plagues. No vaccines will protect us from fire, drought and lack of food. If more people survive, grow up and have children of their own, we’ll have to act much faster to protect a livable environment. Improvement of medicine and public health are wonderful only if we pay the price to take care of our earthly home before it finds still more painful ways of paying us back for abusing our planet.

Insurance – Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare – won’t save you. We have to wise up. Freedom to make your own private choices won’t save you. Either we insist that government do its job or we all burn, starve, dehydrate and thirst together. Whoopee. Our medical accomplishments are useless unless we solve the bigger problem.

Meanwhile we argue about how much we can get away with without acting to stop the world from continuing to warm.

The good news is that we can deal with this by putting global warming at the top of our requirements when we vote, both in the primaries and the general elections – and make sure our elected representatives know what we’re going to do. But the bad news is that without strong action by us, the earth will get its revenge, and annihilate us all. Formerly habitable places are already uninhabitable. Even if we uproot ourselves and move to temporarily habitable areas, the changing climate will keep us moving until there’s nowhere left to go. That’s already happened to some people and several other species.

The good news is that we could overcome the nay-sayers, and stop global warming here and abroad. But the bad news is that people aren’t paying attention – fights over racial or religious superiority push environmental catastrophe out of focus. Issues of respect could be satisfied cheaply by praising each other, but the world wants blood. Too many focus on reinstalling an ousted president who scorns at environmental threats. And the Senate logjam has blocked, delayed and shrunk productive policy. The European Union and United Nations seem scarcely better. If the politics is bleak, can our future be bright?

Perhaps another country, like China, could solve the problem. China seems aware of the threat but keeps building new coal plants.  And there seems little reason to expect China to treat Americans kindly in the process.

A ghoulish possibility is that environmental issues could lead to World War III – it could start as war over forests and rain forests which many rely on to manage CO₂ in the atmosphere, or war over refugee migration – a source of war almost since the beginning of time. By flattening factories, oil rigs and killing millions, World War could reduce production of greenhouse gasses and global warming – but might well make the earth uninhabitable anyway.

Life won’t be pretty unless we learn to respect our earthly environment, and make strong environmental action determine our votes. The good news is that we can. “Sí, se puede,” yes, we can. We just have to let our politicians know that we demand action.

Happy New Year to all.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on December 28, 2021.

Not for Ourselves Alone

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Let me turn our attention to the refugees on the Belarus-Polish border, the Afghan refugees here and pouring into Iran and Pakistan, the Central American and Haitian refugees at our Southern border, and refugees in Africa from the wars in the Congo, Uganda, and Ethiopia not to mention the lack of vaccines.

I commented a couple of weeks ago “Think what it would mean if we invited the refugees, and continued the 19th and 20th century project of building our population, industrial base and military power.” We could  let states and cities invite and welcome whom they choose. And we could alleviate the horrible treatment of refugees and immigrants.

A part of that  does worry me – we have a history of failing to protect both immigrant and domestic labor. We could, but we haven’t, and we’d have to deal with that.

When the world seems particularly bewildering, I often go back to first principles. Many of our religious traditions incorporate common principles of welcome and brotherhood, the word once commonly used to describe fellow-feeling among us regardless of color, faith, or place of origin. Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Jews revere the ancient scriptures which played a part in making many of us the people we became. So I’d like to share a passage that reflects principles common to many of our faiths, particularly at this season, and that I find particularly moving. During the Kol Nidre service, when Jews confess our sins, beg for forgiveness and pray for another year of life, we join in reading:

     Not for ourselves alone do we pray, 
     not for ourselves alone, 
     but for all Your children. 

     Knowing our failings, 
     let us be patient with those of others.
 
     Knowing our will to goodness, 
     may we see in others a dignity that is human, 
     a beauty inviolate forever. 

     Every soul is precious in the sight of the Lord, 
     and every life is Your gift to us. 

     Yet one stands poised to strike the next; 
     armies uproot vines and fig-trees, 
     as war and war’s alarms make all afraid. 

     Not for ourselves alone, therefore, 
     not for ourselves alone, 
     but for all Your children 
     do we invoke Your love.

[Quoted from Gates of Repentance, p. 295 (1978). A nearly identical version can be found online here.] There are undoubtedly similar passages in your own traditions. They remind us of our religious obligations. The Fourteenth Amendment is important not because we always obey it, but because we should. Our prayers for all people are important not because we always follow them, but because we need their teaching. It is important to recover and celebrate those teachings in a period when too many here and abroad celebrate only themselves and those like them.

It was appropriate that faith leaders who had absorbed the meaning of praying for all people, shared the podium and the microphone with Martin Luther King at the March on Washington and elsewhere.

If we each look back at our own histories, we’ll discover that many of our ancestors have been slaughtered and enslaved. To make a better world we need to recover the principles that lead us to share and care, and, as Rabbi David Katz recently told us, not to stand by while others suffer.

In that spirit may I wish happy holidays and a Happy New Year to all.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on December 21, 2021.

Hypocrites against a Helping Hand

Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell want money to help the folk in Kentucky but fight against aid to other states. The Rockefeller Institute has published a chart showing which states contribute more to the feds than they take and which take more than they pay. Only eight states pay more into federal coffers than they receive and the biggest contributors are all in the Northeast. Remember that when all the hypocrites talk about self-reliance. Maybe we should let them practice what they preach, doing without Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts would all be much better off. Wash Mitch McConnell’s and Rand Paul’s mouths (among others) out with soap – or better with the bleach that Trump suggested. The best one could say about Trump’s suggestion is that it would have put them out of their misery – permanently. We don’t need hypocrites in Congress or feeding garbage to the people in their states.

Fannie Lou Hamer and the Holocaust

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The relation between a couple of reviews in the New York Times struck me. In a review of two books about Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the great organizers of the Civil Rights Movement in the South, Jill Watts commented that the 1966 defeat and replacement of the “integrationist leadership [of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] … by Black nationalist members … triggered the group’s decline and drained much needed external support from Hamer’s local crusades.” On the preceding page in the hard copy, Yaniv Iczkovitz criticizes the search for “universal lessons in lieu of attending to the actual persecution of Jews” in the Holocaust. Those two reviews take opposite views of the balance between engaging allies and taking ownership of our own groups’ struggles.

I understand the need to take over one’s movement. Popular movements need to keep changing; moving the goal posts keeps up the excitement and loyalty. But the very point of popular movements is the audience. Strategies that forget their audience lose their way.

My wife and I had the privilege of meeting Fanny Lou Hamer when I was a Legal Aid attorney in St. Louis. One of my clients was an organization called Black Survival. As its name suggested, it was an organization of and by African-Americans. We respected and sought each other’s views and worked out a strategy together. None of us evaluated, let alone discounted, each other’s suggestions based on the color of our skin. In court, I necessarily had a leading role. In other formal settings, I was often used as window dressing, a role I understood and did my best to play. Gathering signatures door-to-door on a very successful petition drive was their job. Our goal was very public – to prevent construction of a highway that would have split businesses, professionals and churches from their patrons, clients and congregations, destroying many of the most constructive aspects of their community – consequences they instinctively understood but consequences for which it was my job to amass numerous white PhDs for documentation and support. Our battle was advanced at a meeting with the Mayor in front of the cameras, and eventually resolved in our favor by the Nixon Administration. Allies mattered.

Like many minorities, Jews often share the instinct to emphasize differences rather than commonalities. To many Jews, the Holocaust was unique and uniquely bad. Tragically, that’s false. Genocidal struggles have been despoiling humanity both before and after the Holocaust with great regularity. The Holocaust can be a window into the struggles of humankind, an avenue for common revulsion and a path to brotherhood and common humanity. That would be better both for humanity in general and for Jews specifically. For many Christian theologians, the tragedy of the Holocaust included the horrendous misbehavior of self-professed Christian peoples and countries. That understanding, not our unique self-understanding, has been the basis for subsequent progress here, in Western Europe, and other parts of the world.

Am I too naïve in hoping that the world will again march toward brotherhood?

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on December 14, 2021.

Race, Education, Integration and Unity in America

Given all the controversies about teaching the history of  immigrants who didn’t come from England in the public schools, I’d like to read a sentence from my book about the Roberts Court:

“Integration had been applied over two centuries to class, immigration, language, religion, ethnicity, gender, and finally, to race.”

Let me break that out for any of you not familiar with the history.

18^th century schools in what became the U.S. were local, generally run out of homes and churches. Colleges were religious institutions, but most gradually broadened themselves from training for clergy of specific faiths, to ecumenical in both faith and subject matter.

Horace Mann was the leader of what was called the common school movement – we just call them public schools. His point was to bring rich and poor into the same classroom so they would get to know and appreciate each other. The 19^th century saw common or public schools largely take over grade school education through what we now called high school.

The 19^th century also brought co-education so girls and boys increasingly went to school together. There was a period when some families kept their girls out of schools where they would meet the male children of poor families. Call that gender flight or wealth flight.

As immigration grew, public schools became agents of Americanization, introducing immigrant children to English, and the customs of America by mixing them with those already here. Both of my parents learned English in school and learned to speak it as if they’d spoken it all their lives. They deliberately prevented me from learning Yiddish, using it only to keep things from me. Papa told me many times how proud he was of an A on an English paper – he had a lot to be proud of, graduating from the Juilliard School of Music and becoming an excellent musician – but he kept bringing up that English paper.

It had been customary to use the Bible to teach English, but the original Protestant Americans used the Protestant version of the Bible, much to the objection of Catholics. The increasing presence of Catholics from Ireland and Italy made schooling more ecumenical.

Common schooling didn’t satisfy the military. They had to organize an army out of people who spoke many different languages. For a while, soldiers were recruited and organized by separate ethnic and language groups. By the 20^th century, the military was integrating soldiers from all their different faiths, and countries of origin. President Theodore Roosevelt praised the way that the military tent brought people together from all different backgrounds.

So by the end of World War II, the Army and public schools brought Americans together across class, language, religion, and countries of origin. Integration was a strategy, a way of making the American. Endless books and articles were written about the value of bringing people together.

During World War II, women like my mother-in-law entered the military as nurses or, like Rosy the Riveter, to do whatever there weren’t enough men to do. By the end of World War II, many understood that women could do most of the work men did and they were increasingly integrated.

What we now call “integration” was just the application of a traditional American remedy to one more area.

Having brought people together from so many different backgrounds, there is good reason to celebrate the accomplishments of all the people who sacrificed, worked, fought for and learned to celebrate America. Integration is central to the experience of us all. Unity is in sharing its blessings.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on December 7, 2021.