Frederick Douglass on the 4th July

In 1852, 10 years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass then living in Rochester, New York, was asked by The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society to address them on the 5th of July. In his speech he praised the Americans who 76 years earlier had declared their independence from England and had fought the Revolutionary War to make that independence a reality. They earned the gratitude of future generations of Americans for asserting that "all men are created equal" and making that principle the basis of their new government.
Douglass, was born a slave. While traveling in England in 1846, his British supporters bought his freedom from his owner in Maryland. Now free, self educated, he spent much of his life traveling through the United States, as well as England and Ireland, to speak in the cause of Abolitionism.
In his 4th of July speech, he reminds his audience that universal human equality did not extend to the slaves. They continued to be grievously oppressed. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which allowed Southern slave owners who kidnap runaway slaves anywhere in the United States, had only deepened the suffering of African-Americans.
In his speech Douglass does not mince words: "There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour… For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."
In recent years, many cities and towns have held public meetings to read this speech by Frederick Douglass. One such meeting was held where I live. It was a hot, sunny day, the sky blue with hardly a cloud, where a long line of volunteers, African-Americans, Whites, people of other origins lined up to each read one paragraph of this heart rending speech.
The audience was small but the readers conveyed their intense sorrow at the continuing injustices suffered by people of color in the United States.
Then the meeting was over. The organizer of the event, a local Black business man, ended the event with the words "God bless America."
God bless America, the nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than those of any other nation? The final invocation of God's mercy seemed at odds with the uncompromising condemnation of America's racial practices we had just read in Frederick Douglass’ speech..
To be sure, even Douglass himself, as he comes to the end of his condemnation of slavery, ends on a hopeful note. He is confident that slavery will come to an end. Most comments on the Douglass speech draw attention to this final expression of confidence that America will finally live up to its own principles and extend equal rights to everyone, black or white.
And is that confidence not justified? We just had a black president. Slavery has come to an end. So has Jim Crow. Black Americans vote and run for office and sometimes get elected.
But wait. Slavery still exists. Our government holds more than 2 million persons in prison. Many must work in prison industries where workers get paid somewhere between $.23 to two dollars an hour. Prison workers have no benefits. They are not allowed to organize. They will be punished if they refuse to work for a pittance. Their condition is not unlike that of their slave ancestors.
The number of Black prison inmates is quite disproportionate to the number of black Americans in the population as a whole. One in three Black men are in prison or live under the supervision of parole officers. They come from black communities where the unemployment rate is close to 50%, where schools fail to teach elementary reading and arithmetic skills to children, and their parents, the working poor, have no time to supervise their children because they are too busy trying to earn a meager living.
The Black Lives Matter movement arose in response to unarmed black men and women being killed by police officers. To date very few of these police officers have had to face court and those that did, were most often acquitted. In the United States in 2017 all men and women are still not created equal.
    We should not invoke divine blessings for America. We should ask for blessings for the small Black children who braved angry mobs of white, racist adults to claim their right to an equal education--a right they still have not won. We should ask blessings for the generations of African-Americans who patiently demanded equality at great danger to themselves.
    We should see our present turmoils as troubles we brought on ourselves for what Douglass called our “revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy.”

Moses and Jesus

This year, as happens occasionally, Passover, the Jewish festival, coincides with Christian Holy Week.

During Passover Jews celebrate their liberation from slavery in Egypt where they had been laboring making bricks and building pyramids to glorify the Pharaohs. But, so the story goes, Moses with the help of God persuaded the Pharaoh to let the Jews go after every firstborn Egyptian child died through divine intervention.

Liberation is the key word in this story about the exit from Egypt. This story is a political one about the founding of a new nation, the Jews, with the help of their divine patron.

The Christian story, as usually told, appears to have little in common with that of the Jews. In the Christian story Jesus is revealed to be, indeed, the son of God whose resurrection and later appearance to his disciples testifies to his divinity. The person who had seemed to be so very human, as he walked humbly among the poor and outcast he had chosen to be his companions, was now revealed to be not only human but also divine, clad in mystery demanding from us that we accept what we cannot understand, the mystery of the Trinity.

But from the perspective of Passover we can see a different story manifest in the Gospels--Jesus as a social revolutionary. He was harshly critical of the religious authorities that governed the Jewish people. The Gospels reproduce long sermons of condemnation of the Pharisees and other tribes of rabbis whom Jesus condemns as hypocrites, as men who take advantage of the privileges of their position to benefit themselves and lay heavy burdens on ordinary Jews.

Over and over Jesus praises the poorest and most downtrodden people in the Jewish community. He associates with prostitutes, tax collectors--widely hated because they collected taxes for the Roman occupiers--he stays in the house of a leper. Almost every move is a protest against the social and economic distinctions in the existing Jewish society. Over and over he preaches equality, that every person is of equal value, that every person deserves respect and considerate treatment. Wealth was not to determine how neighbors spoke to or regarded one. One’s position in the society was not to be determined by how one made a living and what work one did in the day to day. The chief command in Jesus's ethics was "love your neighbor like yourself."

In the political vocabulary of our day Jesus would surely be a socialist. We might even say that Jesus was the Bernie Sanders of his day.

That man fired up ordinary Jews. When he entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey crowds lined the streets and cheered for him. The hard-working, the downtrodden understood his message that they too were to be treated as important persons who did their part to keep the society operating. They should not be exploited and disrespected because their hands were calloused and their backs bent.

Not surprisingly the authorities felt threatened by what seemed to be an impending revolution of some sort. They feared that Jesus would overthrow existing authorities and declare himself the new King of the Jews. The SWAT teams of Homeland security were called out to arrest Jesus.

"Are you the King of the Jews?" They kept asking him. Jesus refused to answer.

What was he going to say? He was not the King of the Jews in that he did not aspire to the power and position of the Pharisees or of the colonial governor, Pontius Pilate. But of course he was the king of the Jews in so far as the people revered him and heard in his speeches a renewal of the Jewish people and the beginning of a new era of equality.

The competing stories of Passover and of Easter illustrate for us the profound ambiguities of our histories – the histories of Jews and of Christians. Their traditions celebrate freedom and human equality. The Jews get to leave Egypt and after 40 years to find their own land and construct their own people. And later there comes the prophet Jesus who steadfastly proclaims a gospel of human equality.

But hierarchies of Jewish rabbis or Christian priests and of Roman colonial authorities continually push the message of freedom and equality into the background, concealed behind the mysticism of Christian theology and the complexities of Jewish dietary laws. Jews gave excessive authority to their rabbis and now, when they are citizens of liberal democracies, many of them support the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinians and many of them support conservative and reactionary governments in their own countries. The message of freedom and equality is almost forgotten buried under hierarchical religious and political organizations. Social distinctions based on income are revered. Freedom becomes very limited.

The Catholic Church concealed the message of freedom and equality, proclaimed so eloquently by Jesus, under a hierarchy which to this day regards women as second-class citizens, which is unable to make a clean break with the abuse of children, and reluctant to give up the benefits of political power for the sake of being true to the Christian message of loving one's neighbor as one loves oneself. Instead of promoting peace, they went on Crusades, fought bloody religious conflicts and legitimated the imperial wars of kings and emperors.

The belt buckles of Nazi soldiers proclaimed “Gott mit uns. (God with us)”

The history of Passover and of Easter is a sad testimony of humanity's unwillingness to take seriously what the best of us have always insisted on, namely that human beings be equal, equally free and equally respected.

These two celebrations challenge us to remain faithful to the central values of our tradition – freedom and equality – and to keep challenging illegitimate hierarchies of political and religious power. Today that means that we support the slogan that “No Human Being is Illegal.” It means that we commit ourselves to combat the gross economic inequalities everywhere. We must be serious about our basic principle that “All Men are created Equal.”

Weddings

 
If you plan to get married in 2016, it is high time to get started planning. How many people will you invite? what venue will be your favorite? Is it available? There are endless questions, decisions to be made, and arrangements to be completed.  Lest you forget to take on this project, many big cities host Bridal Exhibitions in which anyone whose business is at all connected with weddings shows their wares. The local newspaper’s Sunday Magazine had a special issue dedicated to weddings. There were pages of wedding gowns and articles about different kinds of weddings. The push is on for couples to prepare for their wedding day and, in the course of that, spending serious money.

One question occurred to me that was not raised by anyone. Why make weddings into such a major and expensive production? The couple has been living together for, often, several years. They have come to know each other intimately as have the families. In many cases the couple already has a child or two. So what is this wedding frenzy all about?

We live in a world where many women and men believe that women's liberation has been accomplished. Today men and women are equal. Both contribute and both profit from their marriage. They are equal at work.

While that is clearly an exaggeration--women still earn significantly less than men for doing the same sort of job--the situation of women has changed significantly in the last fifty years. We have still to elect the first woman president and the number of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies is very small. Everywhere women are being sexually harassed from very early on, whether that is in colleges and universities or in the military. Significantly more women are murdered by their husbands than  husbands by their wives. The vast majority of children are still raised by their mothers. Current statistics suggest that 20% of fathers stay home to be house husbands.

Nevertheless the position of women has improved in the last hundred years. But it has not changed in all parts of our lives. In many facets of our existence attitudes and practices with respect to the role of women and men are still what they were 100 years ago. Weddings are one of those facets.

Previously, a middle class woman had only one career in front of her: being a wife and mother--working class women always went out to work. Young women did not go to college in order to prepare for their work life, or to become educated. They went to find a husband. By the time a woman reached her late 20s, she was called a "spinster" if she was not yet married. Spinsters were thought to be "dried out." They lost their sexual allure. Worse, they missed their goal in life. They were to be pitied because their lives were empty.

If that is the trajectory laid out for women's lives, her wedding day is indeed the happiest day of a woman's life because it is the day when she gets the opportunity to fulfill her  mission in this world: being a wife and mother. Since men had a much more generous set of goals and opportunities, their wedding day was not as important. Men who did not get married, were not pitied or written off as failed human beings. Some came under suspicion of being homosexual, but even that did not condemn their life to meaninglessness. Oscar Wilde spent time in jail for homosexual acts. But he was a respected and acclaimed writer anyway.

What we say and do in relation to weddings reflects an outlook that is completely out of keeping with what many people think about the relations between men and women. Whatever criticisms people may have of Hillary Clinton, I have not heard anyone say that her job is not to run the country but  to stay home and take care of Bill. No doubt there are some people think that, but even Donald Trump doesn't say that.

In some areas of our lives, equality between men and women is widely accepted. In others we think about men and women the way our great-grandparents did around the time of World War I. It is interesting to notice that what maintains these very old-fashioned outlooks is, in part, the financial interest of the wedding industry. A great deal of money is being made on weddings. Wedding connected businesses maintain the ancient ideals of the "perfect wedding." By doing so they maintain old-fashioned ideas about male and female roles which are completely inappropriate in the world in which we live or in the world we are trying to build.

Working for female political candidates, agitating for equal pay for equal jobs done by men and women, protesting against  sexual harassment  are important ways of promoting equality between men and women. But as long as we are willing to maintain ancient beliefs about women and their wedding and their role in the family, the struggle for complete equality will remain stuck.

Women of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your fancy weddings.

Equality

About 180 years ago, in the early 1830s, Alexis DeTocqueville, a French aristocrat, came to the United States to watch a democracy being constructed from scratch. A new country was being built by immigrants mostly from western Europe. They were indebted to their home countries but were also much more independent in constructing a new society than were the Europeans who remained behind.

This country, DeTocqueville found, was obsessed with the idea of equality. Because all were equal, everyone's decision had the same weight. Everyone was entitled to participate in collective decision-making. Decision-making was democratic and everyone was busy participating. DeTocqueville keeps commenting on the "hustle and bustle" of American life. Everyone came to meetings; between meetings everyone was talking about local improvement projects or issues of national policy. A new country was being built and everyone participated.

The level of participation in our country has changed a great deal for many different reasons. But obviously equality is still a major concern, witness the struggle for racial equality, for gender equality and now for equal treatment regardless of sexual preferences. Equality is not only a central theme of our national life. It remains a continuing challenge. We all know that.

But equality does not only promote democracy, it also promotes conformism, the strong pressure for everyone to have the same opinion, to live their life along the same patterns, to embrace the same values and opinions. The high value placed on equality producers the tyranny of the majority. Wherever there is a disagreement over policy, over morality, over the rules governing individual behavior, the majority will feel justified in criticizing and rejecting what a minority of citizens believes.

The high value placed on equality therefore moves us in contradictory directions. On the one hand, it encourages everyone to participate in public affairs. On the other hand, it disenfranchises any views which are not those of the majority.

This pressure for conformity in America used to be a topic of public conversation. Sinclair Lewis documented it in novels such as Main Street (12920) and Babbit (1922). During the 1950s a number of widely read books like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit occasioned much public complaint about the pressures for conformity.

Interestingly enough that concern about the pressure to conform was quite halfhearted. While conformism was a topic of public conversation, conservatives conducted a successful campaign for rooting out Communists and other leftists from government service, academia, the movie industry. No one regarded this campaign to eradicate one kind of political view as an example of the tyranny of the majority.

It is not hard to see why the high value placed on equality produces such contradictory phenomena. Yes, we are all equal and therefore entitled to our own beliefs and values. But the community has a right to not only disapprove of certain values and behaviors but also to prohibit and punish them. While each of us has the right to shape our lives as we see best, our community has the obligation to prohibit certain kinds of behavior. Molesting small children, defrauding unsuspecting investors with securities that are worthless, overworking and underpaying one's employees and many other destructive behaviors are unacceptable and should be punished.

But that only intensifies the internal contradictions of an egalitarian society. As a group we have an obligation to protect our children, or to protect the elderly against fraudulent investment counselors. Is the rooting out of communists a legitimate exercise of community self-government? What about the laws passed in many states which defined marriage as between one man and one woman? When is a community exercising its political rights at legislating acceptable behavior and when is it illegitimately imposing the opinions of the many on smaller groups who have a perfect right to choose for themselves how to act and how to live?

This is the dilemma a country experiences when it values equality above everything. DeTocqueville proved himself very perceptive when he identified this dilemma.

At the same time the problem is not insurmountable. In a democracy public debates not only concern the policy issues of the day, but also the very meaning of equality. Specifically, citizens must decide in what respects we are all equal. The Tocqueville, for instance, speaks in laudatory terms about "universal suffrage" in the United States, oblivious to the fact that, at the time, only white men were allowed to participate in political decision-making. We have since then, after a great deal of conflict,--a good deal of it bloody-- decided that everyone, irrespective of race or gender, should be able to vote and run for political office. Similarly, what areas constitute a person's private domain, and what areas are to be regulated and supervised by public authorities, must be decided by a people which allows everyone equal rights of political participation.

The central task equality imposes on all of us is to define what that equality means which we regard as so important.

Many Americans ranging from ordinary citizens to presidents and their cabinet members do not understand this. High government officials from the United States regularly travel abroad and urge other countries to adopt an electoral democracy like ours. But if we took the idea of equality seriously, surely we would understand that other countries must decide for themselves how they will govern themselves. That is what a democratic stance demands. But we act as if equality meant that everybody must be like us, that we must all be the same.

It is time for us to be serious about equality and to acknowledge that it allows different people to lead their lives in different ways. We can all agree that terrorism is an unacceptable policy choice. But we must recognize that electoral democracy is not for every one. If we value democracy we must allow others to govern themselves, and to do that in ways of their own choosing.

                     How we have changed.

A friend told me this story: “When my father was a student at the University of Michigan in the 1930s he lived in a cooperative house known as 'Socialism House.' 25 years later when I lived in the same house at the University of Michigan its name had been changed to `Michigan house'.” In the 1930s the word “socialism” was associated with persons who defended working people earning low wages and suffering grievously during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Socialists were in favor of greater equality and a decent standard of living for everyone. Today Republicans are making the Democrats look bad by accusing them of being socialists. “Socialist” has become a term of abuse.

This story reminded me of what has happened to the word “liberal.” Around 1990, Liberals were still the people who were defending freedom and equality for all. They were good guys. I remember my shock when the elder Bush during his campaign for the presidency started calling Democrats “liberals.” All of a sudden, the word “liberal” had become a serious insult.

Often words change their meaning by accident in the course of being used over and over. But what happened to both of these words is instructive. From being the name for people who were defending the most traditional of American values – equality, fairness, liberty – they are now being used for people who support an expansion of government activity. Why are liberals and socialists considered such a threat to us? The power of government, we are being told again and again, is an impediment to private enterprise, to the expansion of American business which will make all of us richer and richer.

Government actions most likely have been threats to some businesses for a long time. But where government stepped in to defend and expand equality and freedom, Americans have, in the past, been willing to pay a price for that.

In the past, socialism and liberalism, the defense of equality and freedom, may have has some undesirable side effects, but they were thought to be legitimate political projects because the pursuit of equality and freedom was thought to be extremely important. Today the dominant political perspective cares only about the health of our corporations, about their profitability. As soon as there is a hint that wage and hour legislation, worker protection, trade union organization, campaign finance reform, and other efforts to safeguard equality and liberty, large groups are up in arms because the defense of liberty and equality might have a negative effect on corporate profits. Equality and freedom count for very little; profits for a a great deal.

What I find truly alarming is the evidence that so many Americans are more seriously concerned about unfettered growth of business and very little concerned about equality, fairness and liberty. Who are the heroes today? Steve Job, Bill Gates – both people who have made huge sums of money and have been known to be unpleasant persons. What matters to Americans is making money. Their heroes are persons who make obscene amounts of money. There are no heroes today comparable to Rosa Parks or Dr. King.

Socialism and liberalism are seen only as threats to some businesses making a enormous amounts of money. Equality is of no interest. Neither is freedom. The public at large watches passively while our democracy is sold to the highest bidder.

The big businesses with their huge profits are selling us down the river and I'm afraid that we deserve every little bit of it. People who care more for money than for freedom and equality deserve what they get.

Saving the rich?

It is the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of Pres. John F. Kennedy. Everyone remembers the injunction “ask not what your country can do for you...” in his Inaugural Speech. Very few people remember the line “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

That sentence came in the context of a pledge that America would help poor nations elsewhere. But in the light of our more recent history, the thought sheds a bitter light on what America has become. After the meltdown of 2007 and 2008, the government bailed out the big banks and financial institutions that caused the economy to crash. I saved the very few who are rich.

At the same time, efforts to create more jobs or to support the unemployed have been lukewarm and ineffective. I did little to help the poor.

It is not as if there weren’t a lot of work to do in our country. Our schools are under-staffed. Millions of elderly could use someone to come and visit, to watch TV with them or read the newspaper to them. Physically limited people could use help getting out, going shopping or going to the movies. Single mothers with children could use help and some time off from mothering and their work. Libraries are understaffed. Injured veterans could lose a great deal more attention. There is lots of work to do.

But somehow the nation has persuaded itself that poverty, disease, old age and disabilities do not concern the rest of us. “America is business is business” as Calvin Coolidge said and all that matters is that our big banks -- those that are too big to fail -- make money once again.

Contrary to Pres. Kennedy’s prediction, our society has saved the few who are rich and made little effort to help those who are poor.

But Pres. Kennedy was talking about “a free society.” Perhaps in saving the few who are rich without helping the many who are poor we we have done serious damage to our freedoms.

Socialism for the poor

Socialism for the poor.
At a recent meeting at Columbia University School of Business, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet--between the two of them worth roughly $100 billion--reaffirmed their faith in our economic system--capitalism. They praised the free market, the equality of opportunity of the system, and the ability of everyone to enjoy the fruits of the private initiative of people like themselves.
At the same time the papers report that one in 7 households struggles for food. Almost 15% of US households or about 49 million people, including 17 million children do not have enough food for an active, healthy life style. 49 million people, 17 million children go hungry some of the time, in the United States, the richest country of the world.
We all know the effects of hunger on children. They have trouble paying attention in school, they have trouble learning, they drop out of school early. They have no chance to participate in the “equal opportunity” Gates and Buffet bragged about. They will not share in the fruits of the initiative of successful capitalist entrepreneurs.
Capitalism is a great system for the rich. It is a disaster for the poor. It is not so great for the people in between, who are prone to job insecurity, have troubles paying their bills, may lose their homes to foreclosures, and be unable to pay for decent medical care.
“So, are you advocating socialism”? An appalled reader asks.
No, I am advocating socialism for the poor. The rich already have socialism. When they lose money, when their firms face bankruptcy, the govern steps in to support them. Ask General Motors, AIG, or Bank of America what they think of the sort of socialism that saved their skin last year and is continuing to do so.
While the big financial firms received astronomical amounts of money to save them, so much so that today their directors again get million dollar bonuses--more in bonus money for one year (when they almost went bankrupt) than many working Americans make in a life time-- 1 in seven families goes hungry.
How about a little bit of socialism for them?