Tonight we pray for the momma who is worried...

I think that the following prayer comes from the Midnight Mom Devotional that I used to draw from often on this blog.

Tonight we pray for the momma who is worried. Her heart is heavy. She's having trouble sleeping. She may even be crying inside but putting on a smile for others. Lord, there are so many things that we as mommas worry about daily and even nightly. You asked us to give it to You. Tonight, we give You our worries. We ask for Your peace. We thank You for taking care of all our needs. Please help this momma to find community and any help that she needs. Please grant her sleep tonight. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.

This photo comes from Ward Weems on Facebook. The accompanying caption says, "A tenant family who lived in the Camp Croft area and was removed, The man was employed working for a neighboring farm and loses employment when moved. Near Pacolet, South Carolina, March 1941 in photograph by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress."

This photo also comes by way of Ward Weems. The caption reads, "Decosta famile mother and children, Portuguese immigrants, and Farm Security Administration client borrowers, Little Compton, Rhode Island, December 1940 in a photograph by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress."

Millions of people the world over are leaving their homes in search of safety and work. Many are fleeing the effects of global warming and climate change and must take their children with them as they go. Some never find what they are looking for and perish along the way and only God and their families know their names. 

These photos remind us that it was not so long ago that many families in the United States were forced to move, traveling north or west in order to escape bad conditions. Political and economic refugees from fascist governments came as well, and are still coming. We should remember their struggles and trials when we consider the mommas and families seeking sanctuary in the United States today and include them in our prayers.

Connecting Central Appalachia to Los Angeles and Beyond

Harlan, Kentucky

Several important court and legal cases have been on mind for the last week or so. You may or may not have the heard of them, and you may or not agree with me that these cases are potentially related to one another.

I have been thinking much about the $83 million opioid settlement reached between the State of West Virginia and Walgreens. You can read about it here. As the article says, "The settlement resolves a lawsuit that alleged many pharmacy chains failed to maintain effective controls as a distributor and dispenser that contributed to oversupply of opioids in the state." West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey office claims to have won over more than $950 million in opioid litigation. Next on the chopping block is The Kroger Company and its pharmacies as they likely did not monitor their sales of opioids and sound any alarms so long as they were making profits from misery and substance abuse.

If you ask me, Kroger is making a big mistake by not trying to avoid the courts. Walmart, CVS and Rite Aid have reached settlements with the state totaling about $175 million since last August. CVS, Walgreens and Walmart have agreed to pay $10 billion in order settle similar lawsuits with state and local governments and Native American tribes elsewhere in the United States. Kroger looks like a vulnerable bad neighbor right now.

It's hard to keep the settlements and the court cases straight. The settlement that has gotten the most coverage was the one that included the OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. The family has to pay something like $6 billion and. Their company is supposed to be taken over by another company that will put its profits into combating the opioid crises. None of this would have happened had there not been activists on the ground forcing action against the Sacklers. There are also the lesser-known settlements involving Johnson & Johnson, Amerisource Bergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson and twelve states that put $26 billion in corporate money into state hands and obligate these companies to put some safeguards in place regarding opioid distribution. Some counties in Ohio won $650 million from Walgreens, CVS and Walmart over additional opioid-related claims.

These billions of dollars are spare change when you balance it out over the companies that have to pay and consider the damage done and the callous attitudes and the corruption that brought all this to pass in the first place. This all sounds like lots of money, but remember that West Virginia led the nation in overdose deaths per 100,000 people, with 81.4 per 100,000 people just three years ago. Kentucky ran a distant second, with a death rate of 49.2 per 100,000 people. Heck, more than 564,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2020.

But it doesn't stop there. The Sackler family will not acknowledge that what they did was wrong, and they have no legal obligation to do so. Walgreens gets to pay their $83 million over an eight-year period, staggering their costs. The company contributed to an “oversupply” of prescription opioids in West Virginia and across Central Appalachia. At some point, either by accident or lack of oversight or callous disregard for human life, the drugs were being diverted for street and holler use. State medical, treatment, adjudication and imprisonment and costs hit hard. Communities were divided, families suffered, and people died. We are living with synthetic opioids like fentanyl poisoning our communities. I heard in church yesterday that dozens of houseless people in my community have died from overdoses since the beginning of the year. I often wonder why the companies involved and the Sackler family and the investors and salesmen and the bought-off "researchers" and doctors who front for these companies are not being prosecuted for running multi-state criminal rings and conspiracies. Once their payments are made the companies will try to walk away from the great damage they have done. In the meantime, they are positioning themselves as caring community partners who want what is best for us and are cutting jobs and raising prices.

The other legal case that is weighing heavily on my spirit is the City National Bank-Los Angeles County redlining case. Here the Department of Justice found that the bank engaged in discriminatory practices by refusing to underwrite mortgages in predominately Latino and Black communities between 2017 and 2020. These practices discouraged or prohibited home ownership and undermined community stability. A sort of "banking desert" was created in the Latino and Black communities as well. These communities were underserved, disregarded, ripped-off, and destabilized. City National will have to pay over $31 million dollars. The bank will create a $29.5 million fund to subsidize loans to Black and Latino borrowers. City National will also spend $1.75 million on advertising, community outreach and financial education programs in Black and Brown communities. The bank is not admitting fault or guilt but is giving in nonetheless. The settlement only covers what the Department of Justice could prove took place between 2017 and 2020. Mr. Mark Alston did an excellent interview with National Public Radio on the issues involved in the settlement.

Redlining and housing discrimination are not news in Los Angeles. City National Bank is just one institution of many that have engaged in these outrageous practices and profited from them, and this way of doing business goes back many generations. Richard Rothstein can give you an eight-minute lesson on how discrimination in lending has been linked not only to residential segregation and the deterioration of communities but to environmental disasters as well. A report by Ailsa Chang, Christopher Intagliata, and Jonaki Mehta will explain this to you in the most engaging ways possible. But whatever the history and tricks involved, systemic oppression and discrimination draw much of their power from the ability of elites to discourage, disappoint, divide, frustrate, and rip people off over time. Patterns arise and poverty and trauma are passed on from one generation to the next unless a healing and activist social movement arises and can counteract some of the damage done. The Department of Justice settlement is huge by their standards, but it cannot, by itself, reverse the traumas associated with discrimination and oppression. 

And that brings me back to my point that these cases, the ones from Central Appalachia and the most recent housing discrimination case from Los Angeles, are potentially related to one another. How so? Notice the patterns of corporate greed and the assumption that corporations will rip us off, even to the point of causing deaths, and they will continue to do so until they are caught. They arrived to where they are with an Us vs. Them way of thinking. They will fight having to pay for the damage done or will lowball the costs of that damage and will fight having to accept legal responsibility for their actions if they are caught. Racism figures mightily into their thinking, but they also see great opportunities for profits where large companies and industries have shut down and where people are desperate and where part of the population can convinced to support get-tough-law-and-order barbaric policies and take employment in law enforcement and the prison industrial complex. The Us vs. Them becomes Them vs. Them.

Something else ties what happens in Los Angeles to what happens in Central Appalachia and the so-called "Rust Belt." Mark Alston, mentioned above, has much that is helpful to say about housing discrimination in Los Angeles. He makes a good point that the money is too little and comes too late for many and that whatever advancements are made from this point depends much on who is designing and administering the next steps, but that the settlement may do some good. The Biden administration has done the right thing by prioritizing stopping and punishing redlining. But at the local and grassroots levels the settlements mentioned above will hit particular walls besides what Mr. Alston and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey talk about.

Houselessness in Los Angeles and the conditions that are creating it and enabling it are swamping the region. Attorney General Morrisey has said that the money won in the West Virginia settlements will “provide help to those affected the most by this crisis in West Virginia,” but syringe laws and the state laws covering how naloxone is administered and paraphernalia laws and licensure requirements for harm reduction programs---all of them based on a fear-driven law-and-order worldview and the rejection of the idea that substance abuse is a disease or disorder---really limits the reach and the effectiveness of anti-drug and lifesaving efforts. In both L.A. and Central Appalachia, the money is there for companies or non-profits or state or local governments to administer programs, but the money is not there to empower people and give them the means of determining their own needs and destinies.

Now, imagine if a national peoples' movement came together and took on Big Pharma, the real estate industry, the banks, and all of the destructive and oppressive forces that destroy our communities and divide us. Imagine if people in Central Appalachia and L.A. and elsewhere were working from the same playbook and could see themselves and one another as leaders and if we operated from a point of solidarity with one another. If the small harm reduction efforts in West Virginia, the volunteer activists who pushed the Sacklers to the walls, and the leading poor and working-class Brown and Black activists in L.A. could win the kind of ground that they have then even stronger regional and national movements can win more, and they can win even more by being in solidarity with one another. 

 Los Angeles

The Sago Mine Disaster---January 2, 2006

When I started to write this post

I began to abbreviate,
as in "Jan. 2, 2006,"
but this is not a moment

to abbreviate anything.

Spell it out. Scream it. Cry it off.

On this day,
January 2,

in the Year of Our Lord 2006,
a blast in coal mine
in Sago,
near Buckhannon
in Upshur County,
in West Virginia,

in Appalachia,
not far from where I once hunted
and near where I once did flood relief

and a body search,
trapped thirteen miners underground
for two days.

Twelve perished in all

but our memories.
Twelve good men died.
Another good man made it out.

It's called a disaster

because we abbreviate.
If we had to say "murder"
we could not 
come to terms
with what that means.
It's called perishing

because we cannot say
that contracting out

and shell companies
and multinational corporations
make Appalachia a colony
and they will

and do

despoil the land

and crush the soul
and kill workers
if they have to.

We perform a ritual

with our wounding

and call it work.

We perform a ritual

with our trauma

and call it politics.

We perform a ritual

with our dispossession

and say we need

the jobs.

There were warnings enough.

Sago was not safe,
this was well-known.
That first shift went in

when it was dark,
just 6:30 in the morning,
when the kids are getting up for school,
when the coffee might be on,
when someone might be
whispering a prayer,
and then that mine blew up.
The shift never made it

to the face of the mine.

Don't abbreviate. Tell the story.
There were at least forty-seven dead
in the mines that year, or so
my memory tells me.

My conscience has

much more to say.

I was 2550 miles away,
give or take quite a few heartbreaks,
and could not tell anyone what I felt.
For once Oregon's gray cold matched
how my heart felt.

For once I was 

silent and began to understand

miles as heartbeats

and tears.   

Forty-seven killed in the mines that year.
I repeat that because my heart
breaks like ice, and there is anger
in my hands. There was me once telling
an Assistant Secretary of Labor
what death in the mines meant

in a room full of older mine workers.

They knew better than me.
My voice and heart cracking,

and I felt so stupid,
but the room took a breath,
the walls took a breath,
and then those with me
stood up and applauded
and he made a hasty exit.

But on January 2, 2006
I was silent.

Prayer after prayer,
but I knew
that all would not be well.

Why do we argue over how precious life is?
Why is it policy that someone must die
so that my lights go on?

Why is every light in the house on

and yet we're living in darkness?
And why did I feel stupid trying to ask

these questions, so afraid of crying

in front of others?

And why

and how

did those others

feel me?      

Our United Mine Workers of America held strong
and would not be bullied. Sago had been
a non-union mine, but at times like these
hearts can beat as one.

I say their last names:

Anderson
Bennett
Bennett
Groves
Hamner
Helms
Jones
Lewis
Toler
Ware
Weaver
Winans

I say their names again.

Mister...

And again.

Brother...

I do not abbreviate.

  

When a picture says much more than one thousand words

Ella Watson, Washington, D.C., August 1942 in a photograph by Gordon Parks

for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress

No War: A Moral Call for a Christmas Truce | Bishop William J. Barber, II

 

The Death Of Eric Nelson

I'm going to begin this post by saying that the opinions that I have to offer here come more from anger and sorrow than they do from knowledge of the facts of the case involved or any direct knowledge of Eric Nelson. This is not a "take it with a grain of salt" warning so much as it is an attempt to state what I think are some other overarching facts. If what I am saying here does not apply in full measure to the person and case immediately involved, it applies to other people and to other cases.

There are more Eric Nelsons than we can count, and right now there are more young people heading in that direction than we're showing an interest in helping. It is still easier to get drugs or a gun or a prison record than it is to get a job and needed social services. So long as that is the case we will sometimes hear about the Eric Nelsons of the world, but many more will die anonymously and under terrible circumstances. Despite these deaths, the numbers of these young people will increase, and they will be seen as threats to what we take to be "social order." The first response to that perceived threat will be heavy-handed. It always is.

This is a photo of Eric Nelson from the Polk County, Florida Sheriff's Office. It has been retouched by someone so that you cannot see the "F*** Cops" tattoo on Mr. Nelson's forehead. Eric Nelson died or was killed while in custody at the South County Jail in Frostproof, Florida on Friday, December 23. According to media reports, Mr. Nelson was found in possession of a baggie of methamphetamine and syringes, and he admitted to officers that he used the needles to “shoot meth.” He was arrested and charged with possession of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. Once in custody he was put in a cell by himself and then placed on suicide watch. Someone with some power in this situation believed that Eric Nelson was high and believed him when he said that he had not eaten for five days. A determination may have been made to move Eric Nelson to a medical dorm.

At some point Mr. Nelson and three or four deputies engaged in a physical altercation. Someone noted that he had extraordinary strength. Mr. Nelson then died under questionable circumstances at a local hospital.

The media accounts that I have read of what happened to Eric Nelson have so far relied entirely on what the police have to say happened. These accounts provide some context for Mr. Nelson death by headlining that he had a "F*** Cops" facial tattoo and a lengthy arrest record that included 16 total criminal charges, including 12 felonies and four misdemeanors, and five felony convictions. If you don't get the picture, the media and police seem to be saying, here's a photograph of a junkie that any decent person might cross the street to avoid. And how do you think law enforcement officers are likely to respond to a repeat offender with that facial ink anyway? Case closed. Forget about the reported discrepancies. Let's move on.

I want to unpack this just a bit. Eric Nelson was 46 years old at the time of his death. Nothing tells us that he had a family or friends or a work history, although he likely did. Nothing tells us how he came to have that tattoo or what it meant to him. And what did his other tats signify?

I got my first tattoo at a time when tattoos were not fashionable and when facial ink was illegal in most places. Over the past 43 years tattooing has emerged from a dark place and has become something more than a fad and something more than respectable. But among the many people who I know with ink there are class, ethnic, and racial differences, and their tattoos document those differences. Eric Nelson went further than acceptable fashionable tattoos, and even further than most jailhouse ink, and made sure that the world saw some pain and a past if anyone bothered to look. But look at his eyes. That is not the practiced Charles Manson stare or what we see on the Live PD or Cops reality tv shows.

I can imagine Eric Nelson growing up in some small southern town or small city, the kid from the wrong side of the tracks who had survived plenty of abuse by the time he was entering his teens. Frostproof has a few thousand people in it, with about 15% of those people living in poverty. It does have some good fishing, though. He was likely on his own early. It wasn't "gateway drugs" that got him to meth so much as it was familiar gateway social conditions. He probably tried to find love and lost. He may have some kids somewhere. I can see him practicing chords on a guitar. There was anger. There was the survival instinct of using others, opportunism, thinking of the world as a jungle in which he had to hunt while he was being hunted. He knew the role of predator, but he also knew what it felt like to be the prey. There were attempts to stop using, or at least there was a vague vision of a life somewhere up ahead that did not include meth and violence. He was living the kind of life that Merle Haggard and some other country singers have taken as their inspiration for a few songs. That and death metal commercialized his suffering.

I can imagine this and insert my own thoughts and values into this story because I have known so many people whose story that is. As I said above, if this is not Eric Nelson's story then it is someone else's. I can see the kid from rural Missouri who taught me how to make biscuits and gravy and who had drug habit at 14 years of age, a young man who I worked with in Michigan who had roots in Appalachia and who was making every wrong choice that he could, and many prison inmates who I have known who had been scamming so long that they cold no longer tell the scams from reality. I share some of this story, but I have known many people who lived and died that story. The Sean Penn-Christopher Walken-Mary Stuart Masterson film "At Closer Range" captures this quite well. The Mountain Eagle and the Coalfield Progress newspapers, both published in Central Appalachia, carry weekly reports of arrests for meth, heroin, fentanyl, and other drugs, and behind each one of those arrests is a person on a roller coaster.

The Eric Nelsons of the world arise from sets of particular conditions, and those conditions are becoming more widespread, and more difficult to survive, as addiction is regarded as a moral failure instead of as a disease or disorder, so long as the lock-'em-up crowd is in charge, so long as employers refuse to hire people with histories of incarceration and substance abuse disorders, so long as helping the Eric Nelsons of our world is criminalized and social supports remain unavailable, and so long as we do not have mass movements that bring poor whites and people of color communities together around a common program that puts people before profits.

The violence that overtakes the Eric Nelsons, and that threatens to swamp all of us, takes the forms that it does because someone profits from it. There are smugglers and dealers, but there is also a legal pharmaceutical industry with billions of dollars to spend on flooding communities with addictive drugs and buying off insurance and healthcare companies and doctors. There is a for-profit prison-industrial complex that depends on crime for long-term profits. The people at the tops of these pyramids buy influence and have a stake in us victimizing one another. This is much less about the moral shortcomings of people with substance abuse disorders and social permissiveness and much more about the greed and avarice of corporations, politicians, law enforcement, and the health insurance and corporate medical sectors.

Closer to home and our daily lives, we do not make room for the kind of race, gender, and class struggles that lead to recovering ourselves as authentic persons who become capable of forgiving and loving. It is those struggles, and not the random violence of the dispossessed and disaffected, that ultimately threatens the system we live in. That system provokes violence by encouraging social alienation and then responds to criminalized alienation with violence. A mass movement that seeks social justice and that speaks from the standpoints of recovery, authenticity, and seasoned audacity flips that script and disarms the system.

A human being died in a jail cell last Friday. He was someone's son. We lost someone on December 23. We lost one of us. 

I hope that somewhere there are people mourning Eric Nelson's passing and that he will get something better than an unmarked grave. I hope that we will some day see a movement that will question and protest every police and jailhouse death and find alternatives to prisons. If I can picture something of the path that led to Eric's Nelson's final and worst night on earth, I can also picture him in God's loving embrace, in a place where he and his victims and his abusers and torturers "bow and to bend..(and) will not be asham'd, (for) to turn, to turn will be our delight, till by turning, turning we come round right" as an old hymn had it.

Something inside of me doesn't want to stop there. In that loving embrace, I believe, there is the capacity for human beings to set things right. Stop the flow of drugs. Cure the sickness of addiction. Stop the violence. Get everyone housing and honest work. Rethink incarceration and policing. Build and rebuild communities. Work some real justice and accountability in. Build bridges, not walls.     

An Advent Devotion from Rev. Dr. Lenore Hosier, member of United Methodists for Kairos Response (UMKR)

The following was written by Rev. Dr. Lenore Hosier and is taken from a Methodist Federation for Social Action Advent Devotion series. Please support MFSA with a contribution.

Advent Devotion 5: December 21, 2022

The House of the Watchers:

Reflections from Beit Sahour, Palestine

Luke 2:8-20

While I had passed through Beit Sahour on my earlier trips to Palestine, it was on my trip in 2009 when I went with Global Ministries as one of our conference Mission Ambassadors where I was first introduced to the reality “on the ground” in that little town bordering up against Bethlehem. As part of our immersion experience, I was dropped off at the home of a local Palestinian Christian family to enjoy true Middle Eastern hospitality as I stayed in their home for the night. I confess, it was intimidating to go alone into a home in a strange town with people who seemed so different than those back home. I was not even sure if I would be able to communicate since I did not speak Arabic. There we sat, me with the husband, wife and five children from infant to teen, not quite sure where to begin. What began with food around their kitchen table, though, turned into laughter and stories that lasted well into the night.

Fast forward thirteen years, and I can share that I am still in contact with my family in Beit Sahour. I have spent many a wonderful meal at their table and have even enjoyed a few family weddings. I still do not speak Arabic, but I know a lot more than I used to know, mostly from the kids as we sat in their home playing cards and talking about life. Their eldest daughter has come to spend time with my family here in Pennsylvania, and I have had the privilege of seeing the “baby” of the family grow into a handsome, teenage boy. None of this would have been possible, though, if I (and this family) had not been open to God showing up in a new and unexpected manner.

Reading this very familiar passage from the Gospel of Matthew as we prepare to enter into the Celebration of the Birth of Christ, my mind immediately goes to those sloping, rocky hills of Beit Sahour where tradition locates those watching shepherds not far from Bethlehem, very close to my friends’ home. The shepherds sat there that night watching their sheep in the dark of the night, no streetlights to break through the darkness, probably only a glowing fire to warn away predators that might come looking to steal a sheep or two.

The name Beit Sahour translates into something like “house of the watchers.” The shepherds might have thought they were just watching over their flocks, but the Scripture reminds us that they saw so much more there on the hillside that night. Luke tells us that what they saw made them fearful, but they did not turn tail and run away. Instead, they heeded the “good news” of the angels. Despite the fact they were intimidated, nervous and even afraid, they were curious enough to see how God was going to show up in a new way, so they went to check it out for themselves.

And God did. God showed up in an unexpected manner as a little baby in swaddling clothes, born to a virgin, teenage mother and her carpenter husband. The Lord came to Earth in human form, and it was the unexpected shepherds that were the first to come to worship the newborn king. They were open to God doing something new and amazing while so many others missed it!

So, as we go through Advent, may we set aside our preconceived ideas, our fears, and our assumptions, as well. May we be open to sitting at the table together with those unlike us, maybe to share a meal, stories, laughter and even tears with our Palestinian and Israeli brothers and sisters. May we be watching to see what God might do in our midst, even through us, in unexpected ways.

I hope that we can be like those shepherds, too, in our willingness to glorify and praise God in what we have seen and heard. Despite the struggles that are experienced daily in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza, God is still at work. Throughout this season, keep your eyes open and watch to see how God is moving amongst us so that we might proclaim God’s goodness wherever we go!

Prayer: Gracious God, open our eyes during this season of preparation to see what you would have us to see. May our eyes not grow weary from watching, our heads not start to droop with fatigue or complacency, our spirits not become distracted and discouraged despite all the heartaches in our world today. Keep our eyes looking towards Jesus, our Prince of Peace, that we might experience your Peace today and every day. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Hosier is an ordained elder in the Susquehanna Conference of the United Methodist Church. She earned a D.Min. from Colgate Rochester Crozer in Peacebuilding and Interfaith Dialogue and completed her thesis work on the African American experience in the Methodist Tradition. Hosier has served local churches in her conference, spent almost three years serving cross-culturally/cross-racially as a Mission Volunteer with GBGM and now serves as an interfaith prison chaplain. She has travelled to Israel and Palestine on 16 trips since 2006 and continues to stay engaged with the people and the land by educating others in the Church and beyond through her work with UMKR.

This is true

 

An Important Announcement...

Let's please change our way of thinking and talking. This comes from the Standing Bear Network.

At the request of many elders we will now refer to the unidentified Indigenous woman murdered by the serial killer in Winnipeg as ‘Buffalo Woman’ instead of unidentified woman. Until her name is found, we honour her, kitotimnaw (our relative).

Today marks the 114th anniversary of the Monongah Mine Disaster, the worst mining disaster in American history.

From the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum;

Today marks the 114th anniversary of the Monongah Mine Disaster, the worst mining disaster in American history. 362 people lost their lives, many of whom were immigrants.

This was just one of a string of disasters that struck coal mines across the United States within the next 30 days. 4 more coal mine explosions happened in December of 1907, marking it the most deadly month in coal mining history.

On December 1st of 1907, 35 miners died at the Naomi Mines in Fayette City, Pennsylvania. On December 16th, 35 more passed away at the Yolande Mine in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. 239 miners were killed on December 19th at the Darr Mine in Van Meter, Pennsylvania. And lastly, 11 were killed on New Years Eve at the Bernal Mine in Carthage, New Mexico.

Sadly, the mistreatment of workers and their appalling labor conditions continued on, leading to the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, where 10,000 mine workers–immigrant and native-born, Black and white–banded together to fight for their rights as laborers and as humans during the West Virginia Mine Wars.

Today, we remember the lives taken in this string of devastating events on National Miners Day. We thank and honor the skilled, hardworking, and inspiring coal miners–both past and present–who have powered the American Labor Movement and our country with their backbreaking labor. #NationalMinersDay

(Photo from WV Public Broadcasting)

Rosa Parks got tired of giving in and then...

“People always said that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
- Rosa Parks
—
Sources: Photograph of Rosa Parks taken in 1955 / National Archives and Records Administration Records of the U.S. Information Agency Record Group 306, record ID: 306-PSD-65-1882 (Box 93) / Wikimedia Commons / Rosa Parks: My Story, p. 116, Rosa Parks and James Haskins (1992) / Wikiquote

 

We've been in a storm too long

Mightly Clouds of Joy- I've been in the storm too long

It feels to me today that I have been in a storm all of my life. Never a period of peace, always a struggle for justice. Never a moment where we could rest in confidence that all will be well.

When I read Leon Liwtack's great book "Been in the Storm So Long" years back I picked up some humility because I could measure my own experience, tough as it is, against that of  African Americans, who have a much tougher time of most everything. But I instantly identified with the title of the book and much that I read there. And I think that there are a few connections between that book and today. One is that had the Confederacy been fully defeated and the Confederacy's leadership and the south's planter aristocracy been treated as the traitors that they were, and had Reconstruction succeeded and been extended, we would not be debating states' rights, gun control, reproductive justice, structurally-based racism, and labor rights today. Those questions either would have been settled long ago or we would be approaching them in a different context. The Jackson Women's Health Organization would be doing its good work without interference.

I don't think that I am mistaken in believing that the loudest voices celebrating the Supreme Court rulings on abortions and guns this week are celebrating the rise of a New Confederacy.

Every storm ends and there are rainbows. I heard it said two weeks ago that, yes, the world is broken, but what is broken can be mended---not by time, but by intentionality. The world needs our light in this storm.
 

  

Notes To The Church At A Time Of Difficulty & Promise

The Poor People's Campaign & Bishop Barber in Los Angeles on May 16

The video works just fine despite what it says. Just click on it on and sit back and watch. And then take some good action.

Our answer to injustice, violence, and oppression...

 

The Spirit That Is Moving In This Land: Bishop Barber & The Poor People's Campaign In North Carolina

 

Our Obligation to the “Least of These”---A Necessary Word From Bishop William Barber

Dear Movement Family,

We live in the richest nation to ever exist since God created the earth, yet many in power use a false Christian narrative to blame poor people and abdicate responsibility for economic justice. But we know that their talk about scarcity and their justifications for serving rich corporations over poor communities are lies. The continuous feeding of the war economy, proliferation of weapons, and notions of peace through military strength give far too many a false sense of security, no matter what curious and twisted attempt at moral justification is tried. Too many politicians raise no question when it comes to funding war, tax cuts for greedy corporate interests, and pornographic sums of money to subvert democracy while at the same time using every excuse to block spending that would lift people out of poverty. This is one of the greatest moral contradictions of our time, and we must be clear that it threatens democracy and civilization itself.

In the Bible, Matthew’s Gospel tells us plain as day in Chapter 25 that a true nation under God must lead by caring for the vulnerable and welcoming strangers. “All the nations will be gathered before [God],” Matthew says, and God will “separate the people from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” Who are the least of these today, and what are the public policies that must change to care for them?

In a nation plagued by hidden poverty, what makes us most vulnerable is the basic moral contradiction of poverty, which we have tried to ignore for the past 40 years. 140 million Americans– 43% of adults and 52% of children–are poor and low-wealth, suffering in plain sight. As pandemic relief programs like stimulus checks, expanded unemployment insurance, and expanded CTC payments have expired, we can expect these numbers to rise. In 2021, the Urban Institute estimated that without these programs, these numbers would have gone up to well over 150 million - nearly 50% of all adults. Yet we have watched billionaires make nearly $2 trillion during that same time.

As long as America ignores these realities and refuses to fully address them, we all live in an impoverished democracy. This requires a warning–not a one-day event, but a demonstration and declaration that the time to act is now. Why?

Because not ignoring the least of these today requires that we address the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the denial of health care, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism. It is time to heal the wounds of our society and declare a moral revival across the land.

Because our politics are trapped by the lies of scarcity. These politics turn us against each other and blame the poor for their poverty, even though we live in a time of abundance. We have the resources to meet the needs of everybody! The only thing our politicians lack is the moral conscience to lift the least of these and the political will to make it so.

Because for far too long poor people, people of color, Indigenous nations, immigrant families, women, children, the disabled, and LGBTQ communities have been under attack, pitted against each other and blamed for society’s problems. Please take 5 minutes today to consider the pain of poverty in America.

Because we must put a face and voice on the shameful conditions confronting this nation and for the least of these we must speak and nonviolently force the nation to hear the truth and to see the faces.

We must have a moral meeting in the public square that takes the social blinders off and puts a face on the realities that can and must be changed. We must become a nation that fulfills our moral obligation to care for the least of these. We must break through the lies that have hidden poverty in America. Poor and low-income people and low wage workers are determined to stand together on Pennsylvania Avenue, Saturday June 18th, gathering at 930am, to make the nation see and hear their pain. Together, we will lift a Third Reconstruction moral agenda for the healing of the nation that can end poverty and low wealth from the bottom up. We need everyone who can to stand together and join us.

In a sermon I once preached on Matthew 25, I said to the Christians sitting in the sanctuary:

So in this season we must say, “America, listen! Hear yourself in the voices of the least of these. Don’t turn away. Recognize that the hope of the nation is in how we treat the least of these.” Remember Rabbi Heschel. Let me paraphrase what he once said: “We as a nation forfeit the right to even worship God until we do right by the least of this nation.”

Brothers and Sisters, we won’t be silent or unheard anymore. In this season we are saying, “If you have been rejected, it’s time on moral authority to challenge policies that create social murder, and we must do it not as Democrats or Republicans but as human beings and moral agents.

It’s time to work together to save the soul of this democracy and the world. Together, we must show the nation that healing is in the very people who’ve been rejected leading a moral revival.

One scripture in the Bible says,

“God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power, and He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him.”--Acts 10:38

Those of us who believe in this Jesus have to help the poor and looked over, the left out and hurting, the harmed and broken, to get up! Looked over get up! This is God’s way. No wonder the hymn writer said:

If I can help somebody, as I pass along,

If I can cheer somebody, with a word or song,

If I can show somebody, how they're traveling wrong,

Then my living shall not be in vain.

If I can do my duty, as a good man ought,

If I can bring back beauty, to a world up wrought,

If I can spread love's message, as the Master taught,

Then my living shall not be in vain.

My living shall not be in vain,

Then my living shall not be in vain

If I can help somebody, as I pass along,

Then my living shall not be in vain.


Forward together,

William J. Barber, II


PS- In my update last week, I noted the moral contradiction of a Congress that can find money for more weapons to fight Russians in Ukraine but will still not invest in poor and low-income people here at home. Some people have misconstrued my words as an endorsement of continued military escalation in Ukraine. I want to be clear: nothing could be further from the truth. We need to do everything possible to get negotiated peace, not the death of more people. We also have to do even more on the front end, before war ever starts. All this death, killing one another, and blowing up cities will lead the human race to its own demise.

I’ve stood for 30 years with organizations that challenge the militarism of our war economy. I have had this position as a pastor in a military town, and members of my church who serve in the military have thanked me for my deep commitment to challenging all this war and the influence of the war economy in our world. The Poor People’s Campaign names the war economy as one of the interlocking injustices we must confront in order to have a Third Reconstruction. We must be determined to continue to work together toward a negotiation of peace in Ukraine and an end to policy violence here at home. Every day I pray and sing this hymn, and I quoted it to the nation when I was asked to deliver the inaugural sermon:

God of grace and God of glory,

On Thy people pour Thy power.

Crown Thine ancient church’s story,

Bring her bud to glorious flower.

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,

For the facing of this hour,

For the facing of this hour.

Lo! the hosts of evil ’round us,

Scorn Thy Christ, assail His ways.

From the fears that long have bound us,

Free our hearts to faith and praise.

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,

For the living of these days,

For the living of these days.

Cure Thy children’s warring madness,

Bend our pride to Thy control.

Shame our wanton selfish gladness,

Rich in things and poor in soul.

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,

Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal,

Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal.

Set our feet on lofty places,

Gird our lives that they may be,

Armored with all Christ-like graces,

In the fight to set men free.

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,

That we fail not man nor Thee,

That we fail not man nor Thee.

Save us from weak resignation,

To the evils we deplore.

Let the search for Thy salvation,

Be our glory evermore.

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,

Serving Thee whom we adore,

Serving Thee whom we adore.

Forward together, not one step back!

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
President and Senior Lecturer
Repairers of the Breach

“The way to heal the soul of the nation is to pass policies that heal the body of the nation. It’s the just thing to do. That’s how we as a nation can together move forward.”

-Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

Where Our Dedication To Social Change Comes From

Stubborn beauty:

The need to investigate and understand the conditions that people live under and work with
every day without prejudice:

The understanding that we are called to freedom and that the tasks of liberation commit us to a long road and a message and work of salvation:

The knowledge that the solidarity of the oppressed, the poor, the working-class, and those who suffer under the present systems of oppression is faith in action and is necessary to all of us becoming our authentic and best selves. From solidarity, authenticity, transformation and repentance, and removing the systems of oppression enemies become cooperators and justice rules:

The knowledge that were fallible, that we need to study and work together, that we need to approach one another and the tasks of liberation with humility and purpose:

That we must speak honestly from our lived experiences and listen to others without interrupted or imposing ourselves and that whatever silences the oppressed is sinful. Compassion and solidarity are our ends and our means:

That if we believe in Christ's resurrection then we must believe in the resurrection of the oppressed and the triumph of a system of life (God's Kin-dom) over a system of death and the idolatry of putting profits and war over people and creation:  

Because we have a great cloud of witnesses urging us forward:

Because we are challenged to live better and more authentic lives and we can't do that by ourselves. We find ourselves in others and through others and we come to see the image of God in others through solidarity, humility, failures and the resolve to do better, taking action and winning, introspection and communal examination and worship, and starting over every day with what we have learned and alongside those who we are traveling with:

  

My confession...

 Just click on it if you can't read the small print. And then please remember it and work with it.