Shall we be callous or shall we be people? There is hope.

This is a repost from yesterday from my other, non-medical, blog "Life the Universe, and a Few Things". I have gotten some positive feedback on it, so have decided to post it to MSJ as well.


Charles Blow, who appears every Saturday in the New York Times, is one of my favorite columnists. He is terse and articulate. His column always features a fascinating graphic with data that presents additional insight into his topic. Sometimes his topic is overtly political, as when he recently wrote about the disappointment many, including African-Americans, feel in President Obama. Frequently it is about people, especially poor people, especially children, and the incredible challenges that they face in this land of “everything for the rich and squeeze the most needy”. His colleague, Nicholas Kristof, often writes about the plight of children in the rest of the world. Between them, we learn a great deal of about the desperate situation of so many, as in Kristof's On Top of Famine, Unspeakable Violence, September 25, 2011.

So, on September 24, 2011, it was uplifting to have a column presenting something good happening for these children, It Takes a Village. Blow describes his visit to the Dorothy Day Apartments on Riverside Drive in West Harlem, a “former drug den” converted in 2003 to housing for destitute and homeless families. Most of the adults were drug addicts or are HIV victims or mentally ill or all these. He writes about the cheerfulness of the design of the entire building (including the art gallery on the top floor with views of the Hudson River), of the yoga done by “wee little legs that barely have kneecaps” on mats placed in a courtyard that was previously 6 feet deep in garbage.  It has been successful by any measure – no teenage pregnancies, successful graduations from high school and entry into college, and done at a cost far less than “housing” people in prison, shelters, or mental hospitals.

Blow quotes Lady Bird Johnson saying “Where flowers bloom, so does hope”. I am reminded of the song (taken from a poem by James Oppenheim written in 1911) “Bread and Roses”, “Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too!” The poem is associated with the women who struck the textile mills in Lawrence, MA in 1912, and since the name of many projects and organizations, including an “integrated arts” high school in Harlem.  If I am disappointed in anything in Blow’s column, it is that he fails to mention who Dorothy Day was. Day, who died in 1980, co-founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933, “a nonviolent, pacifist movement that continues to combine direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf”. If anyone wonders if Catholics are focused only on anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and child abuse, or whether there are those practicing the precepts contained in the New Testament rather than greed, prejudice, and selfishness, the Catholic Worker Movement is a good place to start. We are very fortunate to have such a center, Shalom House, in my town of Kansas City, KS.

On the same page as Blow’s op-ed is one by Theodore R. Marmor and Jerry L. Mashaw, who are academics rather than columnists. “How do you say ‘Economic Security”?” discusses the situation in the Depression in 1934, and how the government was seen as the vehicle for helping those in need to achieve a dignified life. They talk about how the discussion has changed in the last 50 years. “In 1934, the focus was on people, family security and the risks to family economic well-being that we all share. Today, the people have disappeared. The conversation is now about the federal budget, not about the real economy in which real people live.“  They go on to say that “In 1934, the government was us. We had shared circumstances, shared risks and shared obligations. Today the government is the other — not an institution for the achievement of our common goals, but an alien presence that stands between us and the realization of individual ambitions. Programs of social insurance have become “entitlements,” a word apparently meant to signify not a collectively provided and cherished basis for family-income security, but a sinister threat to our national well-being.”

There were selfish bad guys with lots of money in 1934. But they were unable to control the debate, hard as they tried, with their control of the media (Hearst newspapers, anyone?). Somehow today they do. Occasionally, there is a burst of hope, the mass rallying of regular people to contribute to and work for Barack Obama in 2008, and the dashing of hope as this figure too seems to serve those with the most power. Marmor and Mashaw conclude  “Over the last 50 years we seem to have lost the words — and with them the ideas — to frame our situation appropriately. Can we talk about this? Maybe not.”

I’d like to say “maybe yes”. Maybe we can look at the Dorothy Day Apartments and the Catholic Worker movement and Shalom House and the dozens of groups called “Bread and Roses” and the thousands of organizations and millions of people who really want to make this country and this world a better place for actual people, and have hope. And, if we want to look back for inspiration, let me offer a few passages from FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech of January 6, 1941:

“The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.
The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.
The enjoyment -- The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living….

Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement. As examples:
We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.
We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it….

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.”

Are we now such a different people that such aspirations are no longer possible? I hope not.

Fighting for freedom abroad -- and at home

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In two side-by-side Op-Ed pieces in the NY Times on Sunday, February 27, 2011, Nicholas Kristof and Frank Rich discuss apparently very different topics. Rich’s piece, “Why wouldn’t the Tea Party shut it down?”, can be described as “depressing-with-a-glimmer-of-hope.” It compares the current situation in Congress, with a new, empowered, Republican majority with 83 freshman and firm ideology, to that of 1995, when a similar class of mid-term-elected Republicans took control under Newt Gingrich with their “Contract for America”. The similarities are obvious, but he points to the differences as well. Structurally, these include the advent of FoxNews trumpeting the GOP line that this is all about cutting spending and reducing the deficit, and pressures such as Gingrich himself urging current Speaker of the House John Boehner to push ahead with this agenda. Importantly, it highlights the role of massive funding of this agenda by the secretive-but-being-dragged-into-the-open billionaire Koch brothers, whose financial self-interest is being massively served by the Republican policies of tax cuts for the wealthy, and even more by gutting of all regulation of the oil industry (EPA) and financial industry (SEC, IRS and others). As the House moves toward actually shutting down funding for the government, it hopes (believes?) that it can convince the public to blame the President.

What is the “glimmer”? First of all, this strategy did not work in 1995, when the Republicans, not Bill Clinton were blamed for the government shutdown. Second, in 1995 the economy was in very good shape, while now it is still a disaster. While the unemployed and fearing-unemployment portion of the public, may not want to pay taxes, they are their slightly-better-off countrymen both need and want the services provided by the government in that small sliver of discretionary spending (not counting Medicare, Medicaid, and the military) that is on the table. People want their Medicare and Social Security and Veteran’s benefits and are not going to be happy if the checks don’t come because the Republicans shut down government. Moreover, Rich notes that “…the latest Pew survey found that Americans want to increase, not decrease most areas of federal spending – and by large margins in the cases of health care and education.”

Republicans think that they can continue screaming “deficit” and Americans will ignore the fact that the cuts that they propose, targeting social programs they are ideologically opposed to (Head Start, Planned Parenthood, etc.), will not make any significant difference in the deficit, while the cuts they oppose, such as repealing the tax-cuts for the wealthiest individuals and corporations, would. Maybe people will. Hopefully, especially if the President can make these points clearly, they won’t.

Kristof, on the other hand, provides a tale of inspiration and hope-with-a-serious-measure-of-caution. In “Unfit for Democracy?” he challenges the “crude stereotype” that the peoples of the Middle East (along with those of Africa, China, and other parts of the non-western-European world) are “too politically immature for democracy.” He acknowledges the state failures of Yugoslavia after Tito and the Congo; he is aware of the fears that regime change led to civil war in Iraq, chaos in Somalia[1], repressive theocracy in Iran. I have had friends tell me that the uprisings in the Middle East are about economic opportunity, not freedom. I’m sure economics, in these very poor countries, are part of it, but people are bravely dying for freedom, and they are at home, and not in the military.

Kristof tells us of unspeakable tortures endured in Bahrain, of the bravery of the double amputee he met in Cairo who wheeled his chair to the front lines as Mubarak’s thugs attacked with “rocks, clubs, and Molotov cocktails, of people marching unarmed in Bahrain toward security forces who had opened fire on them the day before.” That while there have been bad, even horrible, outcomes when people have overthrown repressive governments, “countries usually pull through”. That the solution cannot be the continuance in power by the current corrupt and brutal dictators. This is a myth perpetrated by the very dictators themselves to justify their continuance in power, to justify both pocketing most of the money and oppressing their own people.

What is the relationship between these two stories? Tyrants in power share with elites in power the professed (and often believed) myth that those who they oppress are lesser peoples, inferior races, too “childlike” to manage themselves not to mention be “trusted” with managing their country. Bigotry and exploitation exist in a homeostatic relationship, one used to “justify” the other, in a history of atrocities, from the colonialist “White Man’s Burden” to Hitler’s attempt to exterminate all Jews in the Holocaust. This position characterized attitudes toward American Indians, black people, immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century, workers and the labor movement, and women. It justified – in our country, built on the idea of freedom and democracy – not only discrimination, degradation, and intimidation, but violent repressive attacks on: American Indians (genocide), black people (slavery and Jim Crow), immigrants, workers, and even women.

Well, these days are not over. American Indians and Black Americans, as well as other minorities continue to be on the bottom rungs of our economic and social order. Attacking immigrants is the new paradigm, with Arizona and its continued escalation of ignoble and often unconstitutional laws being hand-in-glove with the iron fists of those such as the Sheriff of Maricopa County (a worthy successor to the evil Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin Hood’s nemesis on the old television program). Wisconsin moves to the front lines in attacks on workers, with its governor seeking to eliminate collective bargaining under the myth that it is about money, despite the complete accession of the public sector unions to the financial cuts (and despite the fact that it is their own money they are giving back).[2] An astute observer notes: “You look at what is happening in the Middle East where people long kept "under the thumb" are expressing their yearnings for freedom and then contrast that with the fomenting battles over pensions and collective bargaining here in the US. It doesn't take long to start asking "What is wrong with this picture?![3]" What indeed?

“In Egypt and Bahrain in recent weeks,” Kristof writes, “I’ve been humbled by the lion-hearted men and women I’ve seen defying tear gas and bullets for freedom we take for granted. How can we say that these people are unready for a democracy that they are prepared to die for?”

Most of us in the US, those who are not the mostly young and mostly poor and working class people deployed in the at-best-futile wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are not in danger of dying from government-directed violence. But we are certainly in danger of losing the freedom as our rights are all sold off to the highest bidder, and we must stand against it.

[1] See also the article on the Somali pirates and what the response might be,
[2] See Rick Ungars piece on Forbes.com, “The Wisconsin Lie Exposed – Taxpayers Actually Contribute Nothing To Public Employee Pensions”.
[3] R. Aistrope, personal communication.
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