REGARDING ROE V WADE

Regarding Roe v Wade Dr. Roger Ray May 22, 2022 CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO Taken from Justice Samuel Alito’s draft of a Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. We were shocked but we were not surprised when the draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade was leaked. We were shocked because access to safe and legal abortions has been a protected constitutional right for nearly 50 years and this reversal is horrifying and unjust in so very many ways. But it is not surprising because this has been a part of almost every national election’s campaign conversation for decades. We can hardly be surprised, especially after the Trump administration’s appointments to the court that were clearly orchestrated in order to achieve this specific result. I was out of the country when news of the leak broke, but I immediately contacted David to say that we were going to have to juggle our preaching schedule to respond to this nightmare, sooner rather than later. My mind raced back to all the arguments we have made about this topic for decades, that every woman has a right to manage her own reproductive health in consultation with her physician and without the interference of the government. And all of the well rehearsed arguments about the hypocrisy of being concerned about bringing a child to term but not being concerned about the child’s housing, nutrition, education, and healthcare. There is so much to be said about the basic human right of a woman to make this decision on her own and yet, I don’t think that I am going to allow myself to be drawn into that fight. If you will indulge me an aside which I believe is relevant at this point: I spent the first twenty years that I was a pastor in Springfield fighting for the civil rights of the LGBT community. I was, in many ways, a lone voice in this religious wilderness in the early years. I lived through having protesters marching in front of the church, repeated threats to either fire me from my church, or more extreme anonymous physical threats. A retired minister was so outraged by what I was doing that he actually hired a private investigator to try to find enough dirt on me to end my career . . . I believe that he was charged with actually trying to find my gay lover because he was the kind of person who had no capacity for understanding compassion and he assumed, as any sociopath would, that I was only concerned about the civil rights of the gay community because I was secretly gay, myself. I believe that my engagement in that fight along with several other controversial ethical issues is what finally brought about the end of my relationship with my former denomination, which was a price I would gladly pay all over again if I had it to relive those years. But about a decade ago, before the 2015 Supreme Court decision that made same sex marriage legal, we were hosting the late Bishop John Shelby Spong here for our annual conference and he said something that was life changing and liberating for me. Spong said, in one of his lectures, that he was through trying to explain his biblical and moral defense of gay rights to those who continued to oppose same sex marriage. He said, that having thoroughly explained his beliefs repeatedly for decades that it was now time for the opponents of gay rights to make some plausible defense of their prejudice. He could not have been more on target. . . and I felt as if a weight had been taken off of my shoulders. I realized that it was not my job to convince the homophobic to overcome their prejudices. I am not, after all, the ass-hole whisperer. For decades we have paid the price, we’ve lost church members, church jobs, friends and even some family members, carrying the banner for gay rights. We have nothing new to add to the debate. Now it is time for those who seek to maintain this wretched prejudice to explain themselves… which they cannot credibly do. I believe that we are in the exact same place with the civil rights of women, especially as it regards their right to manage their own reproductive lives. It isn’t that Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barret don’t understand the issues at hand, it is that they do not care. It is no longer our job to convince them to do the right thing, they have made it abundantly clear that they have no interest in doing the right thing. It is now our job to double down and change our government so that such an injustice cannot stand and people with such tortured moral retardation as Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barret are not appointed to powerful decision-making positions. In the United States, national elections are won in the margins. The largest margin that any president has won in the popular vote in the past 50 years was 23% and folks, that was the re-election of Richard Nixon who was later forced to resign in disgrace. No one in the last 30 years has even made it to a 10% margin. We elect presidents and most senators by very slim margins of 3 or 4% and some still call that narrow victory a “land slide” that gives them a “mandate.” Because of this almost even divide in American politics, both parties have to try to add up which constituencies they have to add to their voting base in order to win an election. Both parties try to use redistricting to maximize their reliable voting blocks and minimize their opponents. Granted, the Republican Party has elevated redistricting and voter suppression to the level of a racist sacrament, but they know that immigrants, minorities, and the poor tend to vote more heavily for Democrats and so, in a fit of anti-democratic manipulation, they are trying to suppress those votes so that Republicans can stay in power. There was a time when Catholics and Evangelicals tended to vote for Democrats because their constituency was largely among the working poor. But in the most recent generations, Republicans have used abortion as the issue they could exploit to lure Catholic and Evangelical support. Even though between 70 and 80% of Americans are in favor of a woman’s right to choose in most cases, the Republican Party has wrapped itself in several unpopular positions in order to garner the vote of these single issue voters… abortion is one, gun ownership is another, and when those fail, they trot out scare words like “socialism” or “the liberal media” to herd enough of the lunatic fringe into their pro-business, pro-military voting blocks to win many elections. You will note that in the wake of this horrible mass murder in Baltimore, that Republican elected officials have been almost entirely silent. It isn’t that more than three or four of them are dumb enough to have ever actually believed in this whole notion about how white people are being replaced by Jews, Blacks, Latinos, and Arabs, but, and here is the crux of the matter, no Republican can win an election without the votes of the racists who do believe in these conspiracy theories and so, they can’t even breathe near a microphone right now, lest they lose the vote of racist lunatics. This is a hard reality of our current voter demographics. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that Ronald Reagan, or either of the Bushes, nor even Donald Trump were actually personally opposed to a woman’s right to choose or, for that matter, gay rights, nor would they, in their heart of hearts, defend the right of a deranged 18-year-old nut to buy a military weapon. But they acted like they were anti-abortion, pro-assault rifle, and anti-same sex marriage in order to court the votes of the fanatical fringe. The thing is, most of us realized, at least so far as Reagan and the Bushes were concerned, that this was nothing but performative politics. They had no intention of actually doing anything about overturning Roe, they were just throwing out enough red meat to keep their fringe voting blocks in their camp . . . not horribly unlike the way many Democrats have feigned interest in matters of concern to black and brown voters only long enough to win an election and then they went back to work full time for their political donors. I wish that I was just being cynical about politics but if I were to invite you to prove me wrong, you wouldn’t have many things to point to that would contradict what I have just said. Abortion has been a part of performative politics for years. Some states have managed to nibble away at the edges of abortion rights, often passing laws that they knew had no chance of standing up to legal review, but they passed them to make it look like they were taking the issue seriously. But after decades of promises and fake gestures, the chickens have come home to roost. It is sort of like Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield. He knows that would be totally insane and that it would probably bring an end to Russia’s existence, but, if you threaten it enough, you wake up one day and find that it is your only option. We are in greater danger of a global nuclear war right now than we have ever been before, and almost entirely because of the lust for power on the part of one man. Many years ago, I had a young woman in my congregation who was so angry at a boyfriend who had broken up with her that she started stalking him, breaking into his house, and finally repeatedly making suicidal gestures to get him back. At some point, when she claimed to be sitting in her running car in her garage, she called her ex to “say goodbye.” He called the police, who broke in and took her to a mental hospital. The next day I went to visit her in the hospital, and she said something very profound that I have never forgotten. She said, “I have learned that if you act crazy long enough, people will start to treat you like you are crazy.” Not that the Democratic Party hasn’t broken my heart many times, and it is not that insincerity and incompetence are litmus tests to be a Republican candidate, but, folks, what I am saying is that the Republican Party has acted crazy for long enough. It is time for us to start treating them like they are crazy. I’m not saying that we need to lock them away and never hear from them again . . . at least, I don’t think that I am saying that . . . I believe that we must have at least two viable political parties and I honestly wish that we had four or five and not just two, but we must have at least two. But what the Republican Party has become . . . what they are today, we just can’t have them as one of those two parties. Nobody needs that level of crazy. The quote is attributed to several different people, but I like to think that it was Mark Twain who said that “All political parties eventually die, choaking on their own lies.” It has been a long time since one of the leading parties in the United States has died, leaving room for a new party to take its place, but please consider this to by my eulogy for the Republican Party. They no longer have a defensible place in the United States. We have room for a conservative party, if they are conservative about economics, business practices, defense, and immigration, but we don’t have room for racism, misogyny, homophobia, and gun violence. Overturning Roe v Wade will allow abortion laws to revert to the states and, folks, no state should be able to take away anyone’s civil rights. We wouldn’t leave freedom of speech or freedom of religion up to states! If we did, can you think of a state in the Midwest where it would continue to be legal for us to exist? That’s why the constitution went to print with a bill of rights in the first place. Some things are beyond being revoked simply by popular vote. There are lots of people on the lunatic right who not only want to deport all of the brown people, if they could, they would deport all of the liberals of all colors…. And sure, most of us talk about self-deportation a lot, but I still want it to be my choice when I disappear onto a tropical island never to be seen again. But folks, it won’t stop at being a state-by-state option. There is already talk of passing a nationwide ban on all abortions and it won’t stop there either. Thomas and Alito voted against the 2015 decision to legalize same sex marriage. Now that there is a bullet-proof majority of right-wing fanatics on the Supreme Court, how long do you think it will be before they overturn that decision as well? Can even birth control and interracial marriage be safe from this Christian Taliban? That may seem crazy but a couple of years ago, a lot of people thought that the fear of overturning Roe was crazy and now we see that crazy has come to town. I would remind you that the last three conservative judges all said in their Senate hearings that they considered Roe to be settled law, even calling on the legal concept of stare decisis to imply that they will allow past decisions to stand. Now, I don’t know who believed them when they were offering those assurances, but they looked the senate in the eye, leaned into the microphone and lied like a cheap rug. Senator Susan Collins assured journalists that she was absolutely confident that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would not overturn Roe before she voted for their confirmation. If she was, I suspect that she was the only sentient creature in Washington, D.C., a possibly small crowd, who actually believed them. After this draft was leaked, she told the press, "If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office," which, to quote pop singer, Billie Eilish, “Duh.” I don’t want to be trite about politicians lying. Politicians say what they have to say to get elected. We had a guy running for city council in my little hometown of Glasgow, KY who promised voters in 1972 that he would “bring our boys home from Vietnam.” I was too young to vote then but I sure was in favor of bringing our boys home from Vietnam before I had to join them, not that the city council in Glasgow, KY had much to say about it. An unscrupulous jurist will say anything they have to say to be granted a seat on the Supreme Court. As late as 1991, Clarence Thomas just dodged the question of Roe v Wade by saying that he hadn’t thought much about it. Which, if someone hadn’t thought much about the most famous Supreme Court decision since Plessy v Ferguson, you might legitimately ask what on earth they were doing in a position to be considered for a seat on the high court, but, obviously, he was also lying. He knew what he thought about Roe, and he has been waiting for 30 years to be in a majority of justices so that he could cast this vote. When I knew that Biden was going to appoint a black woman to the court, I secretly wished that he would pick Anita Hill. I don’t really have a sadistic streak in me, but I do have a certain lust for justice, especially when it has been delayed for 30 years! I did my Masters’ thesis on the treatment of addiction, and 40 years ago, the best program of recovery that I could study was A.A. and AlAon, and I can tell you, all of these decades later, I am still grateful for every evening I spent in those meetings because they were more educational than any class I ever took at Vanderbilt or Harvard. A.A. is obviously the meeting for recovering alcoholics. AlAnon was for the family members of those alcoholics who needed to learn that they could not make their spouse or their father stay sober. The addict’s recovery was not up to them. But they did need to learn how not to enable the addiction. One of the most important pieces of advice given to the people in the AlAnon meetings was to stop acting like they believed the addict’s lies. Drug addicts and Alcoholics invented gaslighting . . . “Of course I didn’t steal the money from your purse! I can’t believe that you would accuse me of such a dastardly act! You should go and confess your sins to our priest!” Stop believing the lies. Stop acting like you believe them, Susan Collins. The mistake that I made in grad school was thinking of people lying to get what they wanted was somehow uniquely related to addiction. It is not. Nor is it unique to politicians. But it is an aspect of being a sociopath and, men and women, we have to stop electing sociopaths to national office or appointing them to Supreme Court seats. You used to hear the saying that a woman voting for a Republican was like a chicken voting for Col. Sanders. But what if you are not a woman, what if you, say, have a sister? Or a daughter? Or maybe you just believe in justice for women, even if you don’t have any specific woman in mind to defend? Maybe you just care about justice? Voting for someone like Trump may not make you a racist, or a homophobe, or a xenophobe, but it does mean that you are OK with racism, that taking rights away from gays and lesbians and the transgendered is not a deal breaker for you, and that all of those kids in cages on the border is just law enforcement…. The little criminals, wanting to eat and all that. The women who went out and marched the day after Trump’s inauguration knew what they were talking about. It did matter. Sure, he’s an idiot, but he has appointed dangerous ideologues to the Supreme Court and we’re going to have to keep fighting against them and their decisions for a long time. I wish that the USA had a real Green Party. I wish that we had a legitimate Labor Party. Heck, you know me, I wish that we had an intelligent Democratic Socialist Party, but people, as long as people like Mitch McConnel and Donald Trump are in positions of leadership in the Republican Party, I beg you, stop buying ammunition for your own assassins. Voting is now our only means of changing our government into a more compassionate and intelligent government. I would like to remind you, in closing, of the insight of one of our nation’s most insightful founders, Thomas Paine, who said: To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead. The Republican Party has abandoned American democracy in favor of a form of kleptocratic fascism and as such, simply is not a viable option for American voters, in much the same way that Fox is not a news station, Precious Moments statues are not art, and, though my daughter and I still do not agree, the Spice Girls were never musicians. But, of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Remembering Thich Nhat Hanh

“Making Peace In the Moment We Are Alive”: Remembering Thich Nhat Hanh 

David Ketchum 

May 15, 2022

Watch the Video HERE

        It is a custom to offer reflections of gratitude for a Buddhist teacher on the 100 day commemoration of their death. May 1 marked this continuation for the Most Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay (teacher), and this is my belated offering of gratitude. 

"Right in the Moment We are Alive”

       In the early 2000s, I was a pastor in rural Missouri. In addition to the familiar challenges, our communities were reeling from the emerging methamphetamine crisis.  By 2004, Missouri led the nation in meth lab busts, with most of the drugs being produced in home labs. There was a great deal of shame around the problems, too. I remember one woman confidentially asking for help, looking for support for her granddaughter. She was waiting for me outside of my office on a crisp evening in October. We cried together as she told their story, the wind stinging our faces as evening fell. I shared as many resources as I could and recommended some treatment options. But this was too much; she recoiled and stammered, “Nobody can know about this; it would devastate the family!” 

She was not alone; secrecy was usually the default response. But the shame could be hidden only so long, as our community’s needs quickly outpaced the resources available in our little towns. Overwhelmed and uncertain, many people seemed to find it more comforting to avoid the problems than address them, pretending the suffering did not exist. And my work in the community flew in the face of that avoidance. In hindsight, it was probably not surprising that I found myself increasingly at odds with others in leadership. One Sunday, the treasurer cornered me in the copy room. The whir of the Xerox machine buzzed behind us as she emphatically told me that things had to change. “The people you bring to church cost more money than they give!” We were both bewildered, and I learned in a new way that cultivating compassion is an ongoing practice, and not always an easy one, even for people who might otherwise be kind. 

Still, my ongoing work, focused on family conflict, abuse and addiction recovery, and spiritual care for marginalized folx in the community, continued to be both vitally necessary and surprisingly controversial. We did our best to work together, as needs continued to grow. But I could feel my own wellbeing getting stretched thin, and the spiritual disciplines that had sustained me throughout my life to that time were failing me. The most pressing question was increasingly becoming: how can I practice in such a way that I can engage with suffering (inside and around me) with honesty, openness, compassion, and wisdom, without succumbing to apathy, rage, or despair? I felt increasingly frustrated at those who did not support the community programming and decreasingly hopeful that our efforts would make a difference. 

        My spouse Holly and I were foster parents at the time, and we frequently visited a little thrift store in town to pick up household items and toys. This particular shop was a bit cluttered, with rows of display shelves loosely organized by type and crowded with old kitchen utensils, hotel style art, and trash bags overflowing with stuffed animals. It was as if all the odds and ends of the town’s garage sales were unceremoniously deposited in a single storefront, so it was difficult to look for anything specific. Instead, we would give a quick glimpse to see if something useful caught the eye. I had the habit of checking out the bookshelves, too, just in case something of interest had been donated. 

It was late 2005 when I happened upon a thin volume on those shelves, Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh. I was vaguely familiar with the author’s name, and the title certainly caught my attention. The back of the book told me that the author was active in peace work and was also a friend of Thomas Merton and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which were all good signs. 

        The excerpt spoke directly to my heart:  

“Every day we do things, we are things, that have to do with peace. If we are aware of our lifestyle, our way of consuming, our way of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment we are alive.” 

"If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace."

The sticker on the cover assured me that this was a small risk worth taking. For fifty cents, I left the thrift store with a hidden gem. Reading Being Peace, I felt myself entirely at home. Thich Nhat Hanh’s approach and experience spoke directly to my condition. His expression of Engaged Buddhism answered my queries about how to cultivate a spiritual practice that could heal and transform suffering (inside and around me) with honesty, openness, compassion, and wisdom, without succumbing to apathy, rage, or despair. “There are so many things that make me want to withdraw, to go back to myself,” he wrote. “But my practice helps me remain in society, because I am aware that if I leave society, I will not be able to help change it.” (50) The Five and Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings became my daily companions, and I began a habit of reciting a training each day to help train and encourage my mind, a practice I continue even now. 

“With Those In the Places of Greatest Suffering”

     Having found Being Peace so helpful, I began listening to talks and reading more books by Thich Nhat Hanh. This was not as easy to do in rural Missouri circa 2005, and I was grateful for whatever resources I could find. One opportunity came during a rare vacation. Knowing how stressful our circumstances were, Holly’s parents gifted us with a vacation to Grand Teton National Park. Such a trip inevitably included browsing whatever used bookstores we happened across, and this is where I picked up a copy of Fragrant Palm Leaves, a collection of Thich Nhat Hanh’s journals (1962-1966). 

Before reading this book, I had only an academic understanding of the role and importance of the bodhisattvas in the Mahayana traditions. Thich Nhat Hanh helped me understand their power and beauty.  Kshitigarbha especially spoke to me, with his “vow to be with those who are in the places of greatest suffering.” His presence made it possible for flowers to bloom even “in the depths of hell.” Thich Nhat Hanh assured us that “No one sees the existence of suffering more deeply than a bodhisattva, yet no one maintains as refreshing and unwavering a smile.” (111) In reading these words, my heart, which had been heavy by so much suffering in and around me, opened again. 

        I never met Venerable Thay in person, but I have spent a lot of time with him, and his teachings and practices live within me. He had lived a courageous life in the midst of difficult and often terrifying circumstances: trying to transform a conservative religious hierarchy; engaging in social work in the midst of war; advocating for peace as an exile; aiding fellow refugees fleeing violence; supporting the Civil Rights movement when he lived in the United States; doing healing work with veterans and survivors; and more. For those who only know him for his gentle voice and meditation instructions, it may be difficult to understand that he was also a controversial figure that was considered dangerous by many people. Yet, even in the face of opposition, he continued his simple, loving practices for decades, meeting new issues with wisdom and compassion. In all of this, Thich Nhat Hanh’s life was consistent with the Buddhist understanding that if one is liberated from suffering, all are liberated. And if all are liberated, then each one is liberated. Or as Fannie Lou Hamer taught us, "Nobody's free until everybody's free."

The Care We Give to One Another

       This aspect of community, even and especially community in the midst of hardship, has figured prominently in my reflections of Thich Nhat Hanh’s passing.  Two familiar texts keep coming to my mind. In the 10 Subjects for Frequent Recollection, we recite: “‘Could my spiritual companions find fault with my conduct?’ This should be reflected upon again and again by one who has gone forth.” And from the Karaniya Metta Sutta, we remember that the boundless heart is: “Peaceful and calm and wise and skillful, / Not proud or demanding in nature. / Let them not do the slightest thing / That the wise would later reprove.” 

It is significant that both teachings put our lives in the context of community. But getting this right, too, is a practice. In my experience, people (at least in the West) often approach these questions with a rather binary focus on what is right/wrong (good/evil), to the neglect of a more relational and reflective approach. When I teach about meditation, for example, the most common question I’ve been asked over the years is, “am I doing this right?” But meditation practice is a relational practice; it is about our relationship with our experiences, our bodies, our hearts and minds, and even with each other and the earth. “Am I doing this the right way?” is usually not a helpful way to get to those relationships. So we work instead with another set of questions: what happens when I do it this way? Does this lead to more suffering, in myself, others, or the earth? If so, the practice is in letting go. Does this lead to compassion, wisdom, and insight – to more wellbeing in myself, others or the earth? If so, the practice is to encourage and maintain those skillful qualities. We call to mind our human and natural communities, understanding that there is no wellbeing for “me” that excludes the wellbeing of others. Our wellbeing is connected, and this is what moves us to refrain from doing “the slightest thing that the wise would later reprove.” 

        When this is the case, our self-restraint is not out of a sense of shame, guilt, or self-consciousness, but out of the care we give to one another. And while varying religious and cultural traditions may have its own definitions of who is wise, we hold in common a sense of trust in those who have demonstrated wisdom and compassion. Hopefully, this includes - or grows to include - ourselves, as our spiritual and reflective practices bear fruit in our lives. The wise, compassionate heart guides us, and we grow to trust that wisdom, and with it the ability to notice and let go when there is something unskillful. 

        In contrast, blame and guilt are usually unhelpful. More than that, they are usually inaccurate. They oversimplify the situation and lead to misunderstanding, since our lives are interdependent. Compassion and encouragement in wise action are helpful, for they help us make good choices that bear good fruit. We can take responsibility for our unskillful, harmful actions, ask forgiveness, make amends where possible, and begin anew. We can celebrate what is done well and encourage one another in skillful practice. We can be compassionate to those in need, even when they are victims of their own consequences. And we can hold out the possibility that life can change, in this present moment, wonderful moment. In doing so, we practice like a bodhisattva, for the liberation and wellbeing of all. 

This is beautiful and lovely. This is also training the mind - hard work! But it is possible. A friend and I were talking along these lines recently: take care of the practice, and the practice will take care of you. If we all practice in this way, then we can also say with confidence: take care of the community, and the community will take care of you. I am sure you have felt this, and also felt that it is easy to restrain ourselves from harmful actions when we are motivated by that care. The boundless heart, we find, knows how to let go. So we ask, “‘Could my spiritual companions find fault with my conduct?’ This should be reflected upon again and again by one who has gone forth.” We do this "Again and again," because it is a practice. By simply calling to mind the memory and presence of our caring community, we gain a sense of our shared wisdom and the support we need to stay on the path. 

A Possibility

        I believe this is also one of the important reasons why people all over the world felt the loss of the Most Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh so strongly. For so many, they encountered the teachings of Venerable Thay at a time in their life when they were hurting, angry, or confused. They learned to trust his gentle presence. And when the teachings opened an awareness of their unskillful, harmful actions of body, speech, and mind, it was done in a compassionate way that brought, not guilt, but insight toward wellbeing and an experience of care. We have at least glimpsed this in our relationships with each other and in our spiritual communities, too. We grow to know and trust what we can offer to one another, and this is the art of cultivating community. 

Yet anyone who has been involved in building community, especially amidst injustice and oppression, knows that it is hard work. Looking backwards, we can get a glimpse of how uncertain life is, including a lot of things that feel inevitable now. It is easy to remember Thich Nhat Hanh as an internationally known teacher and author; a founder of monastic and practice communities around the world; an accomplished scholar; a poet and artist; and an activist who combined all of this into an expression of socially engaged spirituality. But his life was also filled with tender and fragile moments, as when he described the moment when Sister Chan Khong brought him back from the edge of exhaustion and burnout during their efforts to work for peace during the Vietnam War. “It was in 1966,” he shared, “when the war in Vietnam had become unbearable, and I was so absorbed in working to end the war it was hard for me to swallow my food.” Sister Chan Khong was mindfully preparing herbs with noodles. Her simple question, “Thay, can you identify these fines herbes?”, became a bell of mindfulness, and Thich Nhat Hanh was able to find his balance again. Beautifully, this was a lesson he never outgrew. He wrote: 

“Years later, a friend from America asked me, ‘Thay, why do you waste your time planting lettuce? Wouldn’t it be better to use the time to write poems? Anyone can plant lettuce, but few people can write such beautiful poetry.’ I smiled and said, ‘My dear friend, if I do not plant this lettuce, I will not be able to write poetry.’” (Foreword, Learning True Love)

This was the message I needed to hear when I was also exhausted by the suffering in my community, and I stumbled upon that little paperback in 2005. I had studied Buddhism academically for years, but Thich Nhat Hanh opened the door of practice to me. I’m grateful for the wonderful teachers I’ve had since then; I’ve studied a lot, and I’ve practiced a lot more. But, looking back, I see that I also have not outgrown the wisdom I first encountered in the teachings and example of the Most Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh. With gratitude, I listen again to the words I first read in that little thrift store in rural Missouri: 

“Every day we do things, we are things, that have to do with peace. If we are aware of our lifestyle, our way of consuming, our way of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment we are alive.” 

Mother’s Day, the Supreme Court, & the Spectrum of Trust

Mother’s Day, the Supreme Court, & the Spectrum of Trust 

David Ketchum 

May 8, 2022

Watch the Video HERE

Let me begin by saying that this is a sermon that happens to be preached on Mother’s Day, but this is not a Mother’s Day sermon. I am going to speak about some aspects of family relationships, but I don’t want to mislead or frustrate anyone looking for a Mother’s Day sermon. 

This will also be a sermon in two parts, because I feel compelled to begin with some comments on the radical history of Mother’s Day and its contrast to the Supreme Court and the leaked majority opinion on Roe vs. Wade. We’re planning to give a fuller treatment of these issues soon, so my reflections today are more introductory. 

Celebration

What I remember most about Mother’s Day from my childhood are the peonies. We’d fill a vase with cut flowers and I’d try to rescue the ants crawling on their stems. After breakfast, we’d go to church, and the pastor would hand out carnations to all the mothers there, as well as to the oldest mother, the newest mother, the mother with the most children, the mother of missionaries, and so on. I remember people clapping, and lots of Hallmark cards. It was a very meaningful day to many people, when our community collectively paused to say “thank you” for hard work that was often overlooked and taken for granted. It was also a painful day for many people, including those whose mothers had died, those who were estranged from family, those who had lost children, those who regretted becoming parents, or those who weren’t able to have children. So it was a strange day at church, with some folks showing up who usually didn’t, and others staying away. 

I suspect that this dynamic will be even more present for this Mother’s Day, as headlines filled with news about the draft opinion overruling Roe v. Wade. But while you’ve likely been sorting through emails, articles, podcasts, memes, and protest invitations in response, I suspect that most of the churches in my city will be celebrating this morning. Overturning Roe v. Wade has been a long term goal, and they’ve made no secret about that. And I suspect that these celebrations will be conflated with their observances of Mother’s Day, repeating the idea that attacking reproductive rights and extolling patriarchal values supports mothers and families.  

That is in stark contrast with the origins of Mother’s Day, which  did not begin with either the domestication of women or the commercialization of gratitude and love.   For example, in 1858, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis encouraged a Mother’s Day movement to “promote sanitation in response to high infant mortality”. (https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/mothers-day-for-peace/ ) The holiday was also used as opportunity to help reunite families separated by the American Civil War. And in 1870, Julia Ward Howe wrote a Mother’s Day proclamation that called for mothers to bring an end to war by standing up to their husbands and teaching their children not to kill one another. (https://www.codepink.org/the_radical_history_of_mother_s_day )

Disillusionment

By 1914, the feminist movement – and its demands - had grown in strength. Leaders were lobbying then President Woodrow Wilson to set aside the first Saturday in May each year as a “Women’s Independence Day,” “in recognition of the right and necessity that the women of the United States should become citizens in fact as well as in name.” They were also organizing events across the USA to celebrate, demand the right to vote, and “read a woman’s version of the Declaration of Independence”.  

But President Wilson wasn’t ready to fully support suffrage, and he denied Shaw’s request to meet with him. Instead, he proclaimed Mother’s Day as a holiday, affirming the importance of women while stopping short of affirming their political and social identities and rights.  

As Kimberly Hamlin wrote last year, this proclamation, along with the resulting commercialization of the holiday, didn’t go over well:

“… shortly after Wilson declared Mother’s Day a federal holiday in 1914, women like Jarvis [the daughter of Ann Maria] became disillusioned with the frivolous commercialization of what to her should have been a sacred and sincere commemoration. Indeed, in 1933, Jarvis even wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking him to remove the federal mandate for Mother’s Day. / Why? Because instead of equality, health care, peace, safety and support, Mother’s Day had become an occasion for vapid expressions of ‘love and reverence,’ increasingly characterized by flowers, brunch and store-bought cards. / More significantly, Jarvis’s opposition signaled that celebrating motherhood had become symbolic, not substantive. One could even argue that Mother’s Day provided a superficial placeholder in lieu of policies that actually would benefit mothers.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/05/07/women-asked-an-independence-day-they-got-mothers-day-instead/ )

I still love peonies, but the version of Mother’s Day I experienced as a child was more consistent with this more superficial version than the fiery cries for equality and justice. It’s strange to realize that, over one hundred years later, the superficial vision has survived and even flourished, often incubated in the patriarchal visions of fundamentalist religious communities. A few years ago, Esther Vivas commented on that patriarchal ideal: “According to the traditional, patriarchal view, there are only two types of mother: the devoted, self-sacrificing mother and the bad mother”. (https://www.equaltimes.org/the-rise-of-the-disobedient-mother ) This binary has been a useful tool in preserving patriarchal power. And, in my experience, it has invigorated the anti-abortion movement for decades. 

Reconnection

These insights bring us right back to the present day, when we also and still encounter these dynamics. With the draft opinion by the Supreme Court, a clear path towards increasingly restrictive laws on abortion, accompanied by harsher penalties, is opening up. What is less clear is any discernible way that this will actually benefit pregnant people, children, families, and communities. After all, it’s well-known that outlawing abortion “doesn’t end abortion, it just makes it less safe.” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/24/want-to-lower-the-abortion-rate-support-pro-choice-policies ) 

        However, we do have a pretty good idea about the kinds of things that are likely to create safer, happier, and healthier communities. And it looks a lot more like the activism of Ann Maria Jarvis, promoting public health and sanitation, than it does the opinion of Justice Alito. The kind of policies that should be getting our attention and support, and that our politicians should be exploring and championing, are policies like: 

• comprehensive sex education and access to contraception;
• universal health care, including all pre- and post-natal care, as well as abortion;
• generous parental leave;
• access to parenting education and caregiving necessities, such as diapers, car seats, formula, etc.;
• wages and/or tax credits for unpaid housework and caregiving for parents who stay at home;
• universal childcare for parents who work away from home; and
• universal preschool education. 

        As this list implies, we cannot separate reproductive rights from social, racial, and economic justice. Greater restrictions on reproductive rights, including abortion, will disproportionately harm marginalized communities, including poor, disabled, queer and trans folx, and people of color. (https://www.aclu.org/podcast/how-reproductive-justice-part-anti-racist-agenda-ep-109 ) There is no question that the stakes are high, and this Mother’s Day has been infused with a greater political and social significance by the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion. Protests have already rippled across the nation, coupled with calls for a general strike, beginning today. And this is fitting. As Hamlin wrote,

“This history [of Mother’s Day] reveals women activists have never considered brunch and a card an adequate way to recognize the work done by American mothers, especially after a year in which they’ve done so much more of it. Returning Mother’s Day to its original roots compels us to reflect on our nation’s long-standing disregard for maternal and infant health — among the worst in the industrialized world, especially for women of color — along with our persistent refusal to enact legislation that would provide meaningful support for working mothers.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/05/07/women-asked-an-independence-day-they-got-mothers-day-instead/ )

There’s a lot more to say, including all the impacts the Court’s decision could have on other issues, from privacy to marriage equality. This will also involve facing and transforming patriarchal, racist, ableist, and other violently repressive ideas and institutions that survive today and continue to harm us. The news this week was hard, but we expected that something like this was coming. And although there is a lot of work ahead of us, it’s not separated from the work we’ve been doing for a long time. So for today, we reconnect with each other, as well as all those whose hard work has brought us to this moment, named and unnamed. We take a deep breath, come back to the present moment, and resolve to keep working together to create communities where justice, wellbeing, and joy are real. 

-------

With that said, forgive me for clumsily turning to my original topic for today. For years now, we’ve been discussing different aspects how to manage broken relationships, especially relationships strained by the increasing polarization of American society. Debates about abortion have certainly been a part of that polarization. More recently, transgender rights and Critical Race Theory have shared the spotlight. More troublingly, the wild proliferation of conspiracy theories has further divided between family members, coworkers, and friends. More and more people speak with me about feelings of isolation and loneliness. Even before the pandemic, more than 40% of Americans reported feeling that their relationships weren’t meaningful, and 20% said that they “rarely or never feel close to people”. (https://www.welcomingpath.com/2019/09/loneliness-listening-and-gift-of.html )

Arriving at Estrangement

These feelings of disconnection and isolation include our family relationships.  In 2020, Karl Pillemer of Cornell University documented the results of a large-scale survey on estrangement. The study found that 27% of respondents shared they had completely “cut off contact” with at least one family member. (https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/09/pillemer-family-estrangement-problem-hiding-plain-sight ) And since this is information not everyone is ready or willing to share, the actual number is probably even higher. We can add to this tally those relationships that are strained, but not yet broken. When we pause to acknowledge it in this way, we glimpse the enormity of pain and stress that we are carrying around. As Pillemer pointed out, this “rejection and powerlessness” has a cumulative and harmful impact on our well-being and the well-being of our communities, weighing us with both grief and a “sense of incompleteness”. The weight is a chronic stressor, especially when it includes family relationships where we experienced bonding and attachment in the past. (ibid)

This kind of estrangement is also the slow fruit of long conflicts and destructive relationship patterns. Abuse, whether emotional, verbal, physical, sexual, or a combination, is at the top of the list of common causes. These are deep wounds. Divorce is also a common influence, with various causes, from feeling the pressure to choose between feuding parents to finding new conflicts in blended families. But it is also increasingly common to find that conflicting values are behind a clash. In one study, “value-based disagreements” played a role in more than a third of rifts between mothers and children. These differences in values usually relate to issues of gender, sexuality, religion, and politics. As we well know, these differences have been amplified by the polarization of most of life in recent years, fueled by popular political candidates and cultural and religious leaders stoking xenophobia and conspiracy theories. (https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20211201-family-estrangement-why-adults-are-cutting-off-their-parents )

Distrust Becomes the Default

Some people have been surprised by this shift, but the reality is that we have been creating these conditions for a very long time. My own estrangement from my extended family has been twofold. The value-based disagreements are certainly present. It became very difficult to attend family gatherings with someone, for example, who openly carried a firearm and held racist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic views. There was no way for me to realistically feel or be safe in that situation. 

        But underneath the values-based rifts was a deeper unwillingness or inability for our family members to honestly engage with harmful patterns of abuse and dysfunction. I have always maintained that I am willing to do the work to honestly engage with, heal from, and transform those patterns. But I am not willing to pretend that they do not exist and expose myself and my loved ones to further harm. 

        This makes me one of those statistics that Pillemer lamented, estranged from several extended family members for many years. I’ve also connected with many people with similar experiences. Very often, we’ve lived through a merging of unhealthy family and religious experiences and cultures. And these experiences connect deeply with issues of trust. 

Growing up in communities that tolerated abuse and dysfunction, the lesson that many of us learned was doubly harmful. On the one hand, I felt pressure to trust everyone, at least everyone in our family or church community. Distrust was a sign that something was wrong with me, because the people in our circles were good by definition. We weren’t encouraged to heal and transform unhealthy relationships, because that would require acknowledging that something was wrong in the first place. This was generally not allowed. Especially in our conservative church culture, problems were only allowed in the past tense. You could sometimes share the problems you were facing, if they weren’t too scandalous, but only after you had resolved them. This became your chance to give testimony about how God had changed your life. But we didn’t really ask for help for relational problems, especially not publicly. Instead, we quietly hid them away – perhaps out of helplessness or shame, but always to our collective harm. In such an environment, vocalizing distrust came perilously close to unmasking how broken our relationships often were, and that was too big of a risk. 

In such a culture, though, trust became increasingly impossible, especially for any of us who had suffered abuse. The reality was that, while we felt pressure to trust everyone, we often didn’t trust anyone. How could we, especially when the people who hurt us were also the people society insisted that we should - and had - to trust? Over the years, I found my own experiences mirrored in the stories that countless people have shared with me. How do we trust, when we so often were harmed by the very people we were taught would protect and care for us? Over time, we learned that the way to stay safe was to assume the opposite about people. Distrust becomes the default.

 

A Spectrum of Trust

So this is where I find it necessary to start. I grew up learning that trust was an either/or proposition. Through decades of tending to both my own healing and supporting others, I have learned that trust is more like a spectrum.  At the far ends we have dysfunctional or unhealthy patterns of trusting and distrusting. Dysfunctional trust is the tendency to trust when we should be exercising boundaries and caution. At the extreme, dysfunctional trust puts us in a position to be harmed, especially repeatedly. We stay in unsafe and unhealthy relationships and groups too long. We also risk normalizing those destructive relational patterns, to the point that we tolerate, protect, and even promote them. 

On the flip side, dysfunctional distrust is the tendency to distrust, no matter what. It often arises out of a legitimate need for self-protection; we refuse to be harmed again. But we do this in a way that leads to isolation and even paranoia. We resist forming any relationships at all because the risk of that kind of connection is too great. So we avoid cultivating safe and healthy relationships. This feels like a reasonable cost when compared with the cost of getting hurt again. And it often feels like a reasonable cost, even if we are desperately in need of community and connection.

Between these extremes we find varying degrees of trust and distrust, and in the middle is the sweet spot. This is where we find trust that is healthy and relationships that are supportive and caring. But this is also where we find distrust that is healthy, where we are honoring the process of building (or rebuilding) trust. Healthy relationships cannot be coerced. And if you take one thing away from these reflections, my guess is that the most helpful idea for most people is simply this: distrust can be healthy. It isn’t automatically or inevitably healthy, no more than trust is automatically or inevitably healthy. But distrust is an important part of how we grow into strong, healthy communities. This is part of how we honor our bodies and needs, get in touch with our boundaries and limitations, practice compassionate communication, and learn how to give and receive care without hurting one another. 

Learning How to (Dis)Trust

We practice these skills internally, inside ourselves, and with each other, in our personal relationships and in our communities and organizations. Cultivating a culture of trust helps all of this happen. Time and again in conflict work, I’ve noticed that, when parties in a conflict can’t trust one another, they may be able to trust a mediator. This is why we spend a significant amount of time in pre-meetings with each party in a conflict, building rapport. That trust can then become a bridge for the parties to meet each other again. Similarly, in a community or organization that takes the time to cultivate a culture of trust, we have a much better chance that conflict won’t become overwhelming. We have a better chance of resolving a difference before harm is done. We have a better chance of healing when there is harm. 

On the flipside, it’s much more challenging to address a problem or conflict when we don’t feel and aren’t safe. This isn’t easy work, and the reality is that some relationships are not safe to continue in any form. Single, traumatic incidents can destroy trust in a moment. But distrust can also emerge out of the accumulation of unhealthy relationship patterns. Especially in the latter case, the situation may gradually get worse and take years to recognize an unhealthy pattern. In my experience, this often means that we are prone to staying in unhealthy relationships for too long. Unfortunately, these aren’t usually situations we are prepared to explore, so we often work through questions, such as: 

• When do I feel comfortable addressing problems? 
• What practices and values help me feel both safe and empowered to work through a conflict? 
• When am I least likely to feel that safety and power? 
• How do I recognize when trust or distrust has become unhealthy? 
• What tools and skills have been most helpful, and what tools and skills are still needed? 

Moving toward Wellbeing 

Getting practice like this in our personal lives also gives us insight into how can we create environments and communities where it is safe to heal from dysfunctional forms of trust and distrust, and where we can learn to practice functional trust and distrust. Going back to the Cornell research on estrangement and reconciliation, Pillemer shared that most instances of healing involved: 1) moving from a focus on the past to a focus on the present, 2) envisioning what a future relationship might be like, and 3) shifting a focus from trying to change the other person to “adopting more realistic expectations” about what was possible. (op cit) 

    I would further clarify that the shift from past to present is one where we move from adjudicating the past (what really happened, who is to blame, who is right) to healing in the present (how did what happen change us, what wounds still need to be healed, how can we cooperate in this healing).  We can then explore that boundary between what is possible and what is healthy:

• What needs am I trying to meet in this relationship? 
• What needs are appropriate to meet in this relationship? 
• What needs are realistically possible to meet in this relationship? 
• How might I meet the needs that don’t fit well in this relationship? 

        When you think about it in these terms, you can recognize that we are already experts in navigating trust and distrust. For example, you can trust me for a whole lot of things, but you really shouldn’t trust me with, say, repairing your car. That won’t go well for any of us! We are constantly making decisions like this, and we can tap into that wisdom to help us navigate more challenging relationships. I find this especially helpful in discerning how to relate with someone with whom I have a significant difference of values. Sometimes the answer is still, “there isn’t a safe way,” but, even then, the process is still valuable for me. 

        Finally, another aspect is the importance of centering the voices and needs of marginalized people. Oppression is the most severe and cruel normalization of harm, and it destroys the possibility of trust. This means that prioritizing justice and equity are part of the restoration of trust and the healing of both people and society. Similarly, the wellbeing of marginalized and oppressed people is the measure of the health of a society. Any work we are doing that ignores this dynamic will ultimately undermine our efforts, whatever our intentions. 

And this is important, because our vision of justice and equity is a shared vision; it is about learning to live together without harming one another. It is about being able to heal from our hypervigilance because we feel and are safe. It is about being able to relax and laugh and enjoy life. Social justice work is relational work, within ourselves, with each other, and in our communities and organizations. Making room for us to understand and practice the spectrum of trust supports this vital, healing, life-giving work. So thank you to everyone who has supported my own healing, and the healing of others. Thank you to everyone who has shared in this work - caring for our most painful wounds with compassion, and creating together communities where we can finally trust ourselves and one another with the fragile, precious, and wonderful joys of life. 

"Ain't Scared of Nothing" (May Day)

“Ain’t Scared of Nothing”: May Day, Unions, and Economic Justice

David Ketchum

May 1, 2022

Watch the video HERE

I grew up in a working class family, with a father who worked in a factory my whole life. Most of those years, he worked second shift, which was great in the summer. We were able to go to the school lot and play some version of baseball several times a week. It was a pick-up game if enough people were available, using ghost runners if we were short. And if only a few of us were there, it would be fly-knocker or hot-box. Other days, we were out in the community, maybe mowing grass together for folks who couldn't manage their lawns or picking up groceries. During the school year, I mainly saw him on the weekends, except for those nights I managed to stay up late, and we'd catch the late news or reruns of M*A*S*H*. 

In our home, there was never a question of the dignity and importance of manual labor. My dad considered other careers, but the factory had better pay and benefits than the options available to him after university, so he stayed at the factory. I grew up understanding that his work wasn’t less important than the work he might have done if he had chosen a different career path. There was also never a question about the importance of labor rights and union organizing. Even though my dad worked at a non-union factory, he always emphasized that the benefits he enjoyed were also because of the power of unions. 

        At the heart of all of this were some very basic principles. I couldn’t put them into words as a child, but I could give a short list now: 

•  a healthy economy cannot be separated from equity and equality; 
• everyone should have access to a safe, stable, and healthy economic and social life; 
• discrimination and disparities are signs of social sickness; 
• the right of workers to organize and collectively bargain should always be protected and prioritized;
• all work and workers should be treated with dignity and gratitude.

        But life is complicated. Although these were the ideals growing in my heart, it didn’t take long to begin feeling the contrast between these values and how people were treated in the workplace. I learned that lesson personally soon enough. As a teen, I spent a few years in the food service industry. As a young adult, my years as a student and then as a bivocational pastor meant that I often made a living by whatever means were available: as a graduate TA; a construction worker; a roofer; a seasonal laborer, from hay fields to vineyards; a private music instructor; and an educator as a Title I instructor. I also spent a decade as an unpaid caregiver and stay-at-home parent. These were mainly fields and jobs that did not enjoy the protection or benefits of a labor union. These experiences, combined with studying labor history, gradually gave me a better understanding of how the values and convictions I learned as a child did – and did not – translate into the economic world around me. 

The Decline

The biggest gap, of course, was the decline in union membership over the last 70 years. My dad grew up at the tail-end of the peak of the labor movement’s power, while I grew up as neoliberalism gained a bigger and bigger influence around the world and labor power was in decline. When my dad turned 18 years old, more than 25% of Missouri workers were unionized. When I turned 18 years old, that number had already slipped to less than 15%. (https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/23/385843576/50-years-of-shrinking-union-membership-in-one-map ) When my own child turned 18, it was less than 10%. (https://www.bls.gov/regions/mountain-plains/news-release/unionmembership_missouri.htm )

    That’s consistent with the overall trend in the USA. As Reid Wilson reported in The Hill last January, union memberships bottomed out at 10.3% in 2019. This was the lowest number since 1983, when the Bureau of Labor started recording worker union rates. Wilson puts this decline into sharp focus with a simple comparison. In 1983, 17.7 million Americans belonged to a union, and "20.5 million were represented by a union". In 2022, "there are about 50 million more workers in the American economy than there were in 1983, and 3 million fewer union members." (https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/590631-union-membership-hits-new-low/ )

There was a small exception that Wilson noted, a slight bump in 2020. Union rates increased a small amount to 10.8%. But this was not because more people joined a union, but because more non-union workers lost their jobs during the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic. This result also intersects with racial disparities. In a report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in 2020, the authors demonstrated that “the decline of unionization has played a significant role in the expansion of the Black–white wage gap over the last four decades,” which left marginalized communities more vulnerable to unemployment during the pandemic. While unemployment for White workers peaked at 12.8%, it was 15% for Asian American/Pacific Islanders, 16.7% for Black workers, and 18.5% for Hispanic workers. Black and Hispanic workers were also much less likely to work from home, and more likely to have jobs that didn’t provide a safe workplace (with access to protective equipment) or paid sick leave.  As the authors pointed out, “The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have been felt broadly, but not equally.” And although unionizing would be a major step in alleviating both economic and racial injustices, the system, including current labor laws, has increasingly made it difficult to organize. (https://www.epi.org/publication/why-unions-are-good-for-workers-especially-in-a-crisis-like-covid-19-12-policies-that-would-boost-worker-rights-safety-and-wages/  )

Not Just About Wages

This is by design. Business owners, corporate leaders, and employers have historically opposed unions, especially in the United States. The most obvious reason is the most commonly noted one: union members get paid more, in wages and benefits, which is viewed as a threat to the profits for the already rich and powerful. Significantly, union members are still more likely to earn a higher wage than non-union workers. The most recent data shows that a union worker earns $1,169 a week compared to $975 a week earned by non-union workers. (That adds up to more than $10,000 over a year’s earnings!) (https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/590631-union-membership-hits-new-low/ ) Not surprisingly, decreased union membership has also been met with increased income inequality. As the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) as documented, from 1979 to 2019, wages for the 1% grew about 160%, while wages for the bottom 90% gew only 26%. (https://www.epi.org/publication/union-workers-had-more-job-security-during-the-pandemic-but-unionization-remains-historically-low-data-on-union-representation-in-2020-reinforce-the-need-for-dismantling-barriers-to-union-organizing/ )

      But this is not the whole story. Ileen Devault, a labor historian and professor at Cornell University, has pointed out that this gap is about more than money: 

“Unions aren’t just about higher wages. They are very much about workers having a say about what happens in the workplace … . And that’s what employers don’t like.” (https://time.com/6168898/why-companies-fight-unions/ ) 

The numbers support this point. According to the EPI:

“We know that unions promote economic equality and build worker power, helping workers to win increases in pay, better benefits, and safer working conditions. / But that’s not all unions do. Unions also have powerful effects on workers’ lives outside of work. / ... In the same way unions give workers a voice at work, with a direct impact on wages and working conditions, the data suggest that unions also give workers a voice in shaping their communities. Where workers have this power, states have more equitable economic structures, social structures, and democracies.” (https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-and-well-being/ )

This helps explain why those controlling most industries have found way to limit or stifle the power of working class people. As a result, unionization has been uneven across industries, political values, and geographies. First, public sector workers are five times more likely to belong to a union. (A third of government workers are union members, compared to just 6% of private sector employees.) So you are less likely to have access to a union if you work in the private sector.  Second, workplaces in blue states have more union members. For example, 17% to 20% of laborers belong to unions in places like Hawaii, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington. The numbers drop to less than 5% in Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia. But even these states outpace South Carolina, where only 2.9% of workers are unionized. So you are less likely to have access to a union if you live in a red state. (https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/590631-union-membership-hits-new-low/ ) Third, certain industries are more likely to be unionized. In 2018, workers in utilities, transportation, and telecommunications, for example, all had union membership rates of at least 15%. But only 1.3% of food service workers belonged to a union. (https://stacker.com/stories/3094/most-unionized-industries-america ) 

Recent Victories

This backdrop helps us understand why recent union victories are so important. The medical industry, for example, has been under tremendous strain during the pandemic, and workers have suffered. In response to dangerous working conditions during the pandemic, many hospital workers have begun to organize and join unions. (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/01/11/955128562/for-health-care-workers-the-pandemic-is-fueling-renewed-interest-in-unions ) And a recent study showed that unionized nursing homes significantly lower mortality and infection rates during the pandemic. As CNA Rosalind “Ros” Reggans explained: 

“It’s pretty simple — the safer we are, the safer they are. … And with a union you have more [personal protective equipment], you can get a day off if you’re sick, you get more COVID pay . . . you can negotiate with your supervisor face to face to make things work. All of that helps residents, too, because we’re not infecting them as much if we have better standards for ourselves.”   (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/04/unions-nursing-homes-mortality-rate-covid-pandemic-save-lives )

        Even doctors, who traditionally have not belonged to unions, have had to consider options. This has been the case for emergency room doctors at the Valley Medical Center in San Jose, CA. They have been working with members of the Registered Nurses Professional Association to organize, with a goal to highlight and address problems and abuses emerging since being acquired by US Acute Care Solutions (a “private equity–backed physician staffing monolith that had taken over the hospital’s ER contract”). (https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/emergency-room-doctors-organizing-usacs-hospital-corporation-greed-health-care )

But the most notable cases in our headlines have been workers at Amazon.com and Starbucks. In the latter case, we’ve seen ten Starbucks locations vote to join Starbucks Workers United, with 170 more stores petitioning for elections. (https://www.reuters.com/business/recent-us-union-wins-amazon-starbucks-more-2022-04-01/ )  Writing for Vox, Rani Molla reported on their goals, which align with the EPI’s conclusion that strong unions are associated with “more equitable economic structures, social structures, and democracies.” Molla wrote that the Starbucks organizers are: 

“hoping to use collective bargaining to get a number of improvements, including higher pay, more hours, and better safety protections, a more necessary change since the erstwhile latte makers became front-line workers during the pandemic. They want more say in what their working lives are like, and they want to hold a company that talks of progressive values accountable.”

        Mercado, a graduate student who also works at Starbucks, told Molla that: “We’ve been forced into this world where we can’t afford anything, where we can’t afford to live … . It’s not a difference between generations, it’s just a difference between what you’ve been given and the tools that we can use to make the change.” And Fagan, a 22 year old shift supervisor, said: “Starbucks is quote-unquote ‘progressive,’ ‘woke,’ whatever. They give us decent benefits … . But we’re literally selling our lives and time and bodies to this corporation. Tell me why I don’t deserve a living wage.” (https://www.vox.com/recode/22993509/starbucks-successful-union-drive )

Similarly, the importance of the success of organizers in Staten Island in unionizing with the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) cannot be overstated, especially since their work was done in the face of an aggressive and powerful anti-union campaign. They did this through a combination of persistence, hard work, and creativity. Luis Felix Leon, reporting for In These Times, pointed out that the ALU “upended the conventional wisdom of how to run a union campaign,” relying less on “the staid world of establishment unionism” and more on “the spectacle of fearless, working-class Black leadership from below.” Gerald Bryson, a co-founder of the ALU, had previously been fired by Amazon for protesting pandemic working conditions. He put it this way:

“You really want to know how we did it? I’ll tell you right now how we did it. We didn’t go out and get expert, expert, expert. We went out and found crazy m*f*ers just like us that ain’t scared of nothing.” (https://inthesetimes.com/article/amazon-workers-labor-union-staten-island-new-york )

Taken together, these kinds of successes may indicate a shift to what Brooks, a NewsGuild field director, calls “momentum organizing.” 

“Workers are in terrible conditions all over the country and when they see a public example of a group of people in a similar situation taking action to better their situation, it encourages them to do the same … . So what was once a risky long-shot action by a small group of workers snowballs into a series of successes.” (https://inthesetimes.com/article/amazon-workers-labor-union-staten-island-new-york )

A Way Forward

Part of this snowballing connects with the anger, grief, and frustration of working people who sacrificed their wellbeing to survive a pandemic, while CEOs and shareholders cashed in on their sacrifice. We can all contribute to the process of creating and sustaining a movement for true change in the direction of economic and social justice. At the base is nurturing an attitude that centers and respects working class and poor people, rather than demonizing them. As I’ve said before, “Community, sustaining human lives, requires work, and a lot of it is manual labor. Working people, paid and unpaid, are essential and our labor is beautiful. All labor should be treated with dignity and respect.” 

For those of us who want to educate ourselves more about a way forward, I’d recommend at least three paths. First, study labor history.  You can read books, see a film, enjoy art, sing songs, or watch Youtube videos. Second, get a working knowledge of policies that support working class wellbeing. A good place to start might be the “Policy Agenda” at the Economic Policy Institute and the “Economic Justice” platform at The Movement for Black Lives. Third, find an organization where you can get involved. Join or organize a union if that’s possible in your employment. If that’s not an option, explore other groups, such as Jobs with Justice or the Poor People’s Campaign. Connecting with others – our shared history, our shared values, and our shared work - is at the heart working class solidarity and unionization. Together, we can choose to mark this May Day as another turning point toward a better, more beautiful, and more just world. 

        Happy May Day!