Dear all,
It’s been wonderful to have some weekends this month at home and to feel more caught up with my life. I continue to puzzle over the question of how to fully enjoy the goodness of small and close-in things, while not turning away from all the big hard things that surround us? I think the two are somehow connected, more intimately than we realize. So I wish you the joy of small things as well as courage for the big ones.
Love,
Pamela
Blessings
When our oldest son asked if we could take in a friend of his, it wasn’t hard to say yes. Joel was from the South, separated from his family for some reason, and needing a place to land. We had a room. He was thoughtful, warm, hard-working, ready to please, and we just folded him into our household. It wasn’t long before he had been folded into our hearts as well.
I remember one time when he helped with a big physical job I had to complete. I said, “Thank you, Joel. You saved my life.” He said, “Well, you saved mine.” I was surprised. I hadn’t thought of that before, but considered the possibility that it might be true.
As the years went by we got to know each other better. He practiced peer listening with us and became more open to talking about his personal life and feelings, though we never heard the full story of why he left home. He went through the job and relationship ups and downs that you expect in young adult years. After a while, he got a steady job and met a nice young woman; the pieces of his life seemed to be falling into place.
So when he started talking about going home to Birmingham, we were taken aback. We loved him and wanted him to stay. But he was ready to reconcile with his family and finish the degree he had started down there. How could we not support him in those goals?
He stayed in touch, came up and visited during the holidays. Sarah moved down to Alabama to be with him. When we got the invitation to his wedding, we knew we would go. This might be our final act of surrogate parenting, seeing him finally established in a life of his own.
When we called to check in about hotel arrangements and were invited by Joel to join the family for the rehearsal dinner, we started to realize that this wasn’t just another wedding. A storm and rerouted flight kept us from the dinner, but the warmth with which we were welcomed at the wedding was astonishing. His mother was the first in a series of relatives to greet us, and we were thanked, again and again, for taking care of Joel. His stepfather, his aunts and uncles, his godfather, the mothers of his high school buddies all were warm in their appreciation of what we had done for their boy, for their family.
We were invited to come back and visit, and could tell they meant it. His great aunt from Mississippi said with great energy that “NOBODY would treat us better than they would” and I believe she was telling the truth. It had seemed such a simple and ordinary thing to welcome Joel with an open heart. But now that we were receiving an equally open-hearted welcome from his family, it seemed precious, amazing, even miraculous.
The blessings seem endless. We were blessed to know Joel, then to receive back in kind from his family what we gave to him, learning to better value both the giving and the receiving. We were blessed to be welcomed to the South by people who have felt the weight of oppression but have not been kept down. We were blessed, after going down to Birmingham to honor one young man, to return with a whole new extended family in Alabama and Mississippi, blessed with another place to call home.
Anchored
Arriving alone in the big city
at nightfall
public transit to master
everything strange
no reference point
no anchor
And then
above towering cranes
that glowing crescent
known and loved--
my hometown moon.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Solidarity economy production chain
Justa Trama, in Brazil, is the largest production chain of solidarity economy producers. Farmer associations grow organic cotton to sell to workers cooperatives that make threads and textiles. The worker cooperatives sell the threads and textiles to urban cooperatives that produce and sell clothes, dolls, and educational games with these inputs. Justa Trama comprises more than 600 workers in solidarity economy enterprises in five states in Brazil.
https://blogecosol.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/marc3adlia_justa_trama.pdf
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The Scottish government has banned fracking after a consultation found overwhelming public opposition and little economic justification for the industry. The Scottish energy minister said that allowing fracking would undermine the government’s ambitions to deeply cut Scotland’s climate emissions, and would lead to unjustifiable environmental damage.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/03/scottish-government-bans-fracking-scotland-paul-wheelhouse
The state of New Jersey is replacing cash bail, which penalizes the poor, with a system of judging risk that lets many who are accused of low level crimes no longer languish in jail for months awaiting trial.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/30/new-jersey-bail-reform-criminal-justice-bond-money?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Sweden has the world’s first self-defined feminist foreign policy, which means that all of Sweden’s decision-making – from aid allocation to diplomacy – is informed by its vision for women’s empowerment. The approach is grounded in a wealth of research showing that the more equal a country is, the less likely it is to endure war, food insecurity or political and extremist violence.
https://apolitical.co/sweden-flies-flag-feminist-foreign-policy/
After the Canadian National Energy Board told TransCanada that their Energy East Project's environmental reviews would look at the total life cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with the project--extracting, processing, transporting, refining, and burning fossil fuels--TransCanada scrapped plans to build a pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to the east coast of Canada.
https://thinkprogress.org/transcanada-scraps-energy-east-9d45aa211463/
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
www.findingsteadyground.org
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Recent posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
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