Dear all,
A wise Black friend has advised me that, however I respond to this great wave of protest against brutality and injustice, the important thing is to not change. So, if I am compelled to respond without changing who I am, then somehow I need to be more fully myself. I’ve been sitting with this, trying to live into its implications, ever since. Hopefully there will be fruits, and they will show.
In the meantime, I am doing my best to settle into the heat, trying not to be overcome by a growing weariness, glad to have an ongoing role supporting young climate activists, thankful for grandchildren and for all the people I can love via my computer and phone.
Love,
Pamela
I wake up before sunrise on July 4, with freedom on my mind. The temperature was 97 degrees yesterday with hot muggy weather forecast for a week, so I am glad to get up and outside in the cool of the morning. I am free to choose when I will be outdoors, bound by weather over which I have no control.
I head out on my usual walk to the park, this time with a jigsaw puzzle under my arm. I had been methodically clearing out our oversupply of books, by taking an armload down to the little free library box at the corner of the park every morning. After three months, however, I was down to a core collection, so I started on the puzzles. It seemed like a small contribution to make to my community during this stay-at-home time, but something that I was able and glad to do. I am free to choose my way of involvement with my neighbors, bound to the community where I have put down roots.
Then I go to the community garden, where I water tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and sweet potatoes, and harvest rhubarb and currants. I had been offered some of the rhubarb by my neighbor; I’ll offer him a jar of marmalade in return. The currants make a delicious sorbet—perfect for this hot weather. A fellow gardener is on the lookout for a food dryer for me, so dried currants (and cherries!) might be in my future. I am bound to the earth on which I depend for this food, bound by agreement and affection to others in this shared space. At the same time, I am free from complete dependency on the supermarket, free to do what I will with my harvest. (Each Wednesday I contribute what is ready and extra to the little church food pantry with which our garden is connected.)
When I get home, I chop the rhubarb and start the marmalade. I am free to make—and enjoy—it, bound by the need to do so before it goes bad.
Later, I spend time on the phone with a couple of friends. I am free to choose who I claim as friends, bound to show up for them in their need and to show myself enough that they can do likewise.
With some blessed unscheduled holiday time after that, I am free to choose my activity (I choose to write!), bound by my belief that I am in this world for a reason. The words of an old folk song by Phil Ochs come to mind: “For I’m only as rich as the poorest of the poor; only as free as a padlocked prison door; only as great as my love for this land; only as tall as I stand.”
We take a walk after sunset in the cool of the evening in search of the full moon. It doesn’t show itself, but we are surrounded by the sound of unseen fireworks. When we get home, in an attempt to unlock this double mystery, I go up on the roof. There I discover the moon, just rising, and can see fireworks shows in every direction. It’s one big party, spread out this year in neighborhoods all over the city. I am free to participate in this party in any way I like, soaking up the quiet serenity of the moon, or taking in the bright sparkle of fireworks—or both. Regardless, I am bound—to this country where so very much is wrong even as much is right, and to the moon and the planet it calls home.
Plowing the prairie
Leaning into the plow—
an enduring symbol of virtuous work
Pioneers breaking virgin ground,
bent on mastering the prairie
whatever the cost.
The harder the work
the more noble the cause.
And subdue the prairie they did—
along with all the beings
that called it home.
The prairie, we are learning,
was the keeper of our soil.
Washed to the gulf
we wish it back.
The dead substrate
that’s left behind
cannot nourish on its own.
We pour in more and more,
for less and less return.
If we could listen
to the natives of the prairie,
now gone like the soil,
what might we learn?
Maybe they would tell us
that some work
though it seems so masterful
is better left undone.
Dare to imagine: A new economy is possible!
A Community Development Credit Union
Hope Credit Union, founded in 1995 and first run by volunteers in a church in Jackson, Mississippi, is now a hybrid of a credit union and a nonprofit loan fund. It opened new branches in New Orleans the year Katrina hit, then expanded in the Mississippi Delta during the Great Recession, and now is the size of a community bank, with $307 million in assets. The loan fund has another $150 million in assets, mostly loans to economic revitalization projects considered too risky for a credit union. The credit union has more than 35,000 members, more than 70 percent of whom are black, located all up and down the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans, and Memphis, and has had positive net income every year since 2011.
The non-profit loan fund and credit union were founded as separate organizations at first, both looking to use finance to support communities that were devastated by check cashers and payday lenders, facing structural barriers compounded over generations of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and continued discrimination. Paired, they provide a means for outside investors and depositors to put their wealth to use in places where wealth has been extracted for generations, dating back to before the Civil War.
The loans they are able to make, like the credit union itself, are small compared to the trillions of dollars in wealth in the financial sector. But every dollar grown is that much more wealth taken back by the communities that own Hope.
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/community-development-credit-union-that-grows-every-time-there-disaster
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
This month they fall into two big categories—challenges across the country to the fossil fuel industry and to oppressive policing systems:
Oil And Gas Pipelines Look Like Increasingly Risky Bets
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oil-pipeline-risky-bet_
Climate Campaigners Respond to Cancelled Pipeline: ‘The Future Does Not Belong to You’
https://inequality.org/research/atlantic-coast-pipeline/
https://theappeal.org/minneapolis-city-council-members-announce-intent-to-disband-the-police-department-invest-in-proven-community-led-public-safety/
As nationwide protests over police brutality continue, cities across the US are cutting and reallocating police funding.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/12/nationwide-protests-over-police-brutality-continue-cities-across-us-cut-and?
Oil And Gas Pipelines Look Like Increasingly Risky Bets
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oil-pipeline-risky-bet_
Climate Campaigners Respond to Cancelled Pipeline: ‘The Future Does Not Belong to You’
https://inequality.org/research/atlantic-coast-pipeline/
Minneapolis City Council members announced their intent to disband their police department and invest in proven community-led public safety.
https://theappeal.org/minneapolis-city-council-members-announce-intent-to-disband-the-police-department-invest-in-proven-community-led-public-safety/
As nationwide protests over police brutality continue, cities across the US are cutting and reallocating police funding.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/12/nationwide-protests-over-police-brutality-continue-cities-across-us-cut-and?
Resources
Finding Steady Ground
If you need reminding of some simple ways to stay grounded in challenging times, I recommend this website, which I helped a friend develop following the last presidential election.
www.findingsteadyground.com
Other resources 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
Climate Resistance Handbook, or I was part of a climate action. Now what? https://commonslibrary.org/climate-resistance-handbook-or-i-was-part-of-a-climate-action-now-what/
Leading Groups On-Line. https://www.trainingforchange.org/training_tools/leading-groups-online-book/
Money and Soul
My new book (based on a pamphlet of the same name) available via QuakerBooks or other on-line distributors.
("If money troubles your soul, try this down-to-earth Quaker perspective on economies large and small.")
Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
A 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
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: New link: https://www.peaceworkersus.org/docs/muscle_building_for_peace_and_justice.pdf (or just google the title)
Finding Steady Ground
If you need reminding of some simple ways to stay grounded in challenging times, I recommend this website, which I helped a friend develop following the last presidential election.
www.findingsteadyground.com
Other resources 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
Climate Resistance Handbook, or I was part of a climate action. Now what? https://commonslibrary.org/climate-resistance-handbook-or-i-was-part-of-a-climate-action-now-what/
Leading Groups On-Line. https://www.trainingforchange.org/training_tools/leading-groups-online-book/
Money and Soul
My new book (based on a pamphlet of the same name) available via QuakerBooks or other on-line distributors.
("If money troubles your soul, try this down-to-earth Quaker perspective on economies large and small.")
Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
A 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
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: New link: https://www.peaceworkersus.org/docs/muscle_building_for_peace_and_justice.pdf (or just google the title)
