Dear all,
After moving a much-anticipated in-person work event online earlier this month, my mind is on new COVID challenges—how much we don’t know, and how hard it is to re-pace ourselves when we thought we were almost home. I’ve also had the opportunity this month to listen to a group of passionate childcare workers sharing stories about their frontline work in struggling communities, then to assemble a newsletter for work with a focus on race and equity in childcare, another opportunity to interact closely with wonderful people’s stories of injustice, humanity, perseverance and hope.
In the midst of these compelling stories, I also want to make space for my own voice, as we prepare for my book/birthday celebration this coming Friday evening. If you didn’t get an invitation and would like to be present, just drop me a line and I’ll sent a link.
Love,
Pamela
To focus on what we have in common seems like a radical notion these days. In a hyper-individualized and divisive culture, most of our energy is divided between amassing and protecting what we can claim as our own, and sharpening the lines between us and them. Yet giving up what we have in common is a tendency with far-reaching and damaging consequences.
The enclosure of the English commons—a town’s shared meadows and grazing lands—for private ownership and profit was a fateful step toward landless wage labor and urban poverty in the industrial west. Current battles around the enclosure of the commons are being waged on equally far-reaching and ominous fronts—the privatization of our waters, the pollution of our air and oceans, the claim of rights to ownership over cyberspace and even our shared genome. This is a time like no other to vigorously claim a shared right to that which supports all life.
How do we stake a claim to our common rights even as we are experiencing a great surge of othering? Perhaps this is a job of building critical muscles, but in two very different kinds of exercise. On the one hand we practice flexing our muscles of courage, voice and solidarity as we work to ensure common control over the air, water, soil and communication space that support life in our common home. On the other hand we practice relaxing our muscles around the differences among us—disarming our protections and letting down our defenses against the “other” as we reach for a shared humanity.
On the relaxing front, I was struck recently by a story about a couple of men who started up a business that catered to veterans. They chose products that would appeal to that conservative base, and used political humor to market their brand. They supported a man for president that I find depraved and dangerous—in part with an eye toward their own gain.
At this point in the story, I was ready to write them off in disgust. What could we possibly have in common? But adopting this easy and obvious choice as my go-to strategy comes at a cost. If that’s my best tool for handling behavior that I don’t like, and I use it with full-blown righteousness in the direction of these people, what habits am I developing? Who else do I write off? Where do I draw the line?
I think there is a line. Some behavior is so damaging to the commons that it just has to stop—like seeking power or profit from fossil fuel extraction, whipping people up into a frenzy of hate, mass incarceration, voter suppression, worker exploitation. But that’s not these guys.
As I read on, I learned that these are also men who have reached out with consistency and compassion, and at considerable personal expense, to offer returning veterans an alternative to the open pipeline to militarized police work, a pathway to a decent livelihood in the context of caring and community.
We have something in common here. If I want it to grow, uncomfortable as it might be, I think I have to love them. There are lots of things you can change without love, particularly if you have a habit of righteousness and a taste for domination. You can change people’s outer shape and their public face. You can stunt personalities, feed fears, manipulate behavior and oppress whole groups. You can certainly destroy ecosystems. But you can’t get at that internal place that allows for transformation. This requires an openness to touching the heart of the other, and to appreciating the mystery of what we can’t understand.
There is much that is mysterious to me about angry white men, but these guys invite my curiosity. What is it like to come home traumatized from war, to witness the disappearance of your traditional means of livelihood, to have your people’s central place in a country’s history slipping away? What allows some people to hold on to their humanity in the face of great adversity? How can we find each other and fight together for the commons, for our common humanity, for our shared interest in a livable world?
Sing
A simple pleasure lost to the pandemic—
gathering round the piano to sing.
In May, with vaccinations
comes a seed of cautious hope.
Would it be irresponsible?
Could we be safe?
Just to be inside another house
seems bold, but we don’t linger there—
push the piano out the open door
onto the deck, bring out kitchen chairs.
Sing through the twilight, sing with the birds
Sing to the neighbors (who clap unseen in the dark)
Sing up hope.
Dare to imagine: A new economy is possible!
Community Land Trusts and Racial/Economic Justice
The Community Land Trust (CLT) model was first created and implemented during the late 1960s by African American leaders in rural Albany, Georgia, who were responding to the harsh reality of oppression, violence, and eviction endured by Black tenant farmers across the American South. The goal was to support African American families to own and control land, achieve greater economic security, and fully exercise their legal voting rights without obstruction. Modern CLT organizations are part of a broader shared-equity housing sector typically developing, selling, and stewarding affordable homes that provide security and stability for low- and moderate-income families. CLTs are most impactful when they can steward land on behalf of the community for the uses desired by a majority of local residents. Examples of CLTs partnering with cities to vision, plan, and implement revitalization strategies that prevent displacement are evident in areas such as Buffalo and Houston.
Somethings that have made me hopeful recently (all domestic this time):
The state of Maine is leading the way both in banning “forever chemicals” in an effort to stop climate change, and in shifting costs of recycling from taxpayers to companies.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/15/maine-law-pfas-forever-chemicals-ban?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/maine-becomes-first-state-to-shift-costs-of-recycling-from-taxpayers-to-companies/2021/07/13/aa6fbe44-e416-11eb-8aa5-5662858b696e_story.html
https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/largest-hospital-union-victory-south-1975
In a dramatic victory for the American labor movement, last fall1,800 nurses at Asheville, North Carolina-based Mission Hospital voted by 70% to be represented by a union, National Nurses United, and this summer they celebrated ratification of their first ever union contract. The victory is the largest at a nonunion hospital in the South since 1975, and is the first private sector hospital union win ever in North Carolina.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hr/mission-hospital-nurses-approve-1st-union-contract.html
Local heritage seeds are now available to anyone in Tuscan with a library card.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2018/04/06/how-tucson-preserves-its-native-food-heritage/?
https://www.library.pima.gov/seedlibrary/
https://www.kftc.org/about-us/our-history
Resources
Alive in this World
A book of poetry in three parts: A Home with the Trees, Commuter Encounters, and A Home with the Earth
Available in paperback and e-book at barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com.
That Clear and Certain Sound; Finding Solid Ground in Perilous Times
A book of my essays, available via QuakerBooks or other on-line distributors
The Financial Roots of the Climate Crisis
Link to a talk I gave at a church in Houston
https://vimeo.com/showcase/7910215
Envision or Perish; Why we must start imagining the world we want to live in
An article I co-authored with George Lakey
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2021/02/envision-or-perish-why-we-must-start-imagining-the-world-we-want/
Money and Soul
My newish 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.
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/
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)
