Category: Culture

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Breaking Silence: A Time to Break Silence #6

The Big Topics at Midnight book event that was held January 13 in Oakland was to be focused around the two big anniversaries of that month—the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., fifty years after he proclaimed, “I Have a Dream,” and the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Then death crashed in. Twelve hours before the book reading, in the dark of night, a phone call came to Lillie Allen that her twenty-nine-year-old grandson, John Kelley, Jr., had been hit by a car and killed. Just five months after the death of his father.

Wails from grandmothers and mothers, sisters and brothers, friends and cousins reverberated. And the silencing of a life lost left behind both a heavy weight and a deep hollowness.

Dreams made and dreams shattered. The future remains unknown.

I do believe in the power and grace of what can grow out of ashes. But now the ashes are before me. I am left with King’s death, John, Jr.’s death and the recent deaths of many around the country and world.

My time pondering Dr. King in early January took me back to my favorite, and most demanding, speech of his—Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. His words, first heard by me decades after he spoke, woke me up to connections I hadn’t seen before.

That would have been enough. But then I found out that he was killed exactly a year after this speech. The King family and attorney tried for years to get all of the evidence surrounding his death heard in court, but to no avail. The state clung to the confession and ignored the recanting of James Earl Ray.

In December 1999, the evidence surrounding the King assignation was finally brought to trial in Memphis, TN. Not in a criminal trial—that permission was never granted—but in a civil suit. All of the evidence was presented, recorded and heard in a courtroom for the first time. The jury rendered a unanimous verdict: King’s death was the result of a conspiracy involving local, state and regional US Governmental agencies, the Mafia and Lloyd Jowers.

The evidence is available on line and in William Pepper’s book An Act of State.

The silence around the evidence and that decision was deafening. Few heard the trial had even happened.

I understand why. The verdict was too horrifying to contemplate.

I didn’t want to do a whole series on this speech of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and especially not to end up here. But his speech showed up in me in January. The words flowed. I was obedient. It is, indeed, a time to wake up and break silence.

Sixth and final blog in a series honoring *Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break Silence, Delivered April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.

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The Clarion Call: A Time to Break Silence #5

So here we are. Things crumbling around us. Life spinning so quickly we can’t really catch up. Fear on the rise.

It is time to go for a walk, take a nap and stop for a cup of tea. We’ll get nowhere running around full of fear. But King ends his demanding speech with a clarion call, saying,

“Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons [and daughters] of God, and our brothers [and sisters] wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? … The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.”

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.*

Often I do “prefer it otherwise.” But here I am. I was born for such a moment as this. So were you. The task is clear. It is time to “rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.” Struggle and beauty. Hard and easy. All of it at the same time.

The time is now. We each get to choose in this “crucial moment of human history.”

With my knees shaking I say “YES” and take the first step. And then the next one. The odds look good when we all walk together.

*Fifth in a series honoring *Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break Silence, Delivered April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City. Next in the series is titled “Breaking Silence.”

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Sometimes Confession is the Best Response: A Time to Break Silence #4

I remember 1967. I was in seventh grade at San Jacinto Junior High School. Phones were still attached to the wall and only answered by people who were home when they rang.  Computers were huge and owned by big businesses. Schools were segregated. Protests felt like things that happened worlds away or on TV.

While I was captivated by the task of putting together a chicken skeleton for my biology experiment, Dr. Martin Luther King preached at Riverside Church, saying,

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.1

These words are particularly chilling to me.  If King thought we were a “thing-oriented society” in 1967, what would he think today?  The enormity of the task of undergoing a “radical revolution of values” seems hopeless.

I carried my heavy heart into church last Sunday where I was reminded that Lent starts this week, beginning with Ash Wednesday.  Since my first trip to Haiti in 1996, the Ash Wednesday liturgy has had a special place in my heart.  It is the only time when the Episcopal community asks for forgiveness of our cultural sins—sins such as values honoring “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights” more than people.

“We confess to you, Lord …our self-indulgent appetites and ways … our exploitation of other people … [and] our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts. …

Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done: for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty … prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us, for our waste and pollution of your creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us. …”2

Breaking the silence about the ashes of our failures as a society, gives me the first stirring of hope that something new is possible.  Even now.

1. Fourth in a series honoring *Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break Silence, HYPERLINK Delivered April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City. Next in the series is titled, “The Clarion Call.”

2. “Ash Wednesday liturgy, in The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Seabury Press), 267-268

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Race, Class and Violence: A Time to Break Silence #3

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a leader in the non-violent civil rights movement. The racial fractures in our society were deep and obvious to anyone of color and to whites who could step away from the cultural norms and see the injustice and violence at the hands of white individuals, society and institutions. It was a big enough topic for one fight.

But intertwined with the racial injustice was the deep poverty that disproportionately affected people of color. Money and opportunities didn’t flow through the generations as they had in my white neighborhoods.

As King and other leaders of the civil rights movement began to teach non-violence to people working for racial justice, they came face to face with the multiple layers of violence inherent in the escalating Vietnam War.

In addition to noting that his own government, not the “oppressed in the ghettos,” was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King said, “We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”*

While no one I knew went to fight in Vietnam, many without access to college deferments were sent off to war. As happened in World War II, black young men were sent around the globe to fight for liberties that they hadn’t found at home. As a result of the Vietnam War, money that had begun to flow into poverty programs was abruptly diverted to cover the costs of battle.

King saw the interconnectedness between racism, poverty and war, and “was compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.” He broke a silence that the people in political power did not want him to shatter.  He complicated the civil rights fight. He spoke the truth.

I wish I’d listened in 1967. But I hear these words loud and clear today. Race, class and national violence are big topics that still cut through our world.

It is time to wake up.

The hour is near midnight.

Alert, I listen for guidance about my next step. What are you hearing?

*Third in a series honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break Silence, Delivered April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City. The next in the series is titled, “Sometimes Confession is the Best Response.”

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A Time to Break Silence: Series on A Time to Break Silence #1

Fifty years ago this month Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of his dream, including that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” We are closer now, though we are still a long way from fully embodying this dream.

In the month of the anniversary of King’s birthday and this often quoted speech my thoughts, however, go to a different oration. One that I rarely hear quoted. While the words of King’s dream stirred my imagination, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence* shook me awake and brought me to my feet, breathless.

I was in junior high school when King delivered this speech at Riverside Church in New York City in 1967. King was talking about the war that spanned my growing up years, one that is history now. But his words reverberate with a truth that is as relevant and crucial today as it was forty-six years ago. King saw and proclaimed the complex web that connected economics, race and war.

In gratitude to King for his courage to speak, an act that flowed out of love for his country and all of his fellow citizens, I will focus the next few blogs on A Time to Break Silence.

What else can I do?  It is, indeed, a time to break silence.

*Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break Silence, Delivered April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

First in a six part series. The next in the series is titled “I Must Speak.”

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Medium Topics after Noon: A Texas Girl Takes a Nap

The Big Topics are exploding everywhere. These days it seems that violence and chaos clang as loudly as last week’s Christmas Carols and today’s New Year’s Greetings.

Evening darkness will gather soon—a little after four in the afternoon here in Portland, OR. The ground is still soggy from weeks of rain.  It’s cold and cloudy.

It must be time to take a nap.  Times like these require an extra dose of self-care even as inner voices shout that the needs of the world and my life are too demanding to stop for a while.

Today, I will head the call.

Take a bath.  Lie down in the middle of the day.  Feel the earth under my feet.  Remember my connection to Spirit.  Listen.  Or prop up my feet and read a good book.

The old is crumbling and the new is slowly emerging.  Transition, in birthing children or thriving communities, is wild.  But, for now, right after high noon, rest is needed.

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“I Can’t Believe It Happened Here”

I’ve said that before. When violence erupted, I automatically tried to come up with all of the reasons it should or would never happen in my neighborhood. I was desperate to feel safe and secure again.

I now know the scalding assumption held in that sentiment.

Tragedy should only happen in “bad” neighborhoods. In poor neighborhoods. Or black or brown neighborhoods. Or inner cities.  Or in third world countries.

Not small towns, white neighborhoods, upper middle class parts of town in the USA.

Really?

Brutal tragedies shouldn’t happen anywhere.

Our words matter. Speaking disbelief that innocent people were gunned down in a “good” neighborhood is its own form of violence. The gaps between us grow wider. We are divided into “us” and “them” not just in the middle of horror, but in the center of how we (often unconsciously) are in relationship with neighbors near and far.

The despair of today is growing as our inequitable economy crumbles and the new has not yet emerged. These transition times are scary as the ground we’ve built our lives on is shaken to the core.

If we want to stand steady together, now is the time to dive deeply into the Big Topics and notice the ways that skin color, money, privilege, power and gender continue to skew our thoughts.

For most of us, separation and injustice is not our intent.

Collapsing into shame or denial isn’t needed or productive. But waking up and diving deeply inside ourselves is the work of those of us alive on the planet today. Leaving no stone unturned, it is time for us to look wide, dig deep and take an old toothbrush to those nooks and crannies that are more easily ignored but when cleaned out, make a house sparkle.

From that starting point, we can work together to bridge the gaps between us and begin to make all neighborhoods around the globe safer.

It is not easy. I can be fun. We owe it to the children, both today’s young and those who will follow us in the years to come.

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Midnight is No Time to Secede

Twenty-five thousand Texans have signed a petition to peacefully secede from the United States of America. I understand. I’ve spent much of my life trying inwardly to secede from places and groups (including Texas) that I didn’t agree with.

In the middle of writing Big Topics at Midnight I realized how much energy I’d spent trying to distance myself from parts of me or my world that embarrassed me—my wealth, white skin, cultural Christianity, patriarchy and even Texas. I wrote about this struggle in Big Topics at Midnight:

“When I finally noticed that we had more money than many, I was embarrassed by my family’s upper-middle class and, later, upper class status. For a time, I wanted to give my family money away, not wanting to be wealthy in a world where so many had so little. Simultaneously, I wanted to keep all of the options that money gave me.

Likewise, I had recently realized how white my world had always been. As I heard story after story of experiences and perspectives of people with darker shades of skin, I wanted to rip off my white skin and the white-colored glasses that had kept me unaware of signs of racism during childhood and into my adult years.

The glow from the streetlight gave the room an eerie light as I considered other parts of myself that had faced the knife. It wasn’t easy for me to admit being a Christian, either. Jesus didn’t embarrass me, but far too many Christians did. Too often the radical heart of the faith was usurped by traditional US cultural values.

As a strong girl turned woman, I thought I’d avoided sexism. In the dark of night I realized that I’d been largely unaware of the ways I’d absorbed patriarchal beliefs throughout my life. I’d grown to respect my use of reason and logic—the skills honored in my family—and ignored my subtler intuition, gut and heart. I’d slipped unaware into the patriarchal way of valuing only one part of me. In addition, I was disgusted that it took over thirty years for me to discover how slowly liberation had come to my home state—married Texan women didn’t even have full legal rights until the late 1960s.

I felt full of holes, like a hunk of Swiss cheese. So much of who I was brought me shame. Projecting that onto Texas and onto the United States of America at the height of her world power, I tried to increase the distance between myself and the culturally affirmed values I no longer accepted.”1

A few Texans want to secede from the union just as I wanted to secede from Texas. When I finally woke up, I realized that this separation was in direct conflict with my heart, faith and values of living in harmony within our global neighborhood. The only way I could live a just life in our diverse world was to first accept the diversity that is me. Not blindly. Not trying to pretend that nothing is amiss in our world. But consciously, with open eyes.

We don’t have the luxury to cut and bail whenever we don’t agree. Our hurting world is teetering too close to midnight for that. We will all thrive together or crash together on this one planet we share. I am a Texan. Texans are Americans. Our world depends on us learning how to get freed from the “distress [and separation] of our oppression and to listen to each other in a present and conscious manner.”2

The time to run away with our toys and hide out with others like us has come to an end. And really, the world is a fascinating playground if we can do the work to “build effective relationships and sustain true alliances.”3

 

  1. Big Topics at Midnight, pages 238-239
  2. Be Present Empowerment Model, realms 1 and 2
  3. Be Present Empowerment Model, realm 3
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The Knife and Incompetence

I felt like I’d been under the surgeon’s knife while simultaneously serving as the surgical nurse without adequate training. I preferred feeling competent, in charge and in no need of deep surgery.

Big Topics at Midnight and I were separate, but I hadn’t yet been able to let her have the teen-aged freedom she’d prefer. The mother bear in me roared when she faced the knife.

Part of me knew that the reconstructive operation required to transform this richly formatted and illustrated book/baby into an ebook was an opportunity to offer it in a form that would delight many readers. Yet part of me wailed and fought every step of the way. I didn’t know how to participate in the process, and I hated feeling like an incompetent mother.

I couldn’t even figure out what questions to ask to get the full sweep of what I needed to change. Yes, I could include illustrations but they must be in-line (translated to mean without text wrapping around the photographs). Each drawing had to be a certain size (i.e. removed, “pixel” and “dpi” requirements followed, then reinserted in the text). I could have illustrations or photographs, but not too many (130 illustrations and over 50 photographs was WAY over the limit). I was free to use two different standard fonts (of course, mine weren’t standard, and it turned out using only one font was best). Not to mention issues with block quotes and…

Some of this angst felt familiar. Waking up to rules of the game that were different than I’d learned along the way. Letting go of how I believed a book “ought” to look. Struggling to find ease with the disorienting process of continually learning something new.

I thrashed. I complained. I tossed and turned in the night. But I learned, once again, to keep walking anyway. Finding people to help along the way. Trusting the guidance that came. Releasing regret that I didn’t know this or that earlier, that I could have saved time or money or frustration if only I’d known ____ sooner. Remembering that feeling incompetent wasn’t the end of the world.

Big Topics at Midnight, the book with wild diversity in art, words, layout and fonts is still available, untouched by the surgeon’s knife. Big Topics at Midnight, the ebook with wild technological options of adjusting font size and format while holding a library of books tucked in your backpack, will soon be available.

Waking up is not for the faint of heart, whether around the big topics or computer details or simply getting out of bed and walking into a day filled both with mystery and the known.

As the sun rises on this nearly completed ebook project, I remember—despite the knife and feeling like an idiot, it’s been an amazing journey. And Big Topics at Midnight can stand strong without my help.

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Black and White

There it was again. Black and white. Separated.

My brother-in-law told me that in Shreveport, Louisiana, his hometown, a black man accused of murder would have a predominantly white jury. Not because Shreveport is filled with white people—there are more black residents than white in that city.

The issue is racism. Today. Not just in the past. Not just in Shreveport.

It is possible for people with white skin like mine to live in white-skinned neighborhoods and to look at our own experience as the norm. Sequestered, it is easy to be oblivious to injustices such as this one. I know. I did it for much of my life. I still forget.

But I prefer to live in the real world, where the diversity of our experiences is noticed.

I live in Portland, Oregon, famous for our micro-brewed beer, bicycle commuting and progressive green living. We are also known as the whitest big city in the country—or, as the census would label it, the “non-Hispanic whitest” big city in the country. We have our own Jim Crowe history. Today, gentrification is growing as certain neighborhoods become white and artsy, squeezing out long-term, black-skinned residents. I enjoy wandering among the shops on two of these streets, Albina and Mississippi, but I understand the cost to the families who once called this neighborhood home. On another front, Karyn Hanson, a friend and a city of Portland civil engineer, is working on a process to shed light on institutional bias that has racial impacts.

The focus of my life work is to open up conversations across our differences. I want relationships to hold the possibility of transformation rather than remain caught in historical or present day schism and distress. But that doesn’t mean I can ignore signs all around me that things are still amiss. Waking up first requires seeing the world around me with clear eyes in order to catch sight of things that don’t make sense and degrade us all.

I can’t stand on my high horse, however. I was asleep for far too long to have any moral superiority. I’ve woken up and fallen to my knees in shame and sickness at what I saw. But the issues at hand were far too important for me to stay there.  And injustice wasn’t the whole story. I know I need to stand up and bring my whole self to the conversations and actions across the gaps.

It is humbling. It is frustrating sometimes. But I don’t want my children and grandchildren to be trapped in the same racist systems as my ancestors. As we are today. It harms us all.

I’ve experienced the shifts that can happen in sustainable, collaborative partnerships. Not easy. Not quick. But absolutely possible.

Even in Louisiana or Mississippi or Texas or Oregon.

I am staking my life on it.