What Shall We Do Now?

               What Shall We Do Now?
                 by Shirley Rickett
               July 31, 2016, UUFHC   

     Let’s talk about speech.  About what we say, how we say it, when we say it, and the other half of that, listening. I’m going to attempt to weave an essay by Phillip Kennicott, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Washington Post with some of the text of President Obama’s speech at the Dallas Memorial for the five fallen policemen.
     The time frame for this goes back to July 12th when we had gone through a month of violence.  Since that time the terrible attack in Nice has happened, an attempted coup in Turkey took place, and more troops were commissioned to Iraq.  Remember Orlando?  Forty-nine killed, fifty injured. In Louisiana a black man was held down by police and ultimately shot, and in Minnesota, another black man was shot with his girlfriend in the front seat of a car and four-year-old in the backseat. And now we have Nice, France and a 19-ton truck.
        Kinnicott talks first about empathy in his essay.   He says, “If we can’t empathize across lines of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, then there’s no hope of preserving democratic governance. Before this day is over you will have dozens of encounters with people who disagree with you, and the vast majority of those encounters will be amiable,” and later he says, “It is difficult to persuade anyone to change his or her mind about political, ethical or religious matters; it is virtually impossible to persuade a stranger to change his or her mind about anything. You may shame someone into silence for a while, but you will not change their heart.  It is possible to transform the way people think, but this takes years, or decades, and it requires love.”
     So what shall we do now? 
     President Obama found himself in one more church, one more memorial, with the job of speaking to violence and death, to more than one audience.  Like Lawrence O’Donnell, I believe that speech is something we have not heard and may never hear again, although I would go further.  The structure and performance of the presentation, (half-sermon, half-speech some say) was profound. It is difficult enough to focus a speech on one audience and keep people engaged, but the President spoke to at least three audiences:  the bereaved families of the policemen, the bereaved families of the most recent African Americans killed by police, and local and national audiences.
     “You may shame someone into silence for a while, but you will not change their heart.” That’s Killicott.  The President spoke of the heart also.  Late in his speech this is what he said:
“Can we do this? Can we find the character, as Americans, to open our hearts to each other?
     Can we see in each other a common humanity and a shared dignity, and recognize how our different experiences have shaped us?  And it doesn’t make anybody perfectly good or perfectly bad, it just makes us human.  I don’t know. I confess that sometimes I, too, experience doubt.  I’ve been to too many of these things.  I’ve seen too many families go through this.  But then I am reminded of what the Lord tells Ezekiel.  I will give you a new heart, the Lord says, and put a new spirit in you.  I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
     “That’s what we must pray for, each of us:  a new heart.  Not a heart of stone, but a heart open to the fears and hopes and challenges of our fellow citizens. That’s what we’ve seen in Dallas these past few days.  That’s what we must sustain.”
     Empathy. What both Killicott and the President are saying we need empathy.
     Empathy implies more than feeling.  Miss Hester, my fifth grade teacher, once taught us the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is when you feel sad for someone else.  A grandmother dies and your friend was very close to her.  You see your friend sad and you feel sad for what your friend is feeling.  However, empathy is different.  You become involved with the loss, the suffering of another friend, or someone you never met.  So you make a card, (or a protest sign) and your mother bakes cookies and you go to their house after the funeral and try to comfort your friend and the family. And you tell your friend how you felt when your beloved uncle died.
     Empathy can work on another level, too, said Miss Hester.  You go to a concert and sit through a piano concerto. You play the piano yourself and as the music rises from the keyboard your hands move on your lap and the music reaches a crescendo and the audience rises as one at the finish.  As you go home, you realize your fingers and hands are tired. You were so lost in the music and the playing that your own hands were moving and you weren’t aware of this. Part of the enjoyment and appreciation of art involves empathy.

My Life as a White Person

This sermon was presented by Doug Trenfield on Sunday, February 28, 2016

I’ve been white my whole life. Many of you have been too. The awareness of my whiteness, though, has evolved slowly. As a white person, I have had the luxury of letting that awareness evolve slowly. Because I, like a large percent of white folk, I imagine, did not grow up or ever live in environments where my not truly understanding my place as a white person put me at risk, physically or in any other way. Not like the black woman I sat next to at a convention luncheon, a woman about my age from Galveston. She told me ­­ and told me like it was just a well­-processed funny story, one she often traipsed out at convention luncheons when sitting next to white folk ­­ that her mom taught her at an early age that when she goes into a room of people she doesn’t know, to find the white people and figure out who they are. Her life, her prospects for her future, her profession could depend on how well she did this, her mom told her. I was stunned. I’ve told this to friends who are people of color, and they have not found this remarkable. And I found that stunning as well.

Turns out, stories like this are common among those of you (not me) who identify as people of color. After the horrible murder of Trayvon Martin by a self­appointed neighborhood watchman in Florida, we’ve heard a lot about the talk, when a black father sits down with his son and tells him how to act around white people he doesn’t know, around police. Ta­Nehisi Coates writes about this in Between the World and Me. There’d be real fear in his parents, fear that someone would take away their children’s bodies, enough fear that his father would beat him if he misstepped, hurting the very body he feared losing.

And all my life, I’ve gone blithely into that room, not knowing that the eyes behind the darker faces took me in, measured me, judged me quickly because I might judge them quickly, and if I didn’t like what I judged, that I would bring harm. I’ve gone blithely into that room, aware only of prospects ­­ friendships, jobs, maybe romance ­­ and never was afraid. Well, not in the way people of color speak of it.

I’ve never thought of teacher’s judging my academic abilities based on my skin hue. Tim Wise in his memoir White Like Me writes of this. He was raised and schooled, thanks to happenstance and, for the seventies, fairly enlightened parents , in a multicultural neighborhood in Nashville. He had done little to distinguish himself academically, but apparently his whiteness was his ticket to advanced classes. The skin hue of his black friends, many of whom he admits were probably more capable than he, was there ticket to remain in regular ed or, sometimes, to go to special classes.

I’m sure this sort of thing happened around me in school. Even now, 41 years after I graduated from high school, the U.S. Department of Education reports harsh disparities between ethnicities in how discipline in schools is doled out, and multiple studies (for example, one by the Applied Research Center, suggesting racial bias when schools determine who will take Advanced Placement courses) show how race can influence educators’ judgments of students’ academic abilities. I’m sure it did when I was in school, but I didn’t witness it, because I was that well insulated. My parents were liberal college town folks, supporting vociferously the civil rights movement (though showing some disdain for the uglier side of that movement [I remember my mother, a supporter of Martin Luther King, saying that in a way he “asked for it”]). They didn’t set out to insulate me. But the system insulated me nonetheless.

I’ve been wanting to talk about this, race from a white viewpoint, for years, literally for years. I think it began when I discovered literature, and found myself drawn to the literature coming from people of color. They had something to write about. My people, white people, abdicated our ethnicity when we were accepted into the white club. We were no longer English­Irish­Scottish­Dutch­French­Italian­German, we declared. We were white, void of color and void of histories that reached further into the past than two generations. People with similar ethnic heritage to mine and with my skin hue (yeah, I mean white people) who cry out about reverse racism have never held sway with me. I’m more inclined to white folk like comedian Louis CK, who a few years ago was doing lots of bits on race from a white vantage. He said the following in one:

'Here’s how great it is to be white. I could get in a time machine and go to any time, and it would be f­ing awesome when I get there. The year 2? I don’t even know what was happening then. But when I get there, ‘Welcome, we have a table right here waiting for you, sir.’

Language and images get a little dicey here, so I’ll summarize. He said he would not go forward in time in his time machine because, “We’re gonna have to pay for this sh!+.” And it gets dicier. You get the idea.

But if you’re not familiar with how white privilege functions, and you’ve never been around people of color, when you hear of measures to bring people of color to our bounteous table ­­ affirmative action, for one ­­ something like reverse racism, as poorly coined as the term is, comes to mind. A student at West Virginia University, responding to charges of reverse racism at another southern college, wrote:

Reverse racism does not and cannot exist by definition. While racial minorities can certainly hold prejudices against white people, they cannot be "just as racist as white people" or "just as discriminatory as white people" because they do not hold the same economic, institutional and political power.

A friend of mine, a former student who’s working on her PhD at Florida State, would agree. She wrote, responding to a post on my FB feed: Yes, racism is systemic, but it's not bilateral. In other words, it only goes in one direction, and it always favors Whiteness. People of Color cannot be racist; we can be prejudiced and biased, but we are not evoking racism. That is because racism is anchored in systemically conferred power­­power being the operative notion. In racism, only White people have power (just like in sexism, cis­men have power, and xenophobia/nationalism U.S. citizens have power­­you get the point). Power is unearned influence that benefits one group (i.e., White people) over another group (i.e., People of Color). A simple example of power is as follows: You can hate your boss, and your boss can hate you. Certainly, you can hurt your boss' feelings, but only your boss has the power to fire you­­not the other way around. Likewise, when People of Color pit against one another, it's not racism­­it's internalized oppression. Because when we pit against one another, we pull each other down, thereby anchoring White supremacy.

For a long time, I wouldn’t talk about race, but ethnicity. I think most of us know by now, from any scientific standpoint, there is no race. The American Association of Physical Anthropologists has eschewed the idea of race. They wrote, in a 1996 position paper, "Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogeneous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past." But the word race has crept into another very useful word, racism, which I’d hate to have to drop out of our discussion. Besides, our prejudices toward peoples are not just about ethnicity, but also appearance, specifically, and tragically for a large percent of our population, those features associated with people of African heritage.

But why has this been my obsession? If I want to vaunt my goodness, I’d say it’s because I want to do my part to understand and right centuries of wrongs. And though I do, I don’t think that’s why I’m obsessed. Is it guilt? I think, yeah, though we ­­ you others of my skin hue and having similar heritage (oh yeah ­­ white people) ­­ should do what we can to right wrongs, for the most part, I’m sure, we’ve done nothing consciously to further these wrongs.

So I don’t know. I don’t have any memorable encounters that would lead me to this.

These are the encounters with people of color as I was growing up that I remember. In 4th grade (yes, it took that long for there to be a memorable racial encounter), my nice little suburban neighborhood had its first black family, the Greggs. Kevin Gregg was in my class. He was fun to play football with, which is all I wanted in a friend at that age. The next year, he and his family were gone. Mom told me later that many of our neighbors made life difficult for the Greggs, so the Greggs up and left. At that time, 1966, black families were concentrated in, unironically, two areas of town ­­ Whiteley and White City.

Sixth grade. My sister Gail, five years older, the hippie in our family, brought home a black friend who was a boy. My father ­­ as I’d said, a staunch advocate of civil rights ­­ had never had race relations be so personal. The young man left. I remember there was yelling and stomping. And I remember my father standing over a seated Gail, looking as though he wanted to hit my sister. He didn’t. He wasn’t like that. But that’s how mad he was.

High school, ninth grade. I started at Northside High School in Muncie, Indiana, in 1971. The school opened a year before, rumor has always had it, to give a neighborhood school to the mostly white end of town. Town wasn’t big enough that Northside could exclude all black students, though. I had black students in my classes, but they seemed to have no interest in talking to me. But to be fair, I and my friends had no interest in talking to them. Or about them. Odd, but there was no friction that I knew of. Black and white just lived in skew, though unequal, worlds. At lunch, the blacks ate at one end of the cafeteria. So far as I knew, there were no rules that mandated this. It just happened. After eating, they played on their own end of the gym.

Eleventh grade, at a different high school, Larry Wilkerson broke my nose. No, no drama. We were playing flag football in P.E. I mention it only to bring up Larry, who was a thin bridge between the small group of black kids and my group of white boys (mostly boys). He had good weed. And was open to some good­natured kidding around.

I could go on, but not for very long, and it wouldn’t get more interesting. My point is that I ­­ and I think I’m typical, a type ­­ do not have much to say about my experiences with race, 4 even though, as I was growing up, the U.S. struggled with it mightily (and among whites, mostly unwillingly), and even though the black kids in my town would probably put race close to the center of the stories of their youth.

So I’m almost done with my sermon. And I haven’t given you a lesson, a homily. I don’t think a lesson or homily would be appropriate. I think it’s presumptuous that I, a white guy raised in suburban Muncie, Indiana, would have a lesson to give about race. My purpose in speaking today is to start a conversation. Would someone else like to speak on race? It’s hard to talk about, I know. What’re intended as observations can be taken personally, yes. But I think it’s important that we ­­ by we, I do not mean exclusively we at UUFHC, but all U.S. humans ­­ that we do talk about it. No one needs to presume to give lessons, but I think it’s important that we talk. Since I did not grow up around people of color other than African­Americans, I did not talk today about white­Latino relations. How are those different? How are they similar? Since I’ve spent almost all my adult life as a minority ­­ still white, though, so still a member of the more powerful class ­­ here in the Valley, I could talk about it. But so could most of you, white or Latino. And I’d love to hear the Winter Texan perspective on race here in the Valley.

The first reading today, Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B” ­­ it’s connection is pretty easy to see. I’ve loved that poem since I first read it as a young teacher. Hughes, I think, gets at the subtler tensions between white and black, even though at the time of its writing there were much less subtle tensions between the races. He says:

Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.

The second reading, the sermon at the end of the novel (and movie) A River Runs Through It, is about what we can do when we don’t know what to do. Maclean writes, “And so it is that those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them ­ we can love completely without complete understanding.” We may not understand one another because of our various differences ­­ gender orientation, race, ethnicity, social class. We can work toward understanding, but until we get even close to understanding, we can still love. And when we love, we listen.

Good Riddance!

This sermon was given on July 19th, 2015, by Liz Hutchison.

There has been a lot in the news recently about the Confederate Flag.

Flags are meaningful to us.

My husband arrived at Dulles International Airport in a coffin, draped with the American Flag.  

My granddaughter’s great- great grandmother was the Betsy Ross of Texas.  She sewed the flag that was carried by the Georgia volunteers who fought in the Texas Revolution.

And I was with the group in Selma who first attempted to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

We thought they might tear gas us, so we each had a piece of white fabric to cover our face with.
When I saw the police fondling their batons and looking longingly at us I knew that I might,  at some point, use mine as a white flag of surrender.

Here’s another flag story.  I wasn’t there but I heard this from someone who was.
Bill Nichols, a Dallas Unitarian minister, hung the Nazi swastika flag from the podium…. and then proceeded with his sermon. It’s been a long time, and I don’t remember the details
but I think it may have been something favorable about the Nazi regime.

Now remember as Unitarians we pride ourselves on the freedom of the pulpit.

As the story goes, the members of the congregation sat through as much of this as they could stand. Finally someone walked to the front…., tore the flag down…., said a few choice words…. and stormed out.  

Bill stood there and said,…. “I was wondering how long it would take before one of you had had enough. 
My fellow Americans it has taken a long time but we have finally had enough.
The Confederate Flag is coming down.
Wait you say.  One  flag removed from one  state capitol building is not  the demise of the Confederate Flag.
Of course not.   I agree.  But it is the start and I believe a very important one.  It is the small hole in the dam, the camel’s nose in the tent, the first step in the long journey.

There’s a lot of protest and denial, but to me that’s just  is the sound of death rattles, he choking noises sometimes heard before a person expires.And I’ve  heard that sound before.
George Wallace was the governor of Alabama when I arrived in Birmingham.  He won reelection promising Never. Orval Faubus,  in neighboring Arkansas called in the State National Guard to keep the school’s segregated, but that didn’t work either.  Bull Conner used dogs and fire hoses.
Still we got rid of the separate, but equal schools, bathrooms, water fountains, waiting rooms, sections of buses and trains, movie theater seats, eateries and those awful White Only signs, and now the flag is coming down.

I visited Germany for three weeks around 15 years ago. Something I noticed was the absence of flags.  It took me quite a while to see and recognize the German flag.  As for the swastika, that was certainly nowhere to be seen, and I was not in the country side, but hitting ever city and town from Berlin to Frankfort and on to Munich. That is not to say they aren’t there.  Just that they weren’t in evidence.

So why is the confederate flag still around? Because it is a symbol of racism and racists like it.
 Its creator William T. Thompson said on April 23, 1863, As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior  or colored race. Well the time has come, enough is enough, the citizens are fed up.

So today is a happy day for me because I get to talk about a subject I love.  How I hate the Confederate Flag.  It is a symbol of racism and cruelty.  Dogs, fire hoses, children killed in church bombings, a Unitarian minister clubbed to death, voter registration, with no one being registered, young people found at the bottom of a bayou, burning crosses, lynching, murder, fear.  A black man with eight bullet holes in his back,  lower wages for the same work, I know you could add more to this list.

April of 1963 I moved to Birmingham, Alabama and found out what the confederate flag was and what it actually stood for.  And it stood for everything I knew to be hateful and evil.
Yes there are those who claim the flag stands for a Southern proud heritage.  I don't believe for a second that it has anything to do with pride.
What is there to be proud of?  They caused a war that killed their own countrymen and they lost it. They lost their homes, their livelihood, and the human beings that they had enslaved.  The rich lost everything.  The poor of course remained the same.
In Brooklyn we would say “Hang on to your confederate money.  The South will rise again”.
To us it meant the same thing as some-thing having a snowball’s chance in hell.

After living in the South I think it would be nice if the were to rise again, and prosper, and invest in schools and jobs. 

Racism in the South meant keeping others from making progress. In other words keep them in the gutter.  The problem

With that, as we have seen too well, is that in order to keep a person in the gutter, you have to get down there with him and hold him there. 

How many of those who revere the flag are the descendants of wealthy landowners with slaves, and how many from the poor white share croppers? And as for the soldiers who died fighting for the Confederacy?  Well what about the men who died fighting to preserve the Union.
Very few Northerners are descended from Rockefellers, Carnegies, or Melons.  They are not dreaming of restoring Lady Astor and her salon that held only 400.

There are plans to put the flag in a museum.   I’ve only been to one Civil Rights Museum. That was in Jackson, Mississippi.  I hadn’t intended to go there.  I was trying to buy tickets to a ballet performance and the ticket office was closed for lunch and it was hot and the museum was open.
You know how your eyes have to adjust when you come from a brightly lit room to a dark one.  That’s sort of what I experienced at that museum.  All the photos were there, but the captions didn’t match them.  Something like “ Little Black Children cooling off in the water hydrant”,  when they were actually water hoses that knock a grown man down  and take the skin off him.
They say you can put lipstick on a pig, but everyone will still know it’s a pig.  That’s what is true of the museum, and although it’s a shame not to be to truthful, they aren’t going to fool a lot of people with their confederate flag and it’s shameful history no matter what is said about it’s  proud heritage. 

I know what they should do with their flag. Put Jim Crow in a casket, drape it with the confederate flag and bury it in a Mississippi swamp.

I’m going to close with a favorite poem by the German minister Martin Niemoller.  who, after he changed his allegiance, almost died in a concentration camp.

He wrote this first in 1937 and changed some of the words later, in case you’re familiar with a different version. I chose this version because it was the one I first heard.

In Germany, they first came for the communists and I didn’t speak up because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me—and by that time no one was left to speak up.

I have thought of these words often in my life.  I’ve wanted to make this world a better place for those here now, and for those to come.

Sometimes I feel discouraged.

Poems, Art, and Activism: Which is Which?

This sermon was given on 3 May, 2015, by Shirley Rickett.

Sometime early in March, 2003 at the time our country invaded the sovereign country of Iraq with George Bush’s Shock and Awe campaign, Laura Bush invited Sam Hamill to a White House symposium on poetry.  Hamill, author of thirteen volumes of poems, recipient of several awards, and editor of Copper Canyon Press, asked his poet-friends to send him poems that speak  the conscience of the country.  He received 11,000 poems.

            Hamill learned, after sending off his request for poems, that Mrs. Bush had planned the symposium around the poetry of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Emily Dickinson, according to Hamill, “three of the most original and anti-establishmentarian poets in our literature.” (Introduction to Poets Against the War, New York:   Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003, p. xvii.)  “Once the White House got wind of our plans, ‘the symposium,’ Hamill continues, “was promptly ‘postponed.’” Mrs. Bush’s spokesperson relayed this message:  “While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.” Hamill retorts, “So much for “Poetry and the American Voice” at this White House.  I hadn’t even had time to decline the invitation.” (ibid)

            When I purchased Hamill’s anthology, Poets Against the War, and read the words above in the Introduction, I could only think yes and yes and this is great.  Laura Bush just doesn’t get it that poems can be a powerful voice against war and suffering.  And here was my license to write so-called political poems.  I had been wondering how to do it.  Just how does a poet write about a decision her elected officials made to deliberately attack another country in a sort of pre-emptive war?  I didn’t get to vote on that.  Everything about Shock and Awe went against my beliefs, most of my deepest held convictions, as a UU.  I can’t blame Laura.  What else could she do aware as she was of her husband’s policies as he was poised to invade a country?  I was still disappointed.  She was a librarian, a reader, and a woman who wanted to have a symposium on three American poets.

            I discussed the issue with my mentor and professor at UMKC (University of Missouri at Kansas City).  She did not believe there was a genre called ‘political poems.’  She had a definite idea about the difference between protest and Art with a capital “A.”  She pointed me to another poem as I held the Poets Against the War book in my hot, trembling hands.

It was a poem about two women dressed in black walking quickly together, talking in brief words, looking to bury a body.  The first thing that came to my mind was Antigone trying to bury the body of her slain brother, which was against Greek law.  She would sneak out at night and throw dirt on the corpse.  I understood that these two women in black could have been from anywhere trying to bury the dead.  It was a poem that spoke about war, any war and the dead.  Was this restraint enough?  Was this enough to let out my anger for the wholesale bombing of innocent people, children, babies, families, whole towns and villages, and the destruction of museum art in the valley called the cradle of civilization?  ‘So, a couple of vases got broken’ said William Rumsfield.  No images of the dead coming back home allowed on tv.  No images of thousands of civilians in hospitals, or body parts scattered in the market place. It was a sanitized war for American consumption.  Was poetry a vehicle for my protest, the voice of conscience?

There were several big name poets in the book.  Some of their poems seemed to hit the mark and some were almost too oblique.  I had noticed, also, some rather bad poems, too. Michelle didn’t make speeches about art, but rather let me figure it out for myself.  It’s taken a long time.  Years.  What I haven’t uncovered still nags at me.  So I tried to write, and in the process I wrote some poems just after 911as an exercise with no intention of sending them out.  Here’s one:

09 11 01

                                                A few miles from Manhattan

                                                a photographer watched,

                                                said it looked like a huge

                                                orange and black flower.

                                                The genre action film, reality

now, repeated itself as children

                                                watched tv and saw skyscrapers

                                                in city after city explode again

                                                and again as planes flew into them.

                                                Now the wheels of justice

                                                creak into place.  Fields of poppies

                                                bow in foothills, on the plains.

                                                An abandoned truck sleeps in the sand.

            In the dialogue after 911, parents said children saw the unending sight on television of planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the collapse of the buildings and thought all cities everywhere were destroyed.  At the time, on the day itself, it was thought the pilots had come from Iran or Iraq, or Afghanistan where soldiers later hunted for Bin Laden, an Arab.  Afghanistan  would be our next war. This poem was written one month after September 11^th.

                                                                                10 11 01

                                                Forty-thousand widows

                                                begged on the streets of Kabul

                                                before airstrikes began.

                                                Food packets flutter to the ground    

                                                before missiles and bombs whistle.

                                                Do you trust the food

                       

                                                from those who deliver death?

                                                Can the packages become

                                                the fishes and loaves?

                       

                                                If it's made in America,

                                                (or Taiwan or China)

                                                it must be so.

Widows and their children were starving,  Widows had no way to get food.  Yellow packets of food were dropped, a couple of days supplies.  Sarcasm.   Irony.  Which is OK.  Irony can be useful.  But what did these poems mean?  Was it art?  Did they make a difference? Or was I merely recording history for myself?  The real question emerging seemed to be, when is a poem a rant and when is it an effort aspiring to be art?

A newer poem came out of a promise made at a meeting I attended for people protesting the war in Iraq.  The title is:

                                          Eric M. Steffeney, Waterloo, Iowa, 02-23-05

       

                                                I’ve lost you so many times,

                                                the you I’ve tried to imagine

                                                from the black badge, white words.

                                                I wore the badge of your death

                                                on my green raincoat for years.

                                                No one ever asked about it.

                                                The promise I made, to wear it

                                                until the war, an undeclared

                                                war ended, faded in détritus

                                                of desk drawers, and many ends

                                                to the Iraq war, each new promise

                                                obscure as a lost badge,

                                                prolonged like endless winter

                                                with no spring to believe in.

                                                Today I found the badge again,

           

                                                the promise alive, the haunt

                                                of your death, the fact of your life.

                                                The war is not really over, Eric.

                                                There’s always another one, fanned,

                                                ready.  Again the promise is honored.

                                                This poem’s for you, small act in the face

                                               

                                                of constant war played above an altar

                                                of badges.  Yet they stand for something,

                                                these black buttons:  a prayer, a blessing,

                                                your voice in Iowa trees, your boyhood

                                                under the sun, your memory in my pen,

                                                your name on my breast again.

                                                                                               

Was I was getting close to what war meant to those who fought, and their families?   Instead of concentrating on sheer protest against government powers and their inane pronouncements and the corporate media, I was focusing on metaphor, real lives, on people affected by this war, or now in my mind, any war.  The big picture, the Long Now, humanity: how do we behave, live, mean? War is nothing new. Suffering is nothing new.  How does one make art out of all this?  Here’s a brief excerpt from a poem in Poets Against the War, by Katha Pollitt from her poem, “Trying to Write a Poem Against the War,” (p. 183).

                        what good are poems against the war

                        the real subject of which

                        so often seems to be the poet’s superior

                        moral sensitivities?  I could

                        be mailing myself to the moon

                        or marrying a palm tree,

                        and yet what can we do

                        but offer what we have? 

Yes.  There is that pesky ego I live with.  “If you write a poem, put it in a jar.  Then go outside to see if the trees are still standing.”  I can’t remember who said that but I revisit it from time to time.  And Michelle, my mentor would say that every time you write a poem, you go up against the greatest poets who ever lived.  Harold Bloom wrote a book on that subject called The Anxiety of Influence. That’s enough to make you want to lay down that pen forever.  And it is that way some times.  But I have to write.  It is a haven, my meditation, my prayer, my path.

            Whole books have been written on the definition of art, but my favorite is one from Thomas Merton:  “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” So that might be one of my yardsticks. 

            Many poets and artists have been activists.  Their work reflects their deepest feelings that match the essence of the seven principles:  the inherent worth and dignity of every person, justice, equity, compassion in human relations, acceptance of others, the right of conscience, the use of the democratic process, and respect for the web of life we share.  Is that political or ethical, philosophical, spiritual?  Maybe it’s all of that.  I find it hard sometimes to draw the line, but those are some core values I trust.  I don’t always live up to them, but in my deepest heart, I know they guide me.

            A brilliant artist, Diego Revera, was commissioned by the Rockefeller family to do a mural for the RCA building in New York in the 1930s.  There was a portrait of Lenin in the unfinished mural and he was asked to take it out of the painting. He refused and it was covered for everyone to see in that busy place.  In the end, Revera destroyed it, which sent the press and critics into an uproar at his protest.  (Wikipedia)

The play, The Cradle Will Rock, was sponsored by the Federal Theater Project, an arm of WPA, which provided work for actors during The Great Depression.  Orson Welles directed the play, and in 1999 Tim Robbins brought it to the movie screen.   Stories of the times of the Great Depression were interwoven in the film “which commented on the role of art and power, and the corresponding appeal of socialism and communism among many intellectuals and working-class people of that time.”

            Well known poet Archibald McLeish’s long poem, “ActFive” brought silence.  There were no reviews.  One critic said it was too close to poetry propaganda and radio drama.  McLeish replied:  “Take away a poet’s public life by critical edict in a time like ours and what do you leave him?  Not, certainly, himself.”  (“Archibald McLeish in an Interview,” Benjamin DeMott,  in The Paris Review)  I listen to both critics and poets and I read poems to learn.

Other activist poets include Maya Angelou, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Alicia Ostriker, Mamoud Darwish, and Adrienne Rich to name only a few. The latter, famously declined the National Medal of Arts in protest for then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who voted to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.  Rich has been called one of the most influential voices in the 20^th century for human rights.  She makes no apologies for her poems.  In an oft quoted essay, Rich mentions Shelly and a phrase from “Queen Mab,” “Man’s evil nature’” that puts the reason for evil and cruelty on humans.  She makes of this:  “Shelly, in fact, saw powerful institutions, not original sin or ‘human nature’ as the source of human misery.”  (Poetry and Commitment, Adrienne Rich, New York:  W.W. Norton & Co., 2007)  But powerful institutions are run by people. 

Robert Bly won the 1967 National Book Award for his book, The Light Around the Body.  In his acceptance speech he encouraged people and organizations to protest the Vietnam War, and he explained that he would give his thousand dollar check to the peace movement, and specifically those organizations that worked on draft resistance.  His poem “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,” in Sleepers Holding Hands, (1973) “was a scathing invective against the War.”  Bly had found a way to write through the eyes of mythology, through the lens of the psyche to the dark side of human beings.  He conjures up the Great Mother in the middle of the book in prose.

The Swiss scholar Bachofen suggested for the first time

 in his book, Mother Right, published in 1861, the idea,

embarrassing to the Swiss, that in every past society known

a matriarchy has preceded the present patriarchy. His evidence

drawn from Mediterranean sources, was massive. (Sleepers)

Bly isn’t saying anything about the committed poet, but in other poems, he certainly touches on “powerful institutions” and how they carry blame for Viet Nam.  The difference between Rich’s approach and Bly’s rests not in Shelley’s:   “Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower,” for rulers, the clergy and politicians are human, too.  Bly does not put blame on human nature. (What does that mean?  It sounds like a vague excuse for human beings when they make mistakes we can all accept, like ‘boys will be boys.’)  Bly makes the point about our complex humanness, how we are wired, and the choices we make.  And he does it with the teeth mother, a figure derived from the human unconscious, a figure, said by Carl Jung, to be within us all in some form or other. 

Someone once said we are all capable of murder.  Capable.  Psychologist/philosopher Carl Jung explains that idea with the Shadow, belonging to each of us.  He says we must come to know our darker selves.  “ The problem of evil is the problem of the human ego …  says James Hollis.  And he calls the lowest common denominator, “ institutional Shadows.” (Why Good People Do Bad Things, James Hollis, Gotham Books, New York:  2007.)  There is a personal Shadow and a collective Shadow.  We often become our own worst enemy, whether through acting on raw emotions or compromising our convictions through quiet complicity. We might recall Robert McNamera, Nixon’s Secretary of State, who made a documentary a few years ago, recanting his aggressive stance in the cold, calculated deaths of so many in the Viet Nam War.  Another example:   the SS Guards who went out each morning to supervise the starvation, torture, and murder of Jews, and went home each evening to dinner with family, classical music, and play with children. Perhaps a result of the schizophrenic nature the Shadow can produce.  Some human beings know of the teeth mother and other archetypes and reject them, rationalize their behavior, or do not recognize it.

 W.H. Auden had his troubles, too.  He did reach a conclusion about activism and art.  He famously said this: “ Poetry makes nothing happen.”  He’s right. A poem never stopped a war, nor changed legislation.  Yet where do we turn when we share unimaginable grief or joy?  To poems, poetry, art.  Who can ever forget Teddy Kennedy reading from Romeo and Juliet as he eulogized his assassinated brother?  “And when he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night / And pay no worship to the garish sun.”   (The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, gen. ed., Sylvan Barnet, New York:  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1972)

Poetry may not make anything happen, but it can be transformative.  In her essay, Rich quotes a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle (July 17, 2005):  “Writing Poetry Was the Balm That Kept Guantanamo Prisoners from Going Mad.”  Rich tells of a commander in the Israeli Defense Force who came upon lines from poet, Yitzhak Laor. The commander’s words:

           

Reading these lines a moment after a violent month

            of reserve duty, which was full of a sense of righteousness

            …….was no easy thing.  I remember that for one alarming

            moment I felt that I was looking at something that I was

            forbidden to see.  What this thing was, I did not know …

            ……….Laor’s strong words return to echo in my ears:

                        ‘With such obedience? With such obedience? With

                        such obedience?

He was looking at something he was ‘forbidden’ to see.  Forbidden.  Ever since that experience with a poet’s words, the commander refused to serve in the territories and “Ometz Lesarev (Courage to Refuse) was born.” (Rich)  The Commander turned pacifist.  Prisoners kept their sanity.  Poetry can be transformative.

Are activist poets like Don Quixote, battling windmills?  Maybe, sometimes.  But they follow their convictions and go to jail if need be.  Their work is another issue.  I’ve read much work by activist poets.  I think, rather, they reach for the unreachable star, as, I think all poets do.

I conclude that it’s a matter of balance.  UUs welcome uncertainty and doubt, I think because we know, in the end, those two states of mind will lead us to transformation.

I’ll close with one short poem from my latest book, Transplant,  titled, “Evening News.” There are no divisions in my book, but there is a small section of war related poems that I hope meet a standard that at least strives to be what we call art.  This poem came about after watching evening after evening and Sundays were the worst, of pictures and names of dead soldiers, sailors, marines, which were long lists in the years of the Iraq War.      

  

 Evening News

                                    At the end of the news

                                    come the pictures

                                    and bios too short

                                    to mention a life

                                    or even to say

                                    he was here, she was here.

                                    Proud or funny faces,

                                    often a uniform,

                                    sometimes not,

when grieving hands

can’t find that photo.

                                    If you squint

                                    you might see them

                                    playing with a dog,

                                    holding a baby,

                                    perhaps at a graduation

                                    a camera in hand,

                                    or at a reunion

                                    the glass of wine

                                    a few inches from the lips.