[Part One of this series can be found here; Part Two is here and Part Three here.]

I witnessed the workings of the pride economy—and its slow-motion collapse—when I made a temporary move east across northern Indiana to South Bend in 2020. My motive was to collaborate with a project related to resisting gentrification. The idea was to increase the number of homeowners who could be coached into becoming small developers—incremental development being the term for this approach.

Unfortunately, as I was unpacking in South Bend, Covid-19 also arrived--which hampered the community work I had hoped to do. But I spent two enjoyable years getting to know the city in the afterglow of former Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s ascent to Secretary of Transportation in the new Biden administration.

The pride economy described by Arlie Hochshild was plainly still operative in South Bend in the ever-present ghost of the Studebaker automobile company. This hometown enterprise dominated the civic spirit of South Bend for over a century, employing thousands of workers—over 16,000 at one point in 1956 in a city of only 100,000—with well-paid, unionized jobs.

The date many older citizens remember, however, is December 20, 1963, only a few weeks after the assassination of President John Kennedy. That’s the day the 111-year old South Bend Studebaker plant closed after a decade of gradual decline. Some 7,000 people lost their jobs.

One weekend, I visited the Studebaker National Museum, an marvelous collection of historic vehicles, including several concept cars which gave me twinges of teenage glee.

The museum’s parking lot was taken over that morning by Studebaker owners, several dozen local enthusiasts who parked their mint-condition Avantis, Hawks, and Starliners, in lemon yellow, lime green, or a special pink-white-gray combination and stood around talking about the glory days.

At one point I was invited to an event at the 1884 Studebaker mansion, now a swanky restaurant. And I often took walks past the Studebaker Electric Fountain in Leeper Park. Some millennial friends organized a story-telling event in the former Studebaker factory called “The Studebaker Talks.” Today there’s still the Studebaker School, the Studebaker Golf Course, Studebaker Plaza, and the Studebaker “living tree” sign—more than 8,000 pine trees planted in 1938 to spell out the company name in huge letters visible to an airplane overhead.

In 2012, the year of his first mayoral run, Mayor Pete gave a very good local TED talk invoking the spirit of innovation the world once associated with the city of South Bend. (Equally or more important, I discovered, was South Bend’s hidden resource in its sizable cohort of talented millennials—Pete’s people—who are devoted to their place.)

For every city like South Bend attempting—with some success—to overcome its post-industrial status, the state of Indiana has perhaps a dozen other places which are sliding into the status known as “ghost towns”, a label already applied to some 41 in all by one estimate. Their decline is not entirely from the last half century’s industrial restructuring and offshoring. Some began after the state’s natural gas boom of the 1880s began to play out in the 1910s.

Driving across Indiana north to south on the smaller state roads, you have the same experience today as a driver crossing, say, Texas, Kansas, Louisisana, or Oklahoma. You might call it a “Twilight Zone effect.”

You enter a little town whose skyline includes an historic courthouse with a pleasant-looking park nearby. Then, as you proceed down the town’s main street, you have the grim realization that the storefronts are all empty, with maybe a tattoo parlor and a bar remaining. Almost no one is around.

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My experience with sacrifice zones and places of abandonment is not limited to urban areas. For a few years I was a founding board member of the Northwest Indiana Food Council, a non-profit focused on small farms, healthy food systems, and an annual tour we called the Farm Hop.

The Farm Hop was a daylong bus ride around the Region, with stops to visit a mix of operations, including urban farms in the city of Gary, a peace garden, an aquaponics farm, and a 13-acre specialty farm growing 130 varieties of vegetables, herbs and flowers.

The Hop also offered a visit at a 1,160 acre place operated by one (!) person—a former Wall Street professional with farming roots. Whereas, as he told us, his family’s farm back in Wisconsin required numerous hands working on small tracts of land, he is able to handle his commercial corn and soybean crops with only one occasional hand. That’s partly because, as we witnessed, he owns several enormous pieces of farm equipment, including a huge digitally-outfitted tractor.

One question which our Farm Hop participants might well have asked is: what percentage of the food Hoosiers eat do they actually produce themselves? That number turns out to be less than 10%, in fact.

Years ago, the agricultural economy in Indiana and the U.S. generally was quite different. The USDA records for 1945 shows 176,000 farms operating in Indiana, with an average size of about 100 acres. Today the numbers are roughly 45,000 “family farms”, averaging almost 300 acres.

In 1940, U.S. farms numbered around 6 million, each averaging about 175 acres. Today, the long-term decline continues, with the current number being about 1.8 million farms, averaging 441 acres with the median size at 72 acres.

Those numbers disguise what agrarian philosopher and farmer Wendell Berry has described as another Great Migration—the 25 million rural people who left the farming economy between 1940 and 1967, i.e., in less than half a lifetime, as he notes.

For half a century and more, Berry has been our most perceptive public philosopher on many topics but especially in his lament for the destruction of what was once “an intact, authentic, functioning rural culture.”

To understand better why our rural areas have also become sacrifice zones, Berry suggests “Farmers and the land have been sacrificed to the need for cheap food, just as the miners and the land of Appalachian coalfields have been sacrificed to the need for cheap energy.”

He continues, powerfully: “As a result we live in and from an abandoned, unloved, toxic, eroded and degraded country that most of our people have forgotten or never knew.”

Our emergency, as he explains in his The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, “is that the both the land and the people are unhealthy.” Which also means: they are unhealed.

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In old black and white photos from the 1940s and 1950s, the streetscapes of New York, Chicago, San Francisco inevitably look like noir film sets.

Looking more closely, there’s something else: the modest scale and the gritty, unfinished appearance of these places, a far cry from the glossy “perfume bottle” skylines of today.

As photos from these years also document, cities across the U.S. once contained many “urban villages”, lower-income but vibrant, functioning neighborhoods with the kind of social connectivity whose loss in terms of social cohesion we lament today.

This cultural density is where we got urban flowerings such as the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago’s Bronzeville society, San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood, and the New Orleans-like culture of Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District.

It was segregation which made the ghetto, as social psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove pointed out, which in turn made “the archipelago state and its local representative, the neighborhood.” These island-like communities had a shared common life which maintained the practice of older customs, especially the kinds of mutualism and cooperation needed to survive under enforced apartheid.

White citizens did not know much about these enclaves of color but assumed they were slums—meaning, unsafe, unhygienic, and detrimental to nearby real estate values. Some them still had outhouses. And, perhaps worst of all, they were located too near to downtown, thus giving out-of-town visitors a bad impression.

But in the years immediately following the Second World War, the pressure for housing and the hunger for civic “progress”—in the shape of a futuristic glass-and-steel skyline--was growing.

Thus the passing of the 1949 Urban Renewal Act was an effort to clear “slum” housing for private developers in order to extend the central business districts—Manhattan’s Lincoln Center being only one notable example. Similarly, as Fullilove documents, Roanoke built a new post office, civic center and a Ford dealership in the northeast corner of the city on land which had for decades been a strong and close-knit Black community.

Altogether, over the next several decades, some 2,500 urban renewal projects in 993 U.S. cities were undertaken, of which 1,600 were in Black neighborhoods.

The result was the displacement of nearly one million people, 66% of whom were Black, along with the loss of their churches, businesses, and social spaces.

The multiple impacts of this enormous exercise in social engineering may not have been apparent to city officials, planners and developers, almost all of whom were in lockstep agreement about the “costs of progress.” Certainly Native American communities had historic knowledge of mass removals from decades ago.

As we now know, urban renewal had many indirect costs: destruction of local businesses and livelihoods, loss of social organizations, and psychological trauma—what Fullilove called the loss of the “life world.” The title of her 2004 book on this tragic history is Root Shock, a term she coined to describe the traumatic psychological effects experienced by whole neighborhoods of people who are suddenly uprooted.

Fullilove unpacked the term root shock by listing three ways urban renewal policies affected the general wellbeing of displaced community members.

First, root shock generates stress, trauma, and prolonged grief among those who whose social bonds and sense of stability are radically shaken. It destroys the working models of the world that had existed for generations inside people’s heads.

Second, it is an indirect cause of illness caused by sub-standard living conditions often found in the new places (i.e., public housing projects) to which people were relocated. In urbanist Jane Jacobs’ distinction (Fullilove was a student and mentee of Jacobs), one kind of area may operate as a perpetual slum—i.e., people are continually leaving it—while another could be called “unslumming—i.e., people are continually staying.

And third, it was a forced outlay of resources on resettlement instead of maintaining wellbeing in place.

Altogether, the process could be described as having three sets of costs for neighborhood residents: financial, social and political. Not all these impacts were immediately obvious.

For example, local jazz clubs were once a staple of cultural life in numerous U.S. cities. One answer to the perennial question of “what happened to jazz” is simply that its national web of little clubs was almost entirely bulldozed out of existence in the 1950s and 1960s. We could say the same for most of the small restaurants and shops that once gave a place a distinctive character.

The striking nature of Fullilove’s research for our purposes is that it focuses on community grief from dispossession, and a form of spatial injustice we have come to recognize very belatedly.

Fullilove’s teacher and friend, Jane Jacobs, was a deep critic of modern urban development, notably the kind practiced by New York’s Robert Moses in the 1960s. In these matters, Jacobs sometimes invoked the “sparrow principle”, as she called it. Not a sparrow should fall in executing planning schemes—i.e., no one in the neighborhood should be hurt, nothing done at anyone’s expense. No one experiencing a shock down to the roots. We might guess that such an idealistic standard has almost certainly never been applied—anywhere.

While Black communities suffered most from root shock, the phenomenon was never limited to any sincle racial group. To take a famous example, what was the psychic price paid in 1957 by white neighbors of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field when, after 44 years in the same ballpark, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley moved the team to Los Angeles? Beyond the demolition of the stadium to build apartments, what else changed for Brooklyn in terms of its civic spirit?

If the latter example of an abandoned sports stadium seems merely sentimental, consider the impact in recent decades of the Catholic Church’s closing hundreds of local parish churches, many of them sites of generations of family history—christenings, weddings, funerals—for large numbers of residents in the area.

Even for non-Catholics, it turns out, certain kinds of landmark spaces retain an aura of stability and authenticity which make them beloved essential pieces of the local fabric—like familiar friends. The calculus of progress simply cannot account for these things.

[To be continued.]

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When big financial interests buy up a local software company, its own employees may feel the change but its home community will likely not even notice.

Not so with businesses providing social care—child care, elder care, disabled care. When these small enterprises are bought up—often in multiples—by large holding companies, suddenly employees find themselves tied to an app and new work procedures. The result usually forces them to lower care quality standards which can impact their clients adversely.

Home care is a sector of social care under tremendous pressures—due to a mismatch between exponentially growing demand for services and severe workforce shortages driven by poor job quality, regressive immigration policy and shrinking public investment.

Here’s a whole page of stats that will give you a picture of the situation—which is pretty dire.

Addressing these issues requires innovative solutions that meaningfully transform the work lives of home care workers. The ICA Group, a national non-profit based in Northampton that is a leading expert on worker-ownership, is driving scale of just such a solution.

Their vision is to create (and convert) home care cooperatives—home care companies which are caregiver owned and led—where workers will enjoy improved working conditions through better training, higher wages, and job supports. The result: increased worker satisfaction, decreased turn over, and ultimately higher quality, consistent care for care recipients.

In countries like Italy, Quebec, or South Korea, this incubation process is greatly facilitated by the existence of support networks which are themselves “secondary cooperatives”—i.e., co-ops comprised of co-ops.

This is a critical piece of support infrastructure that has been almost entirely missing in this country. Until now.

After several years in development, the ICA Group recently announced the launch of Elevate Cooperative, a national network and membership organization designed in partnership with caregiver-owned home care agencies and development partners in the field. Elevate aims to strengthen, scale, and unite home care cooperatives to build quality jobs and improve the lives of caregivers.

Elevate already has 14 member organizations employing over 1,500 caregivers in 11 states. Their membership categories include 1) operating home care co-ops; 2) startup home care co-ops; and 3) co-op developers, workers centers and community organizations.

Service for member co-ops include:

• business strategy and growth coaching

• growth capital

• education, training, professional development

• group purchasing (including software systems) and back office optimization

• peer networking and information exchange

• affordable employee benefits (healthcare, etc.)

• policy advocacy and public education

One newly-launched member organization of Elevate is the Colorado Care Cooperative (CCC), a state-wide initiative incubated by the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center.

After years of gathering data and talking to stakeholders, Colorado’s first homecare coop is preparing to launch their community-driven services in the Front Range, Western Slope, and Southern Colorado as they await approval of their Class A Medical Home Care Agency license.

Recently, Debra Brown, the RMEOC’s program director for the CCC, did a presentation about their work which you can view here.

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Dante is never more self-consciously the poet and the artist, conversing and musing with his fellow artists, than in the second major section of his great poem, the Purgatorio. If the Inferno was the favorite of 19th century romantics, the Purgatorio has been claimed by modernists, especially the poets and artists.

It is also the part of the Comedy most concerned with the hope of earthly politics, as Dante encounters striking figures whose stories reveal qualities of both civic virtue and vice. In the Purgatorio, the poem’s scene widens out beyond Florence (the focus of the Inferno) to all of Italy viewed as a landscape of little kingdoms.

And most importantly: of the Comedy’s three dreamworlds, only the Purgatorio unfolds in real time, allowing for hope and change.

We’ll read the Purgatorio together, three cantos per session, on Tuesdays at 2-3:30 PM EST, starting May 5.

To register for the Purgatorio class, please click here.

There is a tuition charge with scholarships available.

Text

For our common reference, I recommend we use the well-received translation by Jean and Robert Hollander. It has extensive notes and includes the Italian text. The translation is both accurate and readable.

If you’d like to explore versions which bring out more of the poetry, you might look those by at W.S. Merwin, D.M. Black or Jason Baxter.

In our class discussions, I will make it a point to always refer to the line numbers of the Italian text so that if you prefer another version over the Hollander, that should work fine.

Schedule

(All 10 sessions will be 90 minutes and will be recorded.)

We’ll meet via Zoom on Tuesday afternoons 2-3:30 PM EST.

May 5

Canto 1: Morning; Venus; the four stars; Cato; the rush and the dew

Canto 2: The ship of souls; the angel pilot; Casella’s song; Cato’s rebuke

Canto 3: Dante’s shadow; the Contumacious; Manfred

May 12

Canto 4: The ascent; the sun’s course; Belacqua; the Lethargic

Canto 5: The Penitents of the last hour; Jacopo del Cassero; Buonconte da Montefeltro; La Pia

Canto 6: The power of intercession; Sordello; the disorders of Italy and Florence

May 19

Canto 7: The greetings of Virgil and Sordello; the Valley of the Princes

Canto 8: The guardian angels; Nino Visconti; the three stars; the serpent; Conrad Malaspina

Canto 9: The dream of the eagle; St. Lucy; the gate of Purgatory

May 26

Canto 10: The First Terrace; the sculptured wall; examples of humility; the purgation of pride

Canto 11: The Lord’s Prayer; Omberto Aldobrandeschi; Oderisi; Provenzan Salvani

Canto 12: The figured pavement; the proud brought low; the angel of humility

June 2

Canto 13: The Second Terrace; examples of kindness; the purgation of envy; Sapia

Canto 14: Guido del Duca; the Arno; the degeneracy of Romagna; examples of envy

Canto 15: The angel of mercy; spiritual partnership; the Third Terrace; visions of gentleness

June 9

Canto 16: The purgation of anger; Marco Lombardo; human degeneracy; the Church’s misguiding of the world

Canto 17: Visions of anger; the angel of peace; disordered love as the principle of sin

Canto 18: The exposition of love; the Fourth Terrace; the purgation of sloth: examples of zeal and sloth

June 16

Canto 19: The dream of the Siren; the angel of zeal; the Fifth Terrace; the purgation of avarice and prodigality; Pope Adrian V

Canto 20: Examples of generosity; Hugh Capet and the Capetian Dynasty; examples of avarice; the earthquake and the Gloria in Excelsis

Canto 21: Statius; the completion of his penance; his greeting of Virgil

June 23

Canto 22: Statius’ indebtedness to Virgil and his conversion; the Sixth Terrace; the purgation of gluttony; examples of temperance

Canto 23: The wasted form of the penitents; Forese Donati; his warning to the women of Florence

Canto 24: Bonagiunta; “the sweet new style”; the second tree; examples of gluttony; the angel of temperance

June 30

Canto 25: The generation of the body and creation of the soul; the Seventh Terrace; the purgation of lust; examples of chastity

Canto 26: Dante’s shadow on the flames; examples of lust; Guinicelli; Arnaut

Canto 27: The angel of chastity; the passage through the fire; the dream of Leah; Virgil’s last speech

July 7

Canto 28: The Earthly Paradise; the fair lady and the stream; the seeds dispersed on the earth

Canto 29: The walk by the river; the pageant of revelation

Canto 30: Beatrice on the chariot; the disappearance of Virgil; Beatrice’s rebuke of Dante

July 14

Canto 31: Dante’s confession; the passage through Lethe; Beatrice unveiled

Canto 32: The wheeling of the pageant; the great tree; disasters to the chariot

Canto 33: Beatrice’s promise of a deliverer; the sanctity of the tree; the passage through Eunoe

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Why are Italian social co-ops famous for delivering community-owned high-quality social care? How could we recreate their model in the U.S.?
Matt Hancock is an expert on employee ownership strategies, speaks Italian, and has engaged with the Italian social co-op over several years.
This conversation will be a chance to "go under the hood" with Matt!

Join us today, Feb. 4, at 1 PM EST.
Get a zoom link here: https://lnkd.in/eVE5thQb

I’ve been reading and occasionally teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy for most of my adult life, starting back in my undergraduate days at UT Austin.

Recently I pitched my friend Samantha Hill on the idea of teaching the Comedy together in one of her wonderful reading groups and she liked the idea.

So we’ll be offering a series of 10 Zoom sessions (Sundays, noon to 1:30 pm EST), starting Sunday, January 18. The course is $333 but we’re offering a “pay what feels right” option so everybody is welcome. You can register for the reading group here.

Sam just posted a notice about the Dante group on her Substack Reflections (recommended!) but I’ll add some thoughts here.

1. Here’s one of the most surprising things about this poem describing a journey to Hell, Purgatory and Heaven—it’s not really about these other worlds. To a surprising degree, it’s about this world, seen from an unearthly perspective.

2. Dante’s Comedy (which is the original name—the adjective “divine” was added many years later) was written over 700 years ago. You would not expect a poem of the Late Middle Ages to offer much in the way of realism in its depictions of human characters. Yet this is exactly the quality Dante brings to his luminous figures like Francesca, Ugolino, Brunetto Latini and others. Their voices break through to us, eager to be heard, before falling silent and then haunting our memories.

3. A poem which is literally about the entire universe naturally invites many different perspectives—theological, historical, sociological, etc. In this reading group, Sam and I will mainly focus on opening up two aspects of the Inferno: 1) the nature of the poetry and 2) the world of the politics (i.e., the socioeconomic background). Just to set expectations!

If you’d like to make a start on the poem, we’ll be using the translation by Robert Pinsky, available here.

And we’ll be sharing a Google folder with recommended readings closer to the Jan. 18 start date.

Happy New Year!

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This is a little unusual for me—a personal pitch letter. So apologies in advance!

But I want to share with you a brilliant crowdfunding project which is hosted on the Small Change platform here. If you care about community wealthbuilding, here she be.

You may recognize two of the key people behind the project: attorney Jenny Kassan and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. (Here they are discussing time banking—part of the Baltimore Community Commons vision.)

I’m hoping you and/or others in your orbit might consider making an investment ($1,000 minimum) in it. I’m already in!

But the window for action will be closing soon–Wednesday, December 31!

The Mulberry is a historic four-story townhouse at 15 W. Mulberry St. in downtown Baltimore’s Cathedral Hill neighborhood.

Jenny and a group of community investors purchased the 6,500 sq ft building and are restoring it as a ground-level community space with five gorgeous one-bedroom apartments on the upper floors for short-term and corporate rentals. (Cash flow!)

So this is not a pitch for donations. We’re talking about a social enterprise-focused real estate project which expects to generate a return-–i.e., double your investment within 7-8 years. (More about that on their crowdfunding page here.)

But there’s more.

On the ground floor will be the Mulberry’s anchor non-profit tenant, the Baltimore Community Commons. It’s a place-based membership organization that promotes community investing, mutual exchange, knowledge sharing, and connection.

Here’s the thing: I think BCC can become a comprehensive model for building locally-grounded community wealth – one that could be replicated in communities throughout the U.S.

BCC will launch with three key initiatives:

● A community-focused business school: A hands-on, alternative business school focused on training and supporting local solidarity-minded entrepreneurs.

● A timebanking program: A network that promotes the interpersonal exchange of skills and services. This ecosystem-building project is a collaboration with former presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Steve Dubner (of Freakonomics fame).

● The community investment initiative: A program that helps local residents pool capital to create a fund specifically to invest in local businesses.

Next step: I hope you’ll go to the Mulberry’s crowdfunding page on Small Change, the investment portal where you’ll find more info.

f you would prefer to have a call with me and Jenny first, then just send me a note at elias.crim@solidarityhall.org.

Thanks much,

Elias

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Note: We plan to begin sometime in the week of Nov. 17. The final meeting schedule will be determined after a signup survey–see below. All sessions will be live on Zoom and recorded.

Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political thinker who died a half-century ago, has never been more in the news.

Her work on tyranny–which focused primarily on Nazism and Stalinism–offers powerful insights into our Age of Trumpism. Given her personal history as a refugee from Nazism, she became an expert witness testifying as to how the forces of nihilism quickly rose in service to raw power.

That’s why you’re seeing her quoted everywhere today.

But she was also brilliant at describing a phenomenon much harder for us to grasp: how a people-powered politics can emerge surprisingly in the worst of times. Recovering this understanding is the goal of our project.

The School of Public Life (name borrowed from this book by Fred Dewey) will be a public conversation in a public space we create together. We will use short readings from Arendt’s writings (to be supplied) to prompt us into thinking out loud together.

In the six sessions we’ll seek out the path back to the roots of public freedom and an authentic politics, from the Athenian agora to the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s, Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab Spring.

And we’ll use the last two sessions to review the legacy of one of the most successful Arendtian “activists”--the late Fred Dewey.

Note: The School of Public Life will not be an academic exercise focused on mastering texts. No background in philosophy or politics is required.

Nor will it be a forum for partisan debates over issues or ideology–there’s no shortage of those.

Instead, we want to clear a space to think, especially about power–our power–to understand where it comes from, how we have been talked out of it, and how we get it back.

In this exercise in proto-politics, we seek to be present to each other, to speak, and to hear each other speak. And to remember our embodiment, despite our virtual setting.

In addition to a Zoom link, participants will receive the readings in PDF form after registration for the school.

The School of Public Life is free, with a suggested donation to Solidarity Hall of $25.

Session 1: What Is Our Condition?

Session 2: What Is Power?

Session 3: What About the People?

Session 4: The Lost Treasure

Session 5: The Portable Polis

Session 6: Working Groups

1. Please use this link to register for the School: https://forms.gle/JFYUzc4Pdk5qcBAr7

2. Our first session will be your choice: either Nov. 18, 19, or 20, at 7 PM EST. Please use this Doodle poll to pick your preferred evening!

[Part One of this series can be found here; Part Two is here.]

I have not read Hillbilly Elegy, the 2016 memoir of Vice President J.D. Vance, whose successful escape from Appalachia and his troubled family put him on track to political fame and even the White House. Some reviewers wanted to take the book as an insider’s explanation of Red America, especially the Heartland and its forgotten-man culture of Trumpism.

From the reviews of Vance’s book, it does not sound like an elegy, certainly not a nostalgic reflection on lost folkways like the joys of mountain dulcimer music. It will not put anyone in mind of Wendell Berry’s writing about community and membership in Port Royal Kentucky. The reviewers suggest it reads more like the effort of a rising politico trying to establish his policy chops.

A better title might have been Hillbilly Makes Good, given the air of self-congratulation which seeps through the story of Vance’s ascent to Yale Law School and a Silicon Valley venture capital fund before being discovered by the Man of Destiny.

As a better title—and a better analysis of his own roots—I would have suggested Hillbilly Grief. A culture of unacknowledged grief lies behind the three generations of the Vance family described in the book, born out of living through, like millions of others in post-industrial America, several decades of economic devastation, cultural demonization, opioid overdoses, and deaths of despair.

To bolster my claim as a participant and witness in this history, let me insert here an autobiographical note.

With a population today of 13,000, my hometown of Henderson Texas is only slightly larger than when I grew up there in the 1950s. In some respects, it resembles Vance’s Jackson Kentucky, the place he calls home. (It also resembles the fictional Anarene Texas, site of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 filmThe Last Picture Show.)

Its location in East Texas, with Shreveport only an hour away, means the local culture in my hometown today was always more Southern than Texan. The poverty rate is 13% with an additional 33% of the population classified as ALICE (asset limited, income constrained, employed), which means almost half the town is not making it, economically speaking. That statistic has definitely changed since my childhood and not for the better.

Like Vance, I always knew growing up that I had to leave town. But it was once in better shape before the neoliberal economy of the 1980s began to take a toll on its main street and local families as well. So I’m familiar with Vance’s childhood world and its citizens. Whereas his early world was that of coal country, mine was oil country.

The arrival of the first gusher of the East Texas oil and gas field in 1930—some 140,000 acres across five counties with 30,000 historic and active oil wells—altered the psychology of an entire region. A red-dirt agricultural economy primarily based in cotton suddenly entered boom times and the mass delusion called “get rich quick.” Because that’s what oil could do for you while the going was good.

In my high school days, we played sports against the neighboring town of Kilgore, an epicenter of the oil field. At one time, its small downtown had more than 1,000 active wells, making it the densest oil development in the world.

As we rode the school bus to the Kilgore game, we would pass pumping rigs on what seemed like every other city block. Unless it’s a figment of my imagination, I think there was even one working drilling rig on the Kilgore High School football field. The players had to be careful not to run into the “rocking horse” in the end zone.

My father described the first years of the boom—his high school years in the 1930s—as truly a Wild West. His father was at work one afternoon in a downtown bank building when a gunshot rang out from an upstairs land office where some disgruntled party to an oil agreement decided to settle things on the spot. Because the local jail was relatively small and the number of lawbreakers so numerous, Dad explained, the local sheriff was reduced to tying arrested folk to trees until the police wagon could make the rounds of the county to pick them up.

Whatever reflections the people of East Texas might have had about the coming of oil, there was no thought that fossil fuels might be anything but a divine blessing. Nor was there anyone asking whether this freakish jolt of unearned prosperity and the mania it brought might in fact be a poisoned chalice. Karma waiting underground.

Over recent decades, the gradual depletion of the mammoth oil field—over 5.42 billion barrels have been produced from it—was not accompanied by any meaningful efforts to diversify the regional economy. Which is what allowed almost half the population of my hometown fall into the ALICE category.

While numerous small towns in East Texas have a dilapidated and depopulated look, the region is not the most egregious example of a sacrifice zone, if we extend that term to include the impact of economic devastation as well as that from industrial pollution.

A better candidate, one familiar to me from later personal history, is about an hour south of Chicago—the five counties of northwest Indiana known by locals simply as “the Region,” as bland a geographical nickname as you could find.

                                                              ֍

                                                     Soured dreamlands

The region of Northwest Indiana, as I discovered years ago, has a nickname: locals refer to it simply as “the Region”. No one has come up with anything more descriptive, less banal. If you live in the area, you’re a “region rat.”

The Region is an archipelago of a few middle-class towns not far from the shuttered steel mills, polluted industrial sites, and boarded-up storefronts of neighboring impoverished places like Gary, East Chicago, Hammond, and Michigan City. These are towns whose percentage of the population in poverty (officially defined as $16,000 annual income for a single person, $32,000 for a family of four) is around 30%. (The national rate currently is just over 11%.)

One of the Region’s happier islands is the leafy college town of Valparaiso, where I spent twenty years raising my daughters while trying to learn inhabitation, as the poet and ecologist Gary Snyder calls it. Snyder’s term refers to the process by which you come to deeply understand the place in which you live in all its dimensions—historical, environmental, geographic, and economic.

Around our little town, as I came to realize, lay a vast expanse of the Rustbelt or the “soured American dreamland”, as the urbanist James Howard Kunstler once put it acerbically after visiting the area two decades ago. Here’s a sample of his impressions:

“The storied steel mills of Gary are gone, and the numberless small shops and sheds that turned out useful widgets exist now, if at all, as ghostly brick and concrete shells along the stupendous grid of highways…Between the ghostly remnants of factories stood a score of small cities and neighborhoods where the immigrants settled five generations ago. A lot of it was foreclosed and shuttered. They were places of such stunning, relentless dreariness that you felt depressed just imagining how depressed the remaining denizens of these endless blocks of run-down shoebox houses must feel…Yet people were coming and going in their cars from the welfare ruins of East Chicago to the even more spectacular tatters of Gary, where the old front porches are disappearing into prairie grass and the 20th century retreats into the mists of mythology.”

My first impressions of the sacrifice zone known as Gary were drive-by glimpses from the interstate which passed just above the weedy backyards and along the empty-looking city center—a small Detroit, I kept thinking.

In 1993 it held the title of “’murder capital of the U.S.”, with an annual rate of 91 murders per 100,000. (The data for 2024 indicate the rate is down to about 70 murders per 100,000.)

Looking down from I-90, I felt the typical white person’s nervous shiver at the thought of the car breaking down somewhere along this stretch of road.

But in the early 2000s, I became involved in some community work in Gary, requiring me to attend meetings in City Hall. Turning off the expressway into the city steets of the downtown area—during the middle of the day, I should add—I had no particular sense of danger. Instead, what struck me was the terrible emptiness of the place.

In 1960, at the town’s heyday as a world center of steel production, the population was around 178,000 people. A litte more than forty years later, the city had only 80,000 residents left. Not even the city’s proximity to the southern beaches of Lake Michigan nor its status as the birthplace and childhood home of Michael Jackson have helped forestall the decline.

Sacrifice zones, with their associated disinvestment and unemployment, are known to bring in their wake deaths of despair, a term referring to lower life expectancy among middle-aged men due to a triple phenomenon of opoid addiction, suicide and alcohol abuse. Originally associated more with white Americans, these deaths have been increasing in Black and Native American populations since 2015, finally surpassing rates for white Americans in 2022.

A 2016 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study compared the life expectancies of the poorest men in two cities: New York City and Gary Indiana. They found the lifespans of the Gary residents was five years less than that of the New York City group, suggesting that income disparities do not tell the whole story: geographical disparities are real and have a measurable impact. Your ZIP code definitely affects your fate.

These kinds of deaths went mostly unnoticed and unremarked until the 2020 publication of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

A few years before the book appeared, it was an incident in our town involving a family member further that awakened me to my own community’s condition.

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                                       Collapse of the pride economy

About midnight one evening in 2017, I got a call from a police officer of our town. He informed me that our middle daughter, aged 18, and a girlfriend of hers had been picked up for possession of marijuana (still illegal in Indiana today!) and underage drinking. They were being held in the county jail until the parents could come by and pay a fine before taking them home.

I drove down, paid a few hundred dollars through the convenient bail kiosk, and then sat waiting in the lobby until my sheepish daughter appeared an hour or so later. It was all a bit comic, although I was worried about this misstep showing up in her college application efforts. In the weeks following, I located a local attorney who specialized in expunging this kind of court record who, in exchange for that service, expunged a few hundred more dollars from my bank account.

Somehow this small event gave me a window into my own community and its unseen life of despair.

The week following my daughter’s arrest, I was browsing through email and glanced at the local newspaper’s weekly newsletter. Among its regular sections was a photo gallery of people recently booked into the county jail, all of them wearing an orange jump suit. Staring back among the faces was one of my slightly dazed looking daughter.

After the shock of seeing her in this setting, I felt compelled to look closely at the faces of the other jail residents—fellow citizens of my town—as well as noting what they had done to get there.

It was a mix of ethnicities and ages, with about as many women as men. A young white guy with wild hair, smiling broadly. Next to him, an older Hispanic woman with a look of intense shame. His crime was creating a public nuisance (urination), hers was forging checks. I reviewed galleries from earlier weeks, just to get a further sense for these faces and their offenses. Rarely had anyone in this little Indiana town committed a serious crime. Quite a few were cases of DUI, along with several opioid dealers and domestic battery perpetrators. Almost none looked like “criminal types”: they looked like people struggling, in pain.

I imagined them staring back at me to say: See how I’m forced to live, the things I do out of fear or desperation. I can’t get a decent job, I don’t know anyone who is willing to help me get my life back on track. One false step and here I am, my pain on display in the gallery.

These are citizens of a state which at one time could be purplish: it once produced Evan Bayh, Birch Bayh, Richard Lugar, and Vance Hartke, to say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. It is now reliably red, voting for Donald Trump three elections in a row.

It is also one of the places where the effects of globalization landed in the form of offshoring, automation, and union decline. The losses inflicted on families—including their shame and loss of pride--over decades have been documented in numerous places, perhaps most notably by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Her Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) and Stolen Pride (2024), both based on extensive conversations with Red State citizens (in Louisiana and Kentucky), revealed the workings of an unseen “pride economy” alongside the material one, an amalgam of anger and mourning.

Well before the collapse of the pride economy—mostly felt by the white working class—there was another planned disaster: the urban renewal policies in the 1960s in communities of color.

Their legacy is called “root shock”, the ripping out of generations of community connection.

We’ll take up that story next time.

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Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty.

–Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

In what feels like a long time ago--mid-April 2020--there reigned ever so briefly a Great Silence in the world. Do you remember?

As the Covid pandemic was beginning to pour across the planet like an invisible tidal wave, a quiet suddenly fell over everything. For a few days and weeks, the whole unstoppable whirring machine of modern civilization shuddered to a halt.

In a state of incredulity, I wrote the following as part of a Substack post:

The unimaginable has occurred. Not only in the form of a deadly virus sweeping the planet. But also as a Great Silence that has, for a time at least, settled over the cities.

For anyone who has learned to hear ‘the cry of the earth,’ as ecological theologian Leonardo Boff calls it, the coronavirus tragedy arrives perversely with a gift: a glimpse of another way of life on earth, a kind of dream interval. We are all, for this moment, Thoreau self-isolating in his cabin, sharing the dream, with time for reflection.

It is not only that smog has lifted over Los Angeles, Tokyo, and everywhere else or that power usage is markedly down. In the Punjab region of India, one can see the mountain range of the Himalayas again in the distance. In our city parks, people are noticing the sound of birdcalls once again. Seismologists are noticing a significant drop in detectable noise in the earth’s crust, for both surface traffic and ocean traffic.

The story of dolphins appearing in the newly blue-green canals of Venice is apparently an urban myth but, as the Italians say, Se non é vero, é ben trovato (roughly, “If it’s not true, it sounds like it should be.”)

While humans are in a great pause, nature is taking a breath. Amidst great human suffering, with no discernible end in sight, we find ourselves not merely in isolation but altogether in something like an enforced silent retreat.

How can we interpret this unfathomable irruption of the natural into the busy human machine-world, I wondered aloud. And I offered two ways of understanding this moment.

One approach — especially for those who imagine themselves as practical-minded — was to take this interval as a glimpse of Eden, an image of a lost world in which somehow we are miraculously, momentarily dwelling. We know our joy will not last.

The other approach — especially for the despairing greens among us — was to understand that moment as a glimpse of Utopia, even if the political atmosphere in recent years has damaged our ability to imagine new worlds.

Undeniably, I argued, this crisis is also a dire warning about our lack of preparation and foresight in so many things. We are already hearing the cries urging us to go back to the Old Normal, the one that led up to these multiple catastrophes in the first place.

I concluded, “Our ability to withstand these powerful ideological forces may depend on the strength we’ve drawn during this moment of nature’s ‘reset.’ Let’s use this time of silence well.”

In justification of this advice, I might have added, had I known enough at the time: “After all, great grief is about to come over our country and beyond.”

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Covid time

Only a few weeks later, well before we’d had much time to reflect together on the great pause, the murder of George Floyd set off almost a year of what became the largest collective protest in U.S. history, with nearly 8,000 separate demonstrations, in addition to many others outside the country. It elevated a painfully needed national conversation about racial justice and likely influenced the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

By the end of 2020, while we were still in the pre-vaccine period, over 350,000 Americans died of Covid-19. Even with the new vaccine which, as many don’t remember, was designed in two days and distributed in two months, another 450,000 died in 2021, as we approached our total mortality count of 1.5 million, with many others disabled from the virus.

It seems more than strange that such shattering recent events are misremembered, which has meant they are still hotly disputed. Might many more have died—perhaps another 2-3 million? Do the notable missteps by various authorities invalidate everything positive in the record of this immense national tragedy? Was our response a triumph or an indictment?

We entered the crisis with an initial show of national unity and cooperation—that was the first phase. It was the Trump administration, improbably enough, which undertook an 18-month expansion of social welfare benefits in order to address the crisis before allowing them to expire.

The second phase of the pandemic has been called one of solipsism, when we retreated into our private worlds as though other people were simply no longer there or suddenly posed a threat to us in some way. For a time, we recognized our interdependence but soon grew angry and frustrated about it. Why can’t someone just fix this?, we demanded to know. Someone, somewhere must be to blame for this enormous disruption to all our lives.

The rise of conspiracy thinking and the loss of calm rationality are symptoms of our condition. Thus the Covid-19 outbreak was taken to be an undeclared state of emergency, beginning on March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic.

In the shift from a sense of shared vulnerability to the release of culture war venting, we almost didn’t notice one other unsettling fact: the pandemic had no formal end, no victory celebration.

Moreover, at those moments when the Black Lives Matters movement exercised the political practice of mourning (“say their names!”), their rituals touched something deep for a nation enduring (and profoundly resenting) a mass death event in which family funerals were mostly disallowed.

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Lonely deaths

Although the pandemic has subsided, have we all come blinking out of our caves of self-isolation into the sunlight of community? It seems not.

In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory report which described a new national malady--a condition of loneliness, debilitating on a par with tobacco, and affecting fully half the U.S. population. As a response to this loss of social connection, he urged us to recover the health benefits of being better connected to each other.

Social connection turns out to be a social determinant of health, as Johann Hari and others have also pointed out. Recent research on this topic claims to show that joining a club actually improves your longevity while being a loner certainly shortens it. (For an entertaining introduction to the topic of social capital, the Netflix documentary Join or Die—“a film about why you should join a club and why the fate of America depends on it”--is recommended.)

The Surgeon General’s loneliness report had an urgent tone but failed, perhaps unsurprisingly, to offer any recommendations toward genuine system change. The report mostly confined its recommendations to rearranging public spaces, reforming digital environments and expanding the public conversation on social connection.

This state of disconnection is not a new topic in American life, of course. The conditions of loneliness, isolation and solitude have been the sources of reflection by numerous thinkers, perhaps most notably Hannah Arendt.

Loneliness, she argued, was the defining condition of totalitarianism and the common ground of all terror. It is the inability to act altogether, a state of uprootedness when we suddenly find we have no place in the world, nothing to give the world. She linked it to a phenomenon described in her book The Human Condition, namely, our loss of a shared reality—a common sense of things--that allows us to know where we end and the world begins.

By contrast, isolation is the inability to act with others, which is the source of our political power. It renders people impotent. It may be the beginning of terror, Arendt argues, and is always its result.

Finally, solitude is a condition we often seek out for its gifts of calm reflection and tranquility.

I want to suggest that the ailment the Surgeon General was hoping to diagnose has one other dimension, a more desperate one. Instead of loneliness, he should have called our condition mutual abandonment—in multiple ways.

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The way we die is a mirror of the way we live

The word abandonment puts me in mind of the global phenomenon described in the Japanese term kodokushi, meaning “lonely deaths” or “dying alone.”

In 2017, the New York Times ran an article called “A Generation in Japan Faces a Lonely Death”, a portrait of Mrs. Cheiko Ito, a 91 year-old widow living alone outside of Tokyo as a resident in one of 171 nearly identical white buildings. These elderly tenants spend their remaining months and years cocooned inside their small apartments, often without families or visitors, unknown to the outside world until they expire.

These apartment complexes, some dating back to the beginning of the economic boom of the 1960s, were built originally for the families of Japan’s rising class of “salarymen” and their nuclear families, in a societal shift away from traditional extended family structures. As Japan has emerged in recent decades as the world’s most rapidly aging society, the country has been struggling phenomena like the depopulation of many small towns, now inhabited by a handful of elderly.

Similarly, certain high-rise neighborhoods have become places in which, according to the Times article, some 4,000 kodokushi-type deaths occur per week, a few of which inevitably go unnoticed for some period of time. The lonely circumstances of one elderly woman led her to make an annual gift of pears to a neighbor across the courtyard in exchange for simply observing whether or not the woman opened her blinds every morning. She told her neighbor that if the blinds did not open, someone should check on whether she might have died the previous night.

Mrs. Ito had lived in the same apartment for sixty years, commenting “I’ve been lonely for 25 years.”

In the same complex, one of Mrs. Ito’s neighbors, a 69 year-old man, came to a grisly end when he was discovered lying dead on his kitchen floor after three years and in an advanced state of decomposition. His rent and utilities went on being deducted from his bank account until finally it ran dry, finally alerting the building management of a problem.

As the chairman of the local housing complex remarked sadly to the Times reporter, “The way we die is a mirror of the way we live.”

Such cases of lonely deaths also occur in cities like New York and many others, of course. In Tokyo, the Times reported, a new industry sprang up specializing in cleaning homes where such human remains are found. (See photo above.)

Part of the power of the Times article—which received almost 400 reader comments, almost entirely full of praise—was its depiction of the way its main subject, Mrs. Ito, lived surrounded by ghosts of both the living and the dead. Her many scrapbooks and family photo albums now seemed to serve, as the reporter noted, as proof of a life lived, despite its obscurity from the world.

Mrs. Ito exemplified the Buddhist belief that spirits of the dead remain part of the lives of the living. Preparing herself for the inevitable, she had even given away the family tablets—the miniature headstones precious to Japanese families—from their Buddhist altar.

In the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, did we practice a kind of enforced kodokushi? “We allowed thousands of people to die alone,” the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis noted. “We buried people by Zoom.”

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Ivan Illich and the art of suffering

One of the figures who can help us understand this moment is the radical social theorist Ivan Illich. Becoming famous in the early 1970s as one of the first people talking about the harms of global development, Illich could also be called the father of the modern commons movement, as well as a major force in the deschooling/unschooling movement.

Another notable focus of his critique of modernity’s institutions was the healthcare establishment which he famously attacked in his Medical Nemesis (1974) for its commodifying and over-medicalizing of our human existence amidst the rise of biomedicine. The book is about professional power as well as the way the medical establishment exercises political power—in the name of care and with a carte blanche that usually only the military can claim. (In a war, no one counts the costs, almost no one dissents.)

Illich argued that institutions finally reach a watershed or tipping point after which they do more harm than good—as when medicine itself finally becomes iatrogenic (i.e, it makes us ill).

While generally favorable to large-scale innovations in public health that have given us good, safe water, clean air, sewage disposal, etc., Illich thought we were headed into iatrogenesis in terms of 1) the clinical impact (high rates of preventable errors), 2) the social impact (the art of medicine gives way to the science of medicine), and 3) the cultural impact (the traditional willingness to suffer and bear one’s own reality until finally dying one’s own death).

If Illich’s claims sound overstated, think of our extraordinary dependence today upon hospitals and our equally extraordinary lack of confidence in our individual ability to care for each other.

Today any sense of an art of suffering, as Illich called it, is overshadowed by the expectation that all suffering can and should be immediately relieved—which does not end suffering but renders it meaningless, an anomaly or a technical misfunction.

Death is no longer an intimate, personal act but instead a a meaningless defeat, a mere cessation of treatment.

Illich’s radicalism, here as in so many places, comes from his orthodoxy—i.e., his upholding of the traditional Christian view that suffering and death are inherent in the human condition. They are realities which can be mitigated but should never be lost. We cannot become gods who attempt to take charge of our own destiny.

Over the last century, having lost the art of suffering, we find biomedicine is creating new forms of suffering. Properly understood, then, the art of suffering is a way of taking things—whether as suffering or as enjoyment—through a respect for the givenness of existence.

“The teachings of the major religions reinforce resignation to misfortune and offer a rationale, a style, and a community setting in which suffering can become a dignified performance,” Illich writes. It is the crowding-out of such an understanding of suffering that most clearly outraged him.

David Cayley, Illich’s friend and surely his dream biographer, has written about Illich’s startling proposition that the most dangerous idol the church has faced in its history—one now worshipped also by secular society—is Life itself, i.e., bare human existence. It might be argued that in our therapeutic frenzy we have also made an idol of the closely related concept of Health, redefined into a pursuit out of all reason.

Illich’s student and friend, community activist John McKnight, took up this theme when he wrote about “the arrival of the bereavement counselor,” the professional with whom so many of us have become familiar in this time of almost routine school shootings. We have it on the best advice that, left alone, we are no longer capable of managing public expressions of mourning without calling in strangers to our lives.

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Along with the abandonment of other persons—both strangers and family members—we should consider the meaning of abandoned places. A drive across America today, especially on state roads off the expressways, can be an astonishing experience. Between the major cities, you pass through smaller cities and towns which may at first glance have a gingerbread quaintness until you realize the main street’s shops are mostly empty, with only a tattoo parlor, a bar or two, and a gas station remaining.

The next post in this series reflects on the “root shock” which these places suffered before being left to die.

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Bardo…1. noun: an intermediate, liminal state between death and rebirth;

2. In Tibetan Buddhism, the state between two lives on earth;

3. A metaphor for the shared but unacknowledged condition of American society in 2025—life in suspension, always on the way, with mutual grief never reconciled or consoled.

Introduction (first post in a series)

How to understand this moment in American life—are we not all trying to do this? But I don’t mean understand it in political or sociological terms. And not just this administration.

An exhausting number of explanations have been offered, some of them reasonable and some probably valid.

But they don’t go deep enough. That’s because this time in our history increasingly feels like a shared nightmare. Or like living in a simulation created by invisible technofeudalists.

But the latter explanation implies that our condition is something new, something enabled by latest wave of Death Star platforms.

Making technocracy the sole cause of this shared fever dream only demonstrates our cultural and historical amnesia. It leaves us helpless to understand how we actually arrived at this moment, somewhere in the middle of a mysterious transition to…somewhere else.

In the thought experiment which follows, I’m suggesting that our history of buried suffering has created a shared spiritual crisis of a particular kind.

We find ourselves between past and future, as the invaluable Hannah Arendt described matters more than a half century ago. She was speaking of our intellectual disorientation, given the loss of traditions as well as any shared sense of the world.

Or might we see American society as undergoing some kind of collective rite of passage? This term, taken from Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 book, was coined to describe an individual’s passage from one status to another (as in initiation ceremonies) and from one life situation to another (graduation, marriage), as well as the passage of time (birthdays, the New Year).

Can an entire culture undergo a rite of passage? Is some other kind of transition going on? Perhaps a deep societal process has been underway, one which we rarely allow to surface because we can scarcely bear to confront it.

I’m proposing here that our dreamlike state can better be understood as time in a bardo, using metaphorically the Buddhist concept of a transitional state between between death and rebirth.

I see American society suspended unknowingly inside a Bardo of Grief. Which is to say: as a society today, we’re perpetually, agonizingly stuck, spiritually and existentially.

Tibetan Buddhism recognizes three bardos experienced in life—the bardo of birth/life, the bardo of dreaming and the bardo of meditation—and three experienced during the process of dying—the bardo of the moment of death, the bardo of reality/luminosity, and the bardo of becoming/rebirth.

But suppose grief from a significant loss can also take us—indeed, our entire society—into a bardo realm.

For our investigations here, I want to sketch out the nature of the bardo of grief in order to suggest its resonance with our public and private lives today. So a few words about why I’m exploring this metaphorical approach.

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First, our American malady—which is more than a malaise--goes beyond economics or politics: again, and like many observers, I believe it is fundamentally spiritual in nature, as I suggested above.

But we need a different spiritual lens at this moment in order to see more deeply. I find that the American encounter with Vietnam and its culture of Buddhism, beginning well over a half-century ago, has profound significance today. We, the sick giant, are very much in need of the healing wisdom and spiritual resources of this small country.

Thus the teachings and witness of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (here’s a discussion of his work relevant to this post) will be important in this series.

Grief, as Mark Robert Frank writes, is a reaction to the precipitous, uncontrolled, and undesirable loss of self. That’s quite different from the controlled and desirable loss of self that takes place within the context of spiritual practice, or the uncontrolled but desirable loss of self in the context of falling in love.

In several forms of Buddhism, the bardo realm is the in-between, transitional, liminal state between death and rebirth. Whatever remains of the self goes out in search of its next rebirth. In this state, the deceased may experience a phase of intense grief, especially if they were not prepared for death—i.e., they have not learned to die, as philosophers once described the motive for their inquiries.

In the bardo realm, the deceased gradually realize they are dead and no longer among their loved ones. In scenes perhaps reminiscent of Dante’s great poem of other worlds, they may see and hear their loved ones and yet be invisible to them—a cause of great anguish. According to Buddhist teachings, the deceased experience a range of emotions related to separation, including sadness, loneliness, and a sense of alienation.

The traditional Buddhist texts describing these emotions also refer to visions of both peaceful and wrathful deities, depending on how we have used our lives (which is reflected in our karma) before death.

On the individual level, understanding the bardo of grief is beneficial in two main ways. First, it shows us mourners how to help the deceased navigate this transition and achieve a better rebirth. Second—and especially for our purposes—it helps the living cope with the loss of a loved one.

As many readers here will know, a central text for understanding this tradition is the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the Bardo Thodol in Tibetan.

These teachings include a number of ritual practices which mourners can undertake in order to lead the departed toward a fortunate rebirth. And to help them avoid getting caught up in mental delusions that would lead one to the hell realm or the condition of becoming a “hungry ghost”. The latter concept is a very suggestive one for citizens of a society dominated by consumerism.

The Hungry Ghost Festival is celebrated by Buddhists and Taoists in numerous Asian countries. On Ghost Day, the spirits of deceased ancestors come out from the hell realm in order to visit the living and be venerated or appeased. Some are spirits without descendants who thus have received no tributes from the living after death, leaving them in a desperately hungry, thirsty and restless state.

Ritualistic food offerings are prepared at tables with empty seats for the spirits. Relatives burn special “hell banknotes” (non-legal tender especially printed for this purpose) and other forms of joss or incense paper in the shape of houses or cars in order to please the ghosts and give them support in the other world.

The hungry ghosts being appeased are those spirits who are driven by intense emotional and physical needs in an animalistic way. They are often depicted in Buddhist art with big bellies and needle-thin necks to signify their suffering. One category of these nightmarish figures—the ghosts of losses—are always covetous, searching out human filth to eat at night. In life, they sought enjoyment in both clean and unclean things and were thus reborn in this condition.

Another category: the ghosts of flaming mouths, with bodies like a palmyra tree. Their condition shows the karmic results of stinginess.

If I am not stretching a metaphor absurdly far here, I can imagine our society as crowded with hungry ghosts, endlessly craving, always consuming. And like the newly dead in Tibetan Buddhism, some of us Americans suffer torments from karmically generated hallucinations of figures who appear to threaten us.

But no rebirth into a happier state is coming in our case. At least not until we confront our lack of public occasions for lament like the three “Great Chanting Ceremonies” undertaken for the war dead by Thich Nhat Hanh in 2007 in his native Vietnam. (I will describe these in a later post.)

In his impact on American spirituality, I think of Nhat Hanh as a terton, the Tibetan Buddhist term for a “a discover or revealer of (dharma) treasures.” The treasures are scriptures (called termas) that have been deliberately concealed and discovered at appropriate times by realized masters through their enlightened powers.

Some of these tantric scriptures are concealed in rocks, lakes, and temples: they are called Earth Termas. Others appear as mental awakenings and are called Mind Termas. We might consider Nhat Hanh’s teachings as falling into the latter category.

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But let’s begin with some grounding in terms of our situation in the U.S. What follows in this series are sketches drawn from life—or more specifically, our history over the last half-century--and my attempt to think out loud about them, drawing on more than one wisdom tradition.

The common thread throughout is my strong suspicion that almost all of us in American society today share a particular kind of unrecognized condition: the existence of “unprocessed” or buried grief.

Thus I’m not reflecting here on personal grief or its trauma discourse: instead I want to confront our unexamined legacy of communal grief.

Like a pool of contamination awaiting discovery beneath a plot of land, I think of our buried grief as a calamity which must be “remediated.” Remediation would mean, in the jargon, closure, especially the communal closure I want to examine here—the kind that comes from public rituals of lament.

In such rituals, it is the community that mourns, that imposes the mourning upon itself, as we have learned from philosopher Byung Chul Han in his Loss of Rituals. Which leads us to ask: where is our community today? Where and how might it offer and conduct a ritual of mourning?

The condition I’m exploring here is more than a lack of closure. And more than simply our American culture’s well-known avoidance of death and dying.

Hoping not to invoke the malign deities, let’s take up seven historical sources of destabilizing grief, most of which have enfolded over decades, all of them based in common experiences, all of them still quietly contaminating our shared life:

• The grief of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its 1.5 million dead in America (and over 7 million worldwide), when a profound human impulse—to mourn family members in public funeral ceremonies—was often put aside by something very like a state of emergency;

• The grief of the over 700,000 dead from the HIV/AIDS epidemic which started in 1981;

• The grief of the over 176,000 “deaths of despair” between 1999 and 2021 from addiction, suicide and alcohol, due partly to the decline in living standards and social status for a significant part of the American middle class;

• Partly foreshadowing the latter, the slow grief of losing our entire rural culture, some 4 million family farms in this country between 1940 and 2012, representing perhaps 25 million people leaving the land, thus removing from it and themselves, as Wendell Berry reminds us, their “love, care, skill and work”;

• What’s been called America’s racial karma—our 246 years of legalized chattel slavery, followed by a century or apartheid, as well as the destruction of our Native peoples and their cultures;

• The grief of those affected by the toll of America’s perpetual wars over the last two decades (over 7,000 deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan), as well as the annual average of 250 self-inflicted deaths by U.S. service members;

• Our shared grief over our burning planet and its wildfires, 500-year storms, dying oceans, lost species, heat waves, desertification, sea rise, displaced communities, climate refugees, and what may become a sixth mass extinction.

Our collective reaction to these losses resembles the often-noted silence and erasure around the flu epidemic of 1919 which killed over 50 million people worldwide. In the U.S., none of these shared catastrophes of the last half-century—all of them enormous in scope--have led us to mount occasions of public mourning on a national scale.

What then does it mean to live in a society which has allowed its social practices to degrade into merely instrumental and economic relations?

Simply that we now lack the grief communities and the rituals of lament which could bring us social healing in the form of forgiveness and reconciliation.

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                                                    Grief as a spiritual enzyme

One of the most insightful writers on these topics is Martin Prechtel whose work teaches that grief is not simply disappointment: it is as natural as singing or dreaming or eating.

Nor is grief simply sorrow—in fact it refuses to remain in sorrow. It is an obligation to the life we have each been awarded—an obligation to make more life. It should not be a mere preference. “Choosing not to have grief,” he writes, “burdens someone else and makes the world a sick place.”

And this: “Only nations capable of the true art of grief, grieving their mistakes and the deeply felt losses they endured, can say they are not pools of economic stagnation dressed up in the spoils of ungrieved wars disguised as good business.”

Another of the most powerful insights in Prechtel’s writing is his connection of grief with praise. Grief is “the best friend of Praise because Praise is a grandiose griever. Without grief and praise, life is only hate and mediocrity.”

In essence, if we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love—“we are ourselves in some way dead.”

Echoing philosopher Byung Chul Han, Prechtel argues that living communities are necessary for people to grieve in a real way. “Grief, even for an individual’s loss, is a thing for which a lot of people are necessary.”

Tragically we have gradually lost the culture in which we could grieve together as a society. Worse, we defer the grief of a previous generation onto the next generation, creating a dangerous and inhuman condition. All the people and places lost, Prechtel suggests, “are buried in a shallow mental mass grave of temporary amnesia in the collective mind.”

What we lack is the process by which grief, defined as a “spiritual enzyme”, metabolizes our losses. If we do not allow this to occur in some communal fashion, the grief almost always goes to a form of accusatory violence and the destruction of our common life. Thus the adoption of revenge works as a way of freezing grief and, in Prechtel’s phrase, “making a shrine to someone’s losses.”

Reading Prechtel, a terrible realization gradually comes over us: that we are all living on top of a buried continent of unprocessed communal grief.

No matter how well we may be dissolving our personal sufferings with the enzymes of grief, we have chosen collectively—and over generations—to live inside a history of great losses, human and natural.

Grieving, he explains, is not a form of depression—which is a condition that comes from not being able to grieve, in which we convert our losses, our “frozen sorrow”, into violence. But what if grief is not sorrow and refuses to remain in sorrow?

Might Prechtel be correct that we possess an ancient way to revive an entire culture, if we truly and freely grieve? Might the practice of grief—itself a sacred art—be the foundation of all our work toward peace and reconciliation?

I welcome your comments and I’ll be posting another piece in this series soon.

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Let’s imagine something new has arrived in the neighborhood—a community incubator. It’s a little like a free health club, if you take health in the broadest sense—i.e., including social and economic health.

You could think of the incubator as working like a golden funnel turned on its side. It’s wide-open at one end (which most business incubators are not really) but it channels and directs the flow to particular places—like toward a good job. Or even a new business you co-own.

The logical home for a program like this is a community hub. You probably know this kind of place. It’s not a community center with yoga classes and senior swimming groups.

An authentic community hub feels grassroots-y and kinda political. It’s a space where people can meet up to organize campaigns, hold meetings, and maybe co-work. Three good examples are ReCity in Durham, the Festival Center in Washington DC, and the new Baltimore Community Commons in that city.

Community hubs are good at incubating organizations—i.e., non-profits. But rarely are they places where businesses are incubated.

A community incubator is a hybrid, a cross between a support group and a startup program. Actually, the former (the group) creates a process which leads to the latter (the launch of a new business). These two ideas—recovery (in the broadest sense) and collective entrepreneurship—are rarely tied together—in the U.S., at least.

So what does a community incubator do?

It invites any and all adult individuals, especially those who are in recovery from various conditions (incarceration, addiction, or just long periods of joblessness), to join a “workout” program—for free.

We know many in our communities justifiably feel they are unable to get back in “the game”. Here I’m proposing an open-access path to not only participating again but becoming a champion—i.e., someone with a strong sense of wellbeing.

Once you become a member of the incubator, you are no longer a random invidual—you’re part of a team (i.e., a cohort) which meets on a weekly or biweekly basis. This is where we all discuss what it can mean to get “back in shape”—i.e., ready to participate in the world, including the economy. (For individuals needing specialized recovery serivces, the incubator coordinates with other area programs.)

Here’s my crude representation of the phased approach of the incubator (it looks like a sideways funnel):

But you don’t participate here solo—the rest of your team is involved in supporting your wellness. And we’re all getting to know each other better.

For example, while incubator membership would be free, there’s one qualification: you have to participate in an ongoing offers and needs market process. This is a highly effective tool used by small groups to explore and then match up their talents and needs It offers a quick way to build solidarity among people who don’t know each other. (One group of skilled OANM practitioners is the highly innovative Kola Nut Collaborative in Chicago.)

Not Just Jobs: Let’s Talk about Co-creating Good Work!

Possibly the most visionary aspect of the community incubator is its potential to create dignified, meaningful jobs in democratic workplaces co-owned by team members. In places like northern Italy, Quebec, and South Korea, these liberatory workplaces already exist in the tens of thousands. For most Americans at this moment, the very term “liberatory workplaces” sounds either bitterly ironic or downright visionary.

To successfully imitate these non-U.S. models, we need to practice what community advocate Sam Pressler calls “civic alignment”—that equilibium reached when our enterprises keep in balance the forces of membership (the glue of commitment), revenue (the fuel of independence and innovation), and governance (the structure for good decision-making).

All of which means: with the right partner organizations, an incubator can turn a community hub into something new and potentially transformative—a site of quality job creation, by and for the community.

Here are some examples of partner organizations in these multistakeholder enterprises:

• Beyond sourcing philanthropy and donors, aim to create a dedicated community investment fund to support the incubator and invest in its businesses;

• And you’ll want to build a shared services platform (to connect with other incubators), developed by a team which practices “small software”—i.e., vision coding and relational tech;

• And as a multistakeholder enterprise, you’ll want to find other community partners (churches, civic groups) which subscribe to ideas such as “neighborhood economics”.

Equally importantly, these are jobs in enterprises which have been co-created by their worker-owners—an idea which many marginalized individuals might not imagine to be possible. (It’s a bit like applying Asset-Based Community Development principles to a small business model.)

This bottom-up process of quality job creation (the general term for it is cooperativism) has been used in most of the countries of the world for many generations—which surely testifies to the “constructive genius of ordinary men and women” referred to in the quote above from Roberto Unger.

This idea is not merely utopian. One inspiration for the incubator model I’ve described here is the methods used by Mondragon founder Fr. Josemaria Arizmendi—i.e., a mix of study groups and then a workplace-as-school of human development strategy.

While examples of this type of community-led economic development are scarce in the U.S., here is one good example in a large city (Denver) and here is another in rural North Carolina.

More to come on all these matters, y’all. And let me know if any of this resonates!

See you next time—peace.

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In a recent call, my friend and colleague in solidarity economy work Julia Martins Rodrigues mentioned the MacArthur Foundation’s “100&Change” program. Here’s a description:

“A competition for a $100 million grant [my emphasis] to fund a single proposal that promises real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem of our time.”

I’d not heard of the program but the size of the award made my eyes water. Julia then asked a fascinating question: “What would we (meaning not just us but practically everybody we know) do with a $100 million?”

The answer, disappointingly, is: we have no idea—or most of us don’t, anyway. In our small universe of worker co-ops, land trusts, CSAs and peoples’ assemblies, only a few of our projects come anywhere near a $1 million budget.

Consider: After more than a century of agitation and some success with worker co-ops, we still have fewer than 1,000 in operation in this country today. The average worker co-op generates less than $500,000 in annual revenue. As a very rough guess, the entire capitalization of the 700-800 worker co-ops in business today is less than $500 million.

Thus for every example of several million dollars in assets represented in a Boston Impact Initiative or East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, there are thousands of small projects locked in a day-to-day struggle for economic survival.

Back in 2020-2022, I co-edited a newsletter with Julia called Ownership Matters sponsored by Felipe Witchger. By allowing us to do dozens of interviews with practitioners, we got an informal overview of the economic landscape. And I had a number of surprising revelations.

One of them was that, contrary to what I might have imagined, the funding issue for most of our solidarity economy (SE) projects isn’t really due to a lack of interested capital providers. On the contrary, quite a number of the impact investing folks—especially the ones trying to “deploy” what they call catalytic capital—want to support SE work, as I heard on numerous occasions.

The problem is largely about making a fit. Given the amounts of capital these funders work with—i.e., millions of dollars at a time—they need to find SE enterprises that can take in cash amounts at that scale. Looking at an SE project which barely generates $500,000 in annual revenue, they feel it’s impractical to spend time on it.

Here’s an analogy: It’s as though we SE people are all eager to have the big jumbo jets set down at our airports but unfortunately our landing strips are still way too small.

We do have a magical power we can use to change this situation—the same one used in places like Italy or Quebec or South Korea to streamline investment into their SE work.

Quite simply, we can use the power of association and collaboration in order to build ecosystems of support around our enterprises. Across our landscape of “many small utopias”, this is what we sorely lack.

This missing infrastructure can only become real if we plan for it, especially by drawing up our million-dollar dream blueprints and having them ready at short notice.

It’s exactly like the beneficial effects of creating a simple business plan. Just the process of sketching out a vision of transformative change brings it closer to being realized.

If we begin to think on a bigger scale, much could change for us. Instead living like cargo cults wishing and waiting for the big planes to land bringing us trinkets, we can create our own national air freight company, making stops all over the country.

See you next time—peace.

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In 2022, my friend J. Howard (“Jim”) Kucher wrote a book with co-author Stephanie Raible called Social Entrepreneurship. I want to say a few things about the book but I should first explain how I learned why we (meaning especially, we people who hang out in the non-profit world) need more social enterprises.

About a year ago, Jim invited me to a group conversation and open house at a place called DC Central Kitchen in southwest DC. I really knew nothing about the place beyond the fact that they had found a great way to recycle waste food from area restaurants into a meals program for the homeless.

I figured we would be meeting in a cramped little room next to a noisy commercial kitchen at an area church.

But as we used to say in my Texas hometown, au contraire. In 2023, DC Central Kitchen relocated to the Klein Center for Jobs and Justice where its team found themselves with a 36,000 sq. ft. bi-level space hosting a large community kitchen, a training facility, and an urban food hub.

After having launched in 1989, DCCK has grown to $40 million in annual revenue, offering over 300 living wage jobs, and supported by 11,355 volunteers. The 2,200 graduates of their culinary training program have an 89% success rate in area job placements. With some 36 millions pound of food recovered so far, it’s not surprising their model has inspired 60 similar organizations around the U.S.

There’s another big factor in DCCK’s success—it’s not a conventional non-profit but a social enterprise. That means it is able to generate independent revenue (which is discretionary income, not tied to any grant guidelines, etc.) as a way of counter-balancing the revenue from local donors and foundations.

Here’s the DCCK’s revenue breakdown for 2024:

You’ll note that 42% of DCCK’s revenue last year was from programming—tbeir 3 cafe locations, catering services and contracted food services.

Jim Kucher has been preaching the need for non-profits to realize they are a uniquely American failed experiment in many respects. For all the good work they do, most nonprofits remain in a precarious financial condition because they do not choose to offer paid services, whether through misplaced fears of the IRS or a lack of familiarity with basic business practices.

Determined to understand this situation better, I picked up a paperback copy of Kucher and Raible’s Social Entrepreneurship. Its dull-looking cover screams “college textbook” but the well-written contents were quite a surprise.

The book is a small encyclopedia of both aspects of social enterprise, combining a history of social work with a short primer on business fundamentals. The authors discuss the history and special characteristics of social enterprises (the term arose in the 1980s), along with guidance on various kinds of tools (iteration, test markets, pivoting, etc.).

But their focus is on helping the reader understand we’re talking here about measuring outcomes rather than outputs. Thus the language and the business models for social enterprises differs from that of for-profit entities. We speak of “social ROI”, “social return”, “psychic income”, and stakeholders (rather than shareholders).

Kucher and Raible also offer insights into frameworks such as asset based community development and the social business model canvas.

Not that in these times the authors are the only proponents of moving beyond non-profits. Michael Shuman, editor and publisher of the Main Street Journal, recently posted on the topic “Non-Profits: the Least Effective Vehicles for Social Change.”

With the usual sources of nonprofit funding going away, time to get creative—and even become the good kind of entrepreneur—social entrepreneurs.

See you next time—peace.

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A priest working in a war-town, impoverished Spanish village, he collaborated with local working people to eventually become perhaps the most successful social entrepreneur of the twentieth century. From its modest start in the early 1950s, Mondragon today is an interlocking ecosystem of 95 autonomous worker-owned cooperatives, with annual sales of €11 billion ($12.5 billion).

To get at the roots of this organization’s rise, let’s read and discuss together Arizmendi’s little 120-page book called Reflections, an inspirational “management text” like no other you’ve ever read.

We’ll meet over four Tuesday Zoom sessions: May 27, June 3, June 10, and June 17. All sessions will be at 1 PM EST.

To register for the Arizmendi reading group, please use this doc in order to receive a Zoom link before each session.

A quote from the Introduction by Nathan Schneider: “Arizmendi inherits the Basque people’s long practice of democracy and their struggles for independence. He was a journalist during the Spanish Civil War, when entire regions of the country operated under a well-organized anarchism of workers’ assemblies, which were highly anti-clerical. His cooperative spirituality depends upon no particular religious or national identity, while it draws from many.”

And a quote from the book’s “Afterword: Cooperation and Liberation"“, by historian Jessica Gordon Nembhard: “Both the Basques of northern Spain and African Americans experience contradictory relationships in their societies as national minorities—citizens without full citizenship rights, experiencing long histories of exploitation, inequality, and social ostracisim. Father Arizimendi taught that subaltern people do not have to live subaltern lives. They can take charge of their own lives, be warriors for change…Not many people understand economics as a project of human liberation. Fr. Arizmendi showed many that it is—or can be.”

A free PDF of the English translation of the book, published in 2022 by Solidarity Hall, will be provided to everyone who registers (donations appreciated).

If you’d like to purchase a print paperback copy of the text, it’s available here.

See you next time—peace.

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Have we arrived at a moment when it’s possible to rethink our shared world?

It seems so, especially when you consider the fascinating work coming out of The Elysian, a collective of writers founded by Elle Griffin. They are about “exploring the future of governance, capitalism, and humanity.”

And they are a great example of the new collective media which the Substack platform is enabling.

The Elysian’s new collection, City State, contains 10 essays on autonomous communities and various possible models of governance. You’ll find some excellent visioning going on here, as the Table of Contents suggests:

U.S. States Should Have Autonomy—Like EU Countries by Elle Griffin

Multi-country Civilizations are Good, Actually by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Should We Create More U.S. States? by Elle Griffin

It’s Time for Thomas Jefferson’s Village-States by Bryce Tolpen

Matera as the Future of Village-States by Elle Griffin

Grassroots Movements are Building Garden Cities by Stephen Mackintosh

An American Case for Building New Cities by Jeff Fong

What if Your Side Hustle is Being in Congress? by J.K. Lund

Digital Nomads Could Create Network States by Olivier Roland

How We Achieve the Borderless Future of Terra Ignota by Elle Griffin

If you’d like to support the project, the digital edition is available for a suggested donation of $5 or you can purchase the print pamphlet for $10. Both options are available using Metalabel, a platform that allows artists to collaborate on projects and share the profits between them.

See you next time—peace.

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I once saw him live, in person. It was on Copacabana beach in Rio, World Youth Day, 2013, a few weeks after he had become pope. Somewhat out of the blue, I had been invited to speak at a panel on “Jesus and the Environment” as part of the week’s festivities. (Perhaps an early rumbling of the spirit and interest behind the famous Laudato Si’ encyclical, still two years yet to come.)

Have you ever stood in a milling crowd of over one million people? A daunting idea but, in this case, a happy crowd of mostly young people, jubilant, expectant, singing and chanting at times, as though awaiting the arrival of the greatest soccer star of all time.

He eventually arrived late afternoon in the Popemobile after a drive through the streets of Rio. Given the traffic, our cab couldn’t quite make it to the beachfront so we had to exit several blocks early and walk the rest of the way. As we got out, our cab driver smiled at us and shrugged. “Papa” he said, gesturing toward the crowds filling the streets.

It was clear right away something was very different about Francis, especially his frequent exhortations to comfortable Catholics of the global North to “go out to the peripheries.” As an Argentinian, he was himself from the peripheries, a country which had known an economic crash, a seven-year “dirty war” in which 30,000 people were disappeared, and many thousands living in favelas near great wealth.

He spoke of wanting a “poor church,” just as his namesake St. Francis of Assisi came to symbolize. This idea did not sit easily with many American Catholics, especially those still in a triumphal mood after the fall of the Soviet Union, given Pope John Paul II’s role in those events.

A few friends and I noticed this disconnect with the U.S. Church and undertook to publish a collection of essays in 2015 called “Radically Catholic in the Age of Francis,” with contributions by laypeople MT Davila, Tony Annett, Mark Gordon, Sam Rocha, Nicholas Lund-Molfese, Matthew Cooper, Michel Bauwens, John Medaille, Matthew Tan, and Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, among others.

That same year, Francis visited the U.S., speaking to Congress and holding up the legacies of four exemplary Americans: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day.

Of the four, Dorothy was surely the least known, even to me at that point. Solidarity Hall went on to publish an anthology of articles about her in 2016 called “Dorothy Day and the Church”, based on a conference at the University of St. Francis in Ft. Wayne Indiana.

My podcast co-host Pete Davis and I next did an interview with Rosalie Riegle, an historian of the Catholic Worker movement, in which we talked about Dorothy’s impact on American culture.

And for our new podcast, Lost Prophets, we spoke with historian Kelly Johnson about Dorothy’s co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Peter Maurin. (Recommended also: our conversation with theologian Mike Budde on Catholic social teachings and American empire.)

Such was the influence and impact of Francis, not only on the Church’s membership but on the world at large, that an excellent doc film made by Toronto’s Salt and Light Media in 2019 was called “The Francis Effect”.

With so much more to say on all this, I want to end for now with a small memory, related to the Francis effect and the way it took hold right away in his papacy.

At World Youth Day, young “pilgrims” were arriving at Rio’s airport from all over the world, an estimated three million in all. Many were from Central and South America but there were flag-brandishing delegations, as I noticed on Rio’s beach, from seemingly everywhere. Even including, say, Iraq.

A kind of quiet fervor was noticeable in the way groups would stroll the city, singing, talking to local people, praying together publicly.

Here’s an example. A new friend I met during that Rio week recounted an incident which I dearly wish I could have witnessed in person. Among the ocean of arriving visitors to the Rio airport was a delegation of young people from (I believe) Canada. They were crossing the airport to reach public transportation downtown when they noticed a delegation from Iraq and immediately stopped to speak with them.

Within seconds, the Canadians seized this moment to drop to their knees and to ask the Iraqis for forgiveness for their part in destroying the country in the Iraq War.

The name of God, as the title of one of Francis’ books suggests, is mercy.

And as Francis said in his Message for the Fiftieth World Day of Peace in 2017, “May we dedicate ourselves prayerfully and actively to banishing violence from our hearts, words, and deeds, and to becoming nonviolent people and to building nonviolent communities that care for our common home…Everyone can be an artisan of peace.”

And may his memory be a blessing.

See you next time—peace.

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I’m afraid I’ve left Solidarity Hall’s Street Catholic section quiet for some time. But a recent retreat experience has restarted my engines. Which is exactly what retreats are supposed to do, of course.

My newfound energy comes out of spending three days with a group of about forty peace activists of various ages and experiences. Before the weekend, I knew only one fellow attendee, my great friend Edgar Rivera Colon (his brilliant podcast is here), who among other guises is a mystagogue, a guide of souls.

Back in early December, he invited me to a weekend at the mountaintop Kirkridge Retreat Center in Bangor PA, in the Poconos. Here’s Edgar’s description of the background to this gathering:

Sixty years ago, Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic and scholar, Thomas Merton discerned the moment to ask, what are the spiritual roots of protest? He convened a retreat with some of the leading faith-based nonviolent activists of the time, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan, John Grady, Jim Forrest, Tom Cornell, A.J. Muste and John Howard Yoder, among others. Martin Luther King, Jr. intended to participate but travelled instead to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

This is the famous retreat held over Thanksgiving weekend in 1964 at Merton’s Gethsemani abbey in rural Kentucky. The agenda Merton proposed would not be about strategy or tactics of peacemaking but rather an exploration of the spiritual roots of that work.

Merton identified three themes he recommended for reflection:

1. conscientious objection to war (a practice in which Catholics in 1964 were not yet as well represented as Mennonites, Quakers, Church of the Brethren);

2. the challenge of technology (especially nuclear weapons);

3. and a provocative question, By what right do we protest?

In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, followed by Pope John XXIII’s “Pacem in Terris” encyclical on nuclear nonproliferation, Merton had moved beyond the goals of most peace advocates of the time. Instead of merely eliminating—or at least reducing—nuclear weapons testing, he had come to see the task as complete disarmament and the total abolition of war.

In these months the peace movement and the civil rights movement were gradually intersecting around a shared sense that new levels of protest would be necessary.

This history is ably recounted by Gordon Oyer (whom I met at the Kirkridge retreat) in the volume whose cover appears at the top of this post. Working from participants’ notes, Oyer reconstructed the spirit-filled conversations which inspired the group to confront the dominating powers and principalities which, we must note, have only grown stronger today.

As Oyer recounts in his book, the three days together at Gethsemani modeled something unusual for its time—namely, interreligious (meaning, at this date, simply Catholic and Protestant!) collaboration for peace work that would blossom in the coming years: the Berrigans’ Catonsville MD draft card burning, the advocacy of Clergy and Laity against the Vietnam War, the work of the Catholic Peace Fellowship with conscientious objectors, the March on the Pentagon, and much more.

When I told Edgar I would love to participate in the retreat, I truly had no idea what was coming. I found myself in a warm group of activists and contemplatives, of all ages and races, many of whom already knew each other well. Many Catholic, some not.

Some of them—especially the veteran resisters—had long ago proven themselves to be fearless people, what you might call “giraffe heroes” who stick their necks up high. People whose last name, I noticed with a touch of awe, was Berrigan.

Several were quietly famous within the American peace community, notably in the resistance to the covert wars of the 1980s in Central America and in the Plowshares anti-nuclear movement. Kathy Kelly, a gentle-spoken older woman from Chicago, recalled a protest action at the School of the Americas in which she was arrested, her hands ziptied painfully behind her before being knocked to the ground while a soldier knelt on the small of her back until eventually ordered to stop. I learned she had been arrested literally dozens of times, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Veteran peacemaker and Catholic Worker Art Laffin described getting in a canoe with friends near the Connecticut navy base where the Trident nuclear submarines were stationed, rowing out to a sub, and then boarding it. The group proceeded to pour blood on a missile warhead, hitting it several times with a hammer (recalling the biblical phrase “they shall beat their swords into plowshares”), and then kneeling to pray before being arrested and carried away.

The topic of the Gaza genocide was also foremost in our minds. Given the history of connections between the Catholic peace movement and the nonviolent organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, it was fitting to have their executive director, Ariel Gold, with us as she described how their work has led to her being expelled from the state of Israel.

I was wonderful to meet Frida Berrigan, daughter of Philip Berrigan and thus Dan Berrigan’s niece. She’s the author of It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood--a funny and striking memoir of nonviolence and family love.

Here’s a taste of Frida’s style, as she’s answering an interviewer’s question whether she is a “lapsed” Catholic:

I’m not lapsed: I am a Catholic in waiting—waiting for my Church to remember the Gospels, to be a justice- and peace-seeking community, to be fully inclusive of women, and to be welcoming to people who are not heteronormative. Pope Francis is a step in the right direction, but there is a long way to go.

Sixty years on from Merton’s retreat and likewise feeling ourselves on a dark threshold, we asked, “Is this a dead-end time? Has every contradiction been pushed to its limit? What is our hope?”

One elder reminded us: we need to imagine our “agitated” ancestors at this moment. And after all, someone else added, “Success is not a name of God. But we can be pockets of creation, seed pods of the new world.”

For a few days, it all felt like the scene in Acts where the tongues of fire descend and suddenly everyone is truly hearing and understanding each other.

Some other observations that I took down:

• “We need to practice enemy love. Which like all love is a discipline. And it always contains risk.”

• “To do this work, you need more than just a good heart and good ideology.”

• “As Grace Lee Boggs told us, the time has come to grow our souls.”

• “We are working at the point where God and the Holy Spirit enter the world system.”

• “We need long obedience in the same direction. It’s like the Middle Eastern proverb: the one who plants dates does not eat dates.”

And possibly my favorite from the weekend:

• “That moment when you realize your individual spiritual journey is actually a mass pilgrimage on your way to becoming an ancestor yourself.”

See you next time—peace.

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An old joke about the slightly fanatical devotion Italians have for their cities is about a guy planning to buy Italian postage stamps. His friend says, “You’re going to buy stamps in Florence?”, looking askance at the idea. He then advises, “No, no—you should buy stamps in my city, Milan. Much better stamps.”

Citizenship as something much more than voting, as an existential sense of membership is an old and powerful idea in many European places but is much weaker, as we know, in the U.S., despite the eloquent urgings of Wendell Berry over thirty years ago. (His “Health Is Membership talk can be found here.)

The once-famous American talent for associational life, so striking to Alexis de Tocqueville back during Andrew Jackson’s administration, has waxed and waned over the decades, lapsing again into decline over the last few decades. (As noted in, for example, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, surely one of the few social science texts which has inspired an entertaining doc film.)

Membership is an attachment that seems to arise organically, almost spontaneously, when conditions are right. It is not a concept easily translatable into practical proposals, as we’ve learned from the failure of all those “red/blue” gatherings which did not actually bridge many divides.

Mindful of these challenges to rebuilding our nearly collapsed civic life, two very talented thinker-activists have just published “City Membership”, a highly readable whitepaper/toolkit offering a mix of policy elements, notable precedents, and strategy advice.

Authors Sam Pressler and Pete Davis argue for rebuilding our communities first from the municipal level, given that it’s pretty much only at that level that we still have some freedom to exercise genuine innovation and practice an authentic politics.

Here are some of my favorite recipes for their campaign to reground us in our own places:

• Mayors should expand accessible meeting spaces and launch a unified space reservation system. This is a modest-sounding proposal to recognize our damaging lack of “third places” where local bonds can develop and even real politics can emerge.

• Cities should collaborate with civic groups to create citizens’ assemblies in which randomly selected (i.e., jury style) groups of citizens deliberate and advise on local issues. This also is a big idea in quiet language!

• Cities can also build up membership in its neighborhoods by creating more microspaces for organic events and meetups, along with microgrant funding.

• The authors push for a much bigger commitment to welcoming new residents, via a “welcoming liaisons” program, a genuinely valuable and practical “welcome kits”, and new resident orientation sessions.

• Civic “homecomings” encourage former residents (including whatever now-“famous” people that might include) are another piece of the authors’ proposed civic ecosystem, somewhat modeled on college homecomings.

• If thoughtfully done, a city “hall of fame” is a way of publicizing a city’s values by raising up authentic local heroes (i.e., not just boosters or the usual business crowd) as a shared point of pride, somewhat on the model of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Most of these proposals, the document notes, have precedents—the Boston Office of Civic Organizing, various towns’ “Old Home Weeks,” the Falls Church (VA) Community Ambassadors program.

To follow the authors’ ongoing work in this vital area, subscribe to Sam’s Collective Tissue Substack and follow the Democracy Policy Network.

See you next time—peace.

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Fred Dewey on Recovering Public Life

A podcast interview with Dorothy’s Place (July 29, 2020)

Elias:

Welcome to the podcast, Fred. We just had a delightful group webinar with you recently but somehow we didn’t spend much time on your wonderful book, The School of Public Life. So that’s what we want to do in this conversation. Fred, how would you like to begin?

Fred:

I’d like to explain why I got so little sleep last night.

Elias:

OK, sure…

Fred:

Which means I am going to start out with something controversial.

One of the things I don't like about activists is–don't gasp, please–is that they’re monomaniacal. And one of the things that I cherish is my enjoyment of culture and all the things that that brings.

So I broke my online streaming virginity last night to join Mubi, which is a wonderful art film site. And I spent more time than I wish to say watching foreign films, one of them being the extraordinary work of the Belgian director Chantal Akerman.

I was thinking about one of your guiding spirits here at Solidarity Hall, Wendell Berry, who talks about what he's learned from farming and everything connected to it. We know that the word culture is one Hannah Arendt talks about and it comes from the word agriculture.

For a single guy like me, culture is like having a family. And it's something I tend to, it's something I cultivate. It feeds me, it nourishes me. It allows me to talk to other people in the community, it’s incredibly valuable.

I mean, there's times when I'm in political meetings when I'm like, “can we just stop and read a poem or something here?” I'm kidding. But because political meetings can be very serious, I'm also not kidding. Because culture is, as you know from having read my book, a crucial part of my life. And it's a crucial part of this thing I talk about in the pamphlet that was really the start of the book, “Polis for New Conditions.” Because this face to face interaction with others is crucial.

In my time as director of Beyond Baroque in Venice CA, I learned something really fundamental about the importance of orality, which is really a fancy word for people talking. I experienced so much live poetry, curating the center. I mean, you know, a couple of thousand readings we did.

When I joined Beyond Baroque, I wanted to run a public space and had written about that for the local alternative weekly, may it rest in peace. They cut out all the political stuff from it. And one of the things about art is that public space is a political thing.

The metaphor for this idea is a table, which is a real world object that you sit around that relates and also separates us. And it's got to be in the world. There's endless lip service to the word public space, but very little real respect for the way in which public space is the space for the life of the people.

So what's the life of the people? Just buying hotdogs and veggie burgers in a public square? It's wonderful to come together that way but for Hannah Arendt that would be called a social gathering. Public space to me is where people come together to govern their condition, period.

Poetry is concerned with meaning, as is politics and culture. These things are woven together. When you’re an activist, it's so funny, the way I've struggled when people ask me for a short bio. How do I describe myself? I would love to take the term you used in the workshop, Pete, super citizen–it was very flattering.

I'm not super although my avatar that I created for the book, Freedom X, was kind of like a super citizen. I vividly remember jumping off the couch in the living room when I was eight years old, wearing my little Superman outfit. And recently I created this avatar, called Freedom X. That was a cultural move in the book. And it was a cultural move in my life because I used it as the title of a column I wrote.

Anyway I took on Beyond Baroque because it was a public space. And this was after I started the neighborhood council work in Los Angeles–they were completely separate tracks. Most of the Neighborhood Council people have probably never even read a poem and they probably don't go to movies like I do. I mean, I love movies, I was up until way too late last night watching them. I've even worked on movies.

And I just think that the point of this is that politics is about all of us. It's about ordinary people. It's about people who are living their lives, who are really stressed for time. They've got this thing and that going on.

And these are all things they can bring to bear they should bring to bear in politics, coming together with others and trying to figure out how do we have better conditions? How do we govern our conditions, because there's so many processes geared to steering us away from doing that. It's like, politics is what we see on TV, politics is what we see at political conventions, in political parties, in the White House.

Well, where's our politics? Where's the politics for the people? Where's the public life of the people? And that's why the book starts out with “What about the people? And we don't realize the stakes here in this confusion.

So I wanted to take on a cultural center where I could bring people together, people who were interested in poetry, but I also brought in Robert Fisk, the wonderful international journalist, as well as amazing poets from Asia, North Africa, South America, Central America. And more importantly, people from around Los Angeles.

I realized last night thinking about this interview, that I actually have some weird need to dig down to the roots of things. There's a wonderful Swedish philosopher Sven Lindqvist who wrote a book called “Dig Where You Stand”--it’s the foundation of a whole historiographical movement.

The Importance of Place

Pete:

Yes, it’s wonderful, I just learned about it last month. It's unbelievable, tens of thousands of participants. Tell me if I'm getting this right, Fred. Lindqvist basically argued that you should research the deep history of the area immediately around you. So if you're working in a factory, you should look into the strikes that happened 40 years ago in that factory.

Fred:

Exactly. I find it fascinating because Lindqvist put it so simply in his manifesto. And yet his idea is extremely threatening, because our whole system is geared to keeping us from standing where we're standing and knowing what's underneath where we're standing.

And this is why Wendell Berry or Christopher Lasch or some of the other guiding spirits you cite at Solidarity Hall are so important. Because if you can't learn about and take responsibility for where you are, and then commit yourself to that–and that's the hard part, committing yourself to it–you're screwed.

OK, I've wandered over about six different topics, but what led me to mention Lindqvist was one of the key aspects of running Beyond Baroque–which was learning about the town of Venice. And learning about the Venice poets and learning the history of that building and learning about the history of the community, bringing in those historic literary figures, having them read with us, publishing them, bringing in the local neighborhood council into our theater space.

I knew that these things were stitched together, and that culture is so important for understanding history. If you can give people a way to recover what they've been robbed of–I know that's a bit harsh, but I really feel that. I end the introduction to my book by saying, I found myself in the middle of an undeclared war.

I really felt like being grounded in the neighborhood was almost impossible. If you wanted a pothole fixed, fine. If you were okay with the community watch group, fine. If you're okay with the various bosses running the neighborhood, fine.

But a real neighborhood is more than that. And a neighborhood has history. And to understand that history, you sometimes need poetry, or you need film, and you need gatherings most of all. But our society, our world is so barren of these things.

A Different Take on U.S. History

Elias:

Fred, I want to go back to the book and your wonderful historical analysis of how we got to this place. From the New England town meetings down to today’s two party cartel. Could you give us here a brief overview of that historical theory that you unwind so wonderfully in the book. It’s a big story, I know.

Fred:

And yet it shouldn't be a big story.

The beginning is the Mayflower Compact, when people came together and made a compact to govern their conditions. It was all the males on the boat, so obviously there were a bunch of people who were not at that compact. They got to New England where they learned from the natives, watching how the natives governed the land, and tended for it and cared for it. So anyway, New England birthed this new form, and it was completely new. John Locke, the great apostle of the social contract theory, actually wrote his stuff after learning about this neighborhood form of government in the colonies, New Englanders coming together to meet once a week, once a month, discussing what's happening in the town, face to face. Farmer John is grabbing the land of farmer Tom, and they have to negotiate all this and make laws in the town meeting, since there were no laws.

So people were held to account if somebody was screwing somebody else. Economically, they had to deal with it. Okay, so this started in the mid-17th century with Plymouth settlement which you could describe–thinking of Jamestown’s plantations and slave trade–as the anti-plantation.

The people on the Mayflower started this practice of town meetings, and then they spread. There were clashes, but there was a lot of comity. And it was troublemakers who started the clashes with the Native Americans, with whom there had been a lot of communication back and forth.

Interestingly, the British were not so happy with these town meetings, because they tended to make people very independent. They realize they don't need an overarching government sitting on top of them telling them what to do. So the farmers, mainly farmers, they were very ornery and this became a problem. And Boston was the place where the clashes began, that we all know so well. So. So the British tried to impose their empire on New England and failed.

At this point, the New Englanders began to abolish slavery–there was some slavery in New England which is also seldom told. So these people decided they needed a larger form of government as the town meetings spread. There were other settlements–mainly in the South–that were not based on a town meeting. And that became a big problem.

But the New Englanders formed a government. We know about the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution with its Bill of Rights. Meanwhile there was the problem of the south where there was no town meeting form of government but there was a little problem called slavery. And the Constitution said a black person was only three fifths of a person so this is really a grievous problem, the racial inequity of it. It has big future implications.

And this is just not discussed. I mean, we hear about reparations. Okay, I understand that, let's get together and figure it out. But the problem with being three-fifths of a person is that you're not a person, first of all, and the two fifths that's missing is the important part, which is governance, intellect, opinion, experience. The other three fifths are labor, and unpaid labor on top of that, so it's just it's it's abominable, chattel slavery, it is the most disgusting form of social and political organization on Earth.

And the Americans perfected it. And not only did they perfect it, they modernized it, another thing you don't hear about. So the Confederacy which formed out of this slave power, this enormous, built-up wealth that tremendously benefited New York City and New Haven where the insurance companies were. The South said we believe in the Declaration of Independence, we believe in freedom, we believe in rights for some of us.

And the debates between Lincoln and Douglas are amazing on this subject, because Lincoln is so sharp. He's like, well, Mr. Douglas, you believe in freedom, but you don't believe in freedom for everybody? What is your freedom worth? It's full of stuff like that, Lincoln was brilliant which is why he went so far.

So the Confederacy, which had erected itself on this heinous principle, was defeated and a lot of people died. It was a very bloody war and that should tell you something about how strongly the New Englanders especially fought. Because for them, it was heinous, an outrage.

And it wasn't just Lincoln, it was Frederick Douglas and all these others, right up to Malcolm X, who has this wonderful quote, something to the effect of “nothing has damaged white people more than having these shuffling ‘yes, massa’ people”--it has destroyed the white people of the United States. Very interesting thought. And Lincoln made observations like this.

So New Englanders hated this system. There was a wonderful film some years ago called Gettysburg. Everybody should see it–I think I saw it five times. And Joshua Chamberlain from Maine leads the battle. And what was the battle about? The meaning of freedom, this terrible, degraded word that is so misused and propagandized.

The problem here is we need to reclaim the words we need in order to govern ourselves, we need that word freedom, we need to take it back. Just like we need to take back citizenship and naturalization and various other words.

So the Civil War was a battle over principles. And over the meaning of principles. What do these principles mean? What does the Declaration mean? Lincoln, with a lot of help and sometimes even pressure from many decent, honorable people who cared about human beings and many very amazing Black folks, they somehow managed to pull this thing out of the fire and put the union back together. And then they launched Reconstruction, one of the great liberation movements in human history that is never described as such.

Eric Foner has done some great work on Reconstruction, following in the footsteps of his amazing historian father, Philip Foner. So we have buy-in for “a government of, by, and for the people”, thanks to Lincoln. That is about as simple as you can possibly get. It's a great axiom. I try to say it to myself every morning. So the principles won, to a great extent, but Lincoln was killed.

And he was replaced with a cracker Southerner Andrew Johnson, who then proceeded to fight reconstruction at every step. A lot of Republicans, people like Thaddeus Stevens, still fought back, so Blacks in the South got some independence, but then it was undone and reversed.

And most important in this reversal, I believe, was the Supreme Court’s adoption in 1886 of a reading of a case called Santa Clara County v. Southern California Pacific Railroad. Everyone's probably heard something about the idea of corporate personhood. This is where it started. But the discussion today does not really delve into what the meaning of this horrendous maneuver was.

Southern Pacific Railroad was one of the first real cartels, which means it was a monopoly, it was controlling the railroads. So one of the counties out west sued them. I've never actually read the entire decision because the decision is not what's important. What's important is what the Supreme Court Clerk did. And I just wonder what family fortune came out of that bag of cash. The clerk inserted into the description of the meeting a phrase indicating that the consensus of the meeting was that corporations are persons. It was not a legal decision. It was inserted by the clerk in collaboration with the Chief Justice whose name I refuse to mention.

Pete (laughing): You're probably the only person in America who refuses to mention his name…

Fred:

Yes, I refuse…

Pete:

Should we mention him for you? It was Judge Morrison Waite, the infamous Waite.

Fred (laughing):

Ugh, my ears are bleeding.

Elias:

May he live in infamy.

Fred:

Well, his legacy lives on with us. I'm becoming more and more militant on this–it basically destroyed the country for the future. Now, there's been huge resistance to the principles embedded in this one-sentence maneuver.

This is politics, folks, this is how it works. Somebody inserts a sentence in the Supreme Court decision. And then the next 150 years, you're trying to get it out. So there is not just one original stain on this country. There are several stains. And this is a big one.

And why is it a big one? Because I believe one of the parties, most likely the Democrats, were behind this and also because–and here’s something that few people know–our parties are corporations.

So what they snuck in was the idea that a conglomeration of people, in private out of the public’s sight, out of public reach, have the rights of the Bill of Rights. Which means the freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. You can't abolish them, you can't criticize them, you can't stop them, you are simply F **** D!

The consequence of this was a kind of cartel political structure for the United States, and the subsequent court decisions confirmed this non-decision as a precedent.

When Corporations Were Radical

One thing to remember is that corporations in the United States originally were radical in nature. This is something else we don't hear much about today. A corporation was the people coming together, in a New England town, saying hey, we need a bridge, we're all getting stuck in the stream. So the people come together, and they form a public entity which can then be dissolved by the people in the next town meeting, once the bridge is built.

This is what was changed in 1886, this principle of public life, and it became a secret. And this is the worst part of it, this abomination. And what I argue in the book–which I don't think anyone else has ever argued–it was kind of a deduction.

When you put 30 people together, and you give that group the rights of one person, who's gonna win in a debate? It's like saying, okay, the 30 people over there have as many rights as I do. But there's 30 people there. So it's absurd, because I should have as much right as the 30 people. In other words, I, as a citizen, should have as much right to abolish Exxon as the 300,000 people at Exxon–not me personally, but we individually coming together, we have the right to govern our conditions. And that means to establish and to abolish, not just watch TV.

So this is my theory, my intuition–this extended and revived the three-fifths principle. It made everyone in the United States a slave. And from there, I mean, it took a really long time because the people revolted, they arose. There were fantastic, multiracial movements. You know, I mean, there were so many great people, the stream and tradition of liberty and freedom in this country is still powerful and strong.

But that little decision is standing there in the way. It's what's blocking the people's power, because the people will never, ever be able to have as much power as secret and private agglomerations of other people that have rights to not be dissolved, to not be attacked or critiqued. And this is what the two parties rest on

Elias:

This is what you call in the book “the cartel”.

Fred:

Yes. People might be familiar with the term monopoly. But actually the term cartel is more precise, because it's something set up by the government. Yeah. And for a contemporary example, where did Bill Gates get his deal? He got it through DARPA, the Defense Department program. And his mom was working for the Democratic Party. So Bill got some very special favors, shall we say.

Microsoft for a long time was a cartel. These are no longer corporations formed by the people in assembly to address public needs. The entire structure of the society is upside down, like science should be dedicated to informing the people about what's available, what's possible, then the people make their decision. They say we want our rights preserved, you know, all the things that people do when they come together. And then we build our technology, we build that bridge across the stream. And if it washes out, we rebuild it. We reform the corporation, but once the bridge is built, we dissolve the corporation. I can tell Pete is on the edge of his seat with a question…

Pete:

Yes, just to respond to that, I totally agree. I worked with Ralph Nader for many years. So I've drunk the true Kool Aid, or I guess it's the water of truth, on this. Which is that corporate supremacy is strangling our democracy. If I had to push back a bit, I do wonder if we risk misguiding people if we say that there was this moment of a flipped switch in 1886. And if we got that fixed, or if we repealed Citizens United, or if we say everything went wrong with the Powell memo…

But I do think the lesson we need to teach people is that there needs to be a civic wave that displaces the corporate wave. I kind of buy Eugene McCarraher’s argument that corporate capitalism is a counter religion, a counter politics. We don't appreciate it enough, how it’s seen by its practitioners as a set of things that give you meaning, a set of default options, almost a religion unto itself. And the only way you can fight an idea is with an idea.

Fred:

Yes, and you're absolutely right to bring this up. These corporations are not truly public. And we need public control of the corporations. There was a weak effort in that direction with things called public utilities. But the point here is the life of the people and this wonderful term called free enterprise. Anybody who runs a small business knows who controls the levers. It's not the small businesses. It's not the enterprising Americans and it's the enterprising Americans that built this country. They built it.

So the corporations are enemies of free enterprise as far as I'm concerned. And an assembly of people to govern conditions is a free enterprise. We don't need to have a history seminar here but we have to understand the gravity of this situation. And that's why I make the link to slavery.

Because we are in effect in that horrible condition. It's very interesting that the word capital etymologically comes from the word chattel.

What if you were to begin to think about the possibility that capital is actually not the friend of free enterprise, in the way that it's accumulated and concentrated? And that actually, wealth is what we all build together when we need to get something done?

Imagine if we had an internet as the original scientists envisioned it–as a community-built enterprise? It would be totally different from what we have, a lot more wonderful, and with a lot fewer sinister elements.

So the point of this argument is not to make people feel powerless. It’s to make them realize they have the power. And this is what we were talking about in the workshop a few weeks ago. It's the people that make these systems function and work. So why can't we govern the systems? That's all I would ask.

Pete:

I have a favorite Lincoln quote about this. At the Wisconsin State Fair, before he was in the election. Before he was president, he was at the Wisconsin State Fair. Among many things you hit the nail on the head with is that this kind of radical Lincoln is not appreciated. You read his full speeches, and it's all about this idea of free labor. And that free labor is against slave labor, but it's also against wage labor.

About this time Karl Marx used to write him letters about this, which I think people don't appreciate. I'd love to send the current Lincoln Project, which is made up of a bunch of Never Trump Republicans, some of Marx and Lincoln's correspondence.

I think Marx was writing for the New York Herald at the time. And Lincoln at the fair is talking about how they’re learning all these things about how to own their own land. And about how we need to all come together and teach each other and then you're gonna use these skills to have your own piece. And when you have your own piece of land, and we're all together in this, we are protected from–and here's the quote–”crowned kings, money kings and land kings”.

The crowned kings are the British Crown during the American Revolution and today’s government, the money kings are the New York financiers that tried to control things, and the land kings are the Southern plantation class.

Fred:

But also what happens right after Lincoln is killed is the ranchers out west who Teddy Roosevelt went out and fought for, the small ranchers, who were fighting the big ranches. So that land problem carries on from the plantation south.

Pete:

Fred, can I ask one more question? One of the things I love that is so apparent as you talk is that you're from this tradition of civic and radical democracy that I can only explain through this one metaphor from the open source community. It’s called the cathedral versus the bazaar. How I basically interpreted it is there's one way to think of politics, which is there is some perfect utopian cathedral out there. We need the perfect expert engineers to build the perfect thing alone. And the dream is we're all just scientists trying to discern some perfect cathedral.

And the only problem with our situation today is how distant we are from the perfect cathedral. And I think that's totally wrong.

Democracy is about the bazaar: it's about all of these people in all these shops and meeting in between them. They can be taken down and put up anywhere, full of life. And there's no way of saying what the perfect bazaar is. It's only measured by how lively it is. That's the democracy I love. And I think you are from that tradition. Am I wrong about that?

Fred:

No, you're right. And very well put, Pete, especially the Lincoln quote. Yes, that's really prescient, it tells you something about a freedom tradition in this country. James Baldwin has a wonderful quote about how “we need to squeeze water from the rock of inheritance”. An incredible quote, which tells us that our inheritance is a rock and how do you squeeze raw water from a rock? He of course was talking about slavery, but also many other things.

What Makes Us Secure?

Elias:

One last question and then we we're almost out of time. On the other side of what Pete was describing–this wonderful, local communal feeling we get in the neighborhood assembly–there are people listening who might say the idea of government at that scale handling public safety makes them uneasy. It might be risky. And in the book, you make a very specific comment, which was slightly startling to me and really got me thinking. The comment was “self government is our only security.”

Fred:

Right, that's the fundamental first principle.

Elias:

You mean, we don't actually need the military industrial complex?

Fred:

Who won the American revolution against the greatest empire on the planet? It was farmers, farmer Joe and farmer Tom and their suffering wives. I mean, absolutely, self government is our only–and I emphasize the word only–security.

And it's because it fosters enterprise, as Pete was talking about, and innovation, and solidarity. And it is unbeatable. It's the great principle. Locke did his version of it and Martin Luther King did his version of it. And Malcolm X.

One of my teachers said, look, this system is just unreformable. But you know how you could reform it? You let Black people have their own self-governing structures, and that will percolate throughout the entire system. And we'll change the system in the direction we want it to go.

And there's a great truth in that, because the people who have the least power are the first people who should have self government. We're learning so much from the Black community, they're teaching the whole country and the whole world. Because they understand the freedom principles. So self government is our only security.

My teacher, Harvey Shapiro, taught me this term first principles. And I think people on the left need to reclaim this because there's actually just one principle–the one you just stated. I am so appreciative that you mentioned it because it is the basis of my historical analysis.

But importantly it's also what steered me through the neighborhood council fight in L.A. Because I realized even when the system was trying mightily to thwart us through all kinds of gimmicks and magic shows and smoke and mirrors, and it was ferocious, the only thing that kept my head screwed on was this: that there's no security unless you govern your own conditions. It starts there. Everything starts there.

Elias:

And the practice of self government, as the title of your book suggests, is itself a school?

Fred:

That's the most important part of it. Because you learn about what it means to govern your own condition. It's tough. In the webinar you held with me, somebody asked, “Fred, you said power is easy. It's the easiest thing. But if power is the easiest thing, why is politics so hard?”

It's hard because we don't have what Hannah Arendt called the space of appearance, we don't have the space to come together, to find out our condition, and then to do something about it.

And that's why self government is the only security. If you can't talk to somebody else who is suffering, how are you going to answer them, because you don't realize there's other people suffering the same way you are. We're all suffering under these conditions. And if you can't talk to other people and find out they're having the same problem, then you'll never get together to fix it.

And so this goes directly to addressing the problem, as I talked about in the book–the subject of remedy and repair. Repair is the big thing that we really, really need. When I speak of revolution in the book, I am talking about something peaceful. I'm not talking about heads on pikes.

In L.A., all we did was change the law in the city. Now that was hard. But it actually wasn't that hard at all because the system is so blind. It doesn't know what's going on. It manufactures one reality after another, which gets into the subject of the next book, which is propaganda, that it really doesn't know what it's doing.

And Arendt did a wonderful book about Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, who couldn't think. Why couldn't he think? Because he was a career climber, because he grew up in a culture that had no self government of the people at all, no accountability. He could invent these massive schemes that were just absolutely horrific without any recognition of what was going on. He couldn't, as Hannah Arendt put it, stand in the shoes of other people.

And I like to think of the town meeting principle versus, let's say, a kind of proto totalitarianism–the clash of these two principles is what we're facing right now. Can the people come together?

First of all, they have to have the space to do it. Most don't, some do. It's still very strong in parts of the country. But this practice of understanding that self government is our only security versus all these other claims, like “technology will solve our lives”, “the market will solve our lives”. No, no, no.

Take eight people in a block coming together and saying, wow, things are not going so well. What are we going to do about it? And that's where they meet the wall, the bulldozer. That's where they meet the local city council that couldn't give two you know whats about them.

So the problem is: how do the people reclaim that understanding that their self government–together with others–is the only security. There is no other security.

Elias:

What you’re saying reminds me that one difficulty with some neighborhood assemblies is the lack of neighborliness shown in their fear of their own neighbors. It’s a great obstacle to building anything if we have this propagandistic notion that we can't trust each other. So is your new book going to be touching on that?

Fred:

Well, that's really interesting. You've just planted a thought in my head, which I hadn’t really put together. Because one of the texts I wanted to use as a piece I wrote on a really scandalous term–the “n” word plus “ology”--coined by George Wallace in 1968. He was losing the election because his opponent was being a bigger racist than him–and Wallace was not originally a racist.

But this ugly term came out of Confederacy days. And the idea was: when out campaigning, you don't just holler the N word, you promise the moon first. In other words, you say, I'm going to give you everything–like we heard in the Trump campaign. I'm going to give everybody jobs, I'm going to get out of the wars, I'm going to protect your healthcare. I'm promising you the moon.

But then you add, “these bad guys are after us”--and that's what he used to break all of his promises. And Hannah Arendt says promises are the only thing that keep the society and the body politic together. So he broke all his promises.

When you promise the moon and holler the N word, you divide people. That's why I talked in your webinar about these poetry programs in which we brought together the neighborhood, getting people in L.A. to cross town and talk to each other and not to be afraid of each other.

One of the participants in the webinar said, What about somebody sitting next to me who is totally opposed to what I want? Well, hello, that's politics. But you can't just stop there: you got to say, we're all in the same boat. We're all together in this world. So let's work this out because we want to protect the world we want.

Everybody wants to protect their community. This is why I love the idea of neighborhood councils. Because everyone wants to protect the neighborhood. But here we come back to that originary principle, self government is the only security. Everyone–including the people ranting and raving at each other–they also believe this. They just have a different idea of what self government is and what security is. But it's the same principle.

And so your question is really good, how do you deal with this fear? How do you deal with the hatred that is stirred up by politicians, daily hatred, and 400 years of grievances? How do you deal with this? That's a great question.

What If We Had Rich Lives?

My belief is–and this is was the point of Shapiro's amazing comment about giving Black communities self government–once you do that, once there's a space where people have power to govern their conditions, I really firmly believe things get worked out. And not only that, it ripples outward. It's so powerful.

And I was thinking last night, what if we had rich lives? Like, what if we had rich neighborhoods that were full of the differences that fed each other and inform each other, as per your wonderful quote earlier, Pete.

What if we had a rich world? What if we had a world where all the knowledge formation wasn't locked away in the ivory tower? What if we had a rich world where enterprise was rewarded and protected? What if we had a rich world where people were educated? These are all things you need for self government and if you demand self government, you also demand the resources to do it. Those resources include comity, friendship, understanding, knowledge…

Elias:

Fred, that’s great, I think that's a final vision for this conversation.

Fred:

No, no, that's just the beginning!

Pete:

Democracy is never final!

Fred:

That’s right, thank God!

Pete:

The bazaar continues!

Elias:

Thank you friends, we will ride again.

See you next time—peace.

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July 8, 2020

Note: This post is an edited version of the full conversation which can be viewed on the Solidarity Hall YouTube channel here.

Because this is a lengthy post, you may need to click the three-dot button to expand the post in full.)

Part 1 of this series can be found here.

Elias Crim:

Welcome, everybody, I'm Elias Crim and the director of Solidarity Hall. Joining me for this conversation is my friend and co-host, Pete Davis.

Pete Davis:

Glad to be here.

Elias:

Today, we're talking about politics and democracy at a moment when we may be feeling a bit of what's called democracy grief. But we will also be talking about authentic power and where it comes from, or doesn't. As Hannah Arendt once said, there are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself is a dangerous activity. Here at Solidarity Hall, we're always working to make this connection between thinking and action. So that's very much part of our view of public life.

Now I'd like to ask Pete to set this up and introduce Fred.

Pete:

Thanks, Elias. We are so glad to be joined today by Fred Dewey, a political and cultural activist from Los Angeles or, as I like to refer to people like him, a super citizen. And is often the case with super citizens, people who see freedom as participation in power, people who take responsibility for co-creating our shared world, it's hard to describe them without a laundry list of the projects they're involved in. Because when you start taking on the role of self government, you get involved in a lot of things, but we will try to highlight a few of yours, Fred.

From 1995 to 2010, Fred was the director of Beyond Baroque, a cultural and arts center in Venice California. He was the founder of the Portable Polis, a public participation project in which people do close readings out loud of texts by Hannah Arendt and others, and discuss the texts.

Fred has sponsored multiple dozens of these working groups, as he calls them, in California and across Europe, at community centers, squats, schools, art spaces, among other places. And here's my favorite—the neighborhood councils project he did in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Rodney King uprisings in 1992, leading a decade-long and successful effort to establish over 100 of these councils in the city.

And here's my personal connection to the neighborhood councils since hearing about them. I have asked every Angeleno I've known about the neighborhood councils and they know them, they love them. Maybe it's the type of friends I have that are involved in civic life. They say the councils are a very big part of Los Angeles civic life. It's often the first thing they tell you to do when you have an idea is to go to your neighborhood council--which is only there because of Fred Dewey.

Fred is also the author of The School of Public Life, the most splendidly formatted memoir I've ever read. It contains thoughts and ideas, even poems, from his decades of civic action.

Fred Dewey:

And there are several rants in it in case you feel sleepy. (Laughter.)

Pete:

So, Fred, I'm so glad to have you join us. And we want to get into your personal background in a moment.

Fred’s Analysis of Where Power Is Located

But I'd like to jump in with a question first, and then we'll bounce back to your personal background. In your book, The School of Public Life, you have a section called “What Is Power?” And you say, power is often thought by people to be something that's out there, that you need to build power, seize power, gain power, that we don't have it.

But you say, that is not the case. Here's a quote: “Power is actually the easiest thing, for it is what we already have.” Could you talk to us about that? Because I think that's the theme of the moment and everything will stem from it. So what do you mean by saying power is what we already have?

Fred:

Well, I was, like many, raised on people like Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, the French theorist, who basically lines up power as a disciplinary and punishing form. And I, through various good graces, got myself to Montgomery, Alabama, and had been doing some research on the bus boycott, or as Martin Luther King called it, the non-cooperation movement.

And one of the things that I found striking about this, and I discuss it at some length in the chapter “Polis for New Conditions”, was how the boycott revealed to the completely disappeared Black segment of the population that they actually had enormous power.

And this really was a revelation, because King’s agenda was pedagogical, as much as anything else. He was teaching his people that they actually had power they didn't even realize they had. So all they had to do was say no. No, we're not gonna ride those buses. So they didn't.

And all of a sudden, the city came to a halt, and what I would call a kind of preliminary or preparatory nonviolent revolution, because suddenly the people realized how much power they had. And this is really important.

In fact, this is probably the most important part of the book, because we really are taught from our first infant cry, that power is over there, it's somewhere else, it's not in us.

And this is simply not true, even if it's been mercilessly beaten into us, like a form of enslavement. And once you start to think about it, the greatest thing about this moment is that we actually have some very important teachers in the country now called BLM. And virtually the entire Black population of this country understands freedom principles better than most white people. And they usually can't even practice them. And they are beaten mercilessly to make sure that's the case. But Black people understand the structure.

Now, what is this educational process? I was studying the boycott, and realizing how important this was. Rosa Parks was a very well schooled person in the school of public life, she spent time at the Highlander folk school, training with Myles Horton. And she knew very well what she was doing, as did Fannie Lou Hamer. And these people, we owe so much to these people. And to this new generation of people who studied, I might add, the LA riots and what happened after the police acquittal, which is seldom mentioned as the cause of the riot.

And we are facing a similar situation soon with our lovely Mr. Derek Chauvin, whether he will ever be truly prosecuted, charged and put away where he belongs. If there's an acquittal there, we're going to have a similar situation.

So what is power? That essay was an attempt made while I was in Berlin and feeling really distraught. I've been through several gentrification battles around New York, the East Village, and also in L.A. And then I moved to Berlin where I was really struck by how fatalistic the Berliners were about this. I wanted to speak to these people to try and tell them, you live in Berlin, you can fight to keep what you have.

Because there was an extraordinary freedom that I felt in Berlin which was slowly being chipped away by the political establishment and its economic forces. And I just wanted to say, I know many of you have read your Foucault. And power is a bad thing, it’s what we're trying to get out from under. And we think we need to get it.

No, you have it--you don't need to get it. And the people who are telling you, you need to get it, are the same ones who want to lead and control us. We already have it, it's between us when we gather. It's there inherently. Because–and this is the most important part–we're the ones who keep these systems going. This is the lesson of the Montgomery boycott. Those people realized for the first time, we're the ones who keep all these systems going. That's power.

Elias:

This is a bit like when some people discovered during the pandemic that we had “essential workers.”

Fred:

It's very similar. And of course, Myles Horton of the Highlander Center got in a lot of trouble, being branded a communist and so on. He did a lot of work with labor organizing, which I prefer to call worker organizing. And of course, the communists were very involved in the South back then. But one of the things that they were focusing on was worker power and labor power and these kinds of things.

Real Power is Not About Political Parties

Elias:

You have a quote in the book, Fred, that goes, “Politicians hate us, the people, because we are their rivals.”

Fred:

That's right. Sorry to give you the news, folks. I think the question of why they would hate us points to a primordial hate. I know it's sobering to think about this and it's not true of all politicians. There have been great politicians in this country.

But we are their rivals, because the politicians are the ones who claim to have power. And their claim to have power is very important for us not realizing we have power. And if we have power, then everything changes.

All of a sudden you realize power is not climbing your way through a political party. This also applies in corporations, climbing your way up the ladder, whatever. Power is about being able to do things to make things happen to govern your own condition.

Politicians don't like that. They fight mightily to get those positions of power and they're gonna hold on to them, whatever they have to do. And this is where the political parties come in, because the parties are a tool to basically keep the people out. We are the politicians' rivals and that's why people get beat up and shot.

But as I say in the book and elsewhere, power is actually the easiest thing. Let's think about that for a second: power is the easiest thing. You just have to understand that we're the ones who keep the system going. Not the politicians, not the economy.

The Political vs. the Social

Pete:

I'd like to share this parable from Zygmunt Bauman with you and hear your thoughts on it. Bauman said that politics has become like living in an RV park. You pull up your RV to your spot in the RV park. Maybe it’s a low-quality place, very few amenities. But you know, at its best, everyone's safe, and they all have their spot and no one bothers anybody else. You have your TV and your kitchen and everything’s inside your RV.

But sometimes the electric plugins and the water hookups don't work. And you start complaining. You walk over to other people’s RVs and knock on their doors and ask, are your electric hookup and water faucet working? And they say no. And they say why don't we get together and walk over to the manager's office and bang on the door and demand they fix the electric hookup and the water hookup.

Bauman says this is the best case in politics today: you get a bunch of fellow RV owners to go knock on the management’s door. And then they fix the water hookup and the electric plugins. And you call that politics. And you think oh, that was a big moment there, when there was a “revolution” and we got the hookups working again.

But what never happens is you don't co-create the RV park. You don't become a community. You just have shared private grievances that you demand the managers of society solve. And that's our best case scenario. Worst case scenario is nothing solved.

How do we move beyond the best case scenario politics being coming together every so often to demand that the managers fix the minor things that we expect? How do we get out of the RV park and start actually kind of having a shared community that we co-create together?

Fred:

Bauman is an interesting figure who talks about liquid modernity. I wrote about him in a piece on the Nazi’s “degenerate art” show in the 1930s. He had written a really wonderful book called Modernity in the Holocaust where he suggested that this barbaric thing that happened in Central Europe was actually at the heart of modernity.

I guess the first thing I would say is that his example is social. And this distinction between the political and the social is really crucial to any kind of understanding of politics. An RV park is a social, proto-urban form. It's also usually full of poor people, each of whom has found a way to cobble together the cheapest form of living they can find. I guess the problem with Bauman’s parable is that it's cute but it doesn't speak to people who are living in insufferable conditions. It doesn't speak to suburban homeowners who are not. And besides, RV parks are like gated communities for the poor. I mean, the point of a city is that the boundaries, if the political system hasn't stepped in with armed guards, are not fences and walls. And so the RV park is like arguing that democracy is for white trash, basically.

Pete:

I guess the point he was trying to make, Fred, is that politics has become people bringing their collective private grievances together, and demanding managers solve them for them. As opposed to taking ownership with self-government and broadening the sphere of areas that we take control over. That's what I guess he was going for with the metaphor.

Fred:

It's a good start but again, I'm not sure...

The Fight for Neighborhood Councils in L.A.

Pete:

I'd love to ask you something about this. Horace Mann once said, Be afraid to die until you've won a victory for humanity. And I feel your establishment of neighborhood councils in L.A. is one of the great victories for humanity.

And one of my favorite points made about civics was by the great Deweyan philosopher Roberto Unger. He says Americans love talking about civics and community and public life. You go to any government department, and often it's a cult to De Tocqueville and a nation of joiners. And every politician, if you ask them, Do you like community, they say yes.

But nobody in America puts their money where their mouth is in the sense that they don't demand that the government fund and enshrine civic organizations and participatory organizations. So they leave it to everyone to have these participatory things start up and then run out of funding because they never enshrined them in law, or in a governmental budget.

We can think of the great moments where we have enshrined things, like the NLRB enshrined unionization within law. With the neighborhood councils, you said, I'm not gonna just start a nonprofit, where we're gonna get one or two neighborhood councils off the ground and in seven years, it's gonna run out of funding. And it was a nice experiment.

But you made a demand of the city that these neighborhood councils be part of the Los Angeles City Charter, and now it's part of the L.A. budget. And they still exist, so many years later, because of that. So I'd love to hear about that fight and why you chose to make it a political fight, changing the law and changing an institution.

Fred:

Let me start by saying the L.A. neighborhood councils are not perfect. But the original representation in Los Angeles was one city council person for 200,000 people. This was beyond an outrage.

Now, it's more like one rep for 2000 people, 3000 people. I mean, the councils are not strictly political. We knew we could never ever get them into the city charter if we made them political. It would never happen.

We've studied the neighborhood council systems set up elsewhere and they always went for advisory power. My theory was, you give the people a little power, and they taste it and they want more, thank God. There had been councils, but they were set up by the City Council. And they were really only advisory and just part of the political machine.

A neighborhood leader would be put on it and then effectively they’d be bought off. And this is a huge problem in the black community. It's a problem everywhere in the country.

So with the neighborhood councils, we weren't demanding them. I knew and the other people who really wanted them as well, we knew the city had completely broken down. After the officers were acquitted, it broke down. I remember breaking curfew and driving around, seeing these columns of smoke. And there were white looters. Nobody ever mentioned it but this was a multiracial spree.

And people freaked out, as rightly they should have, because it was very clear that the government was totally out of touch, had beaten us over the head and then let off these goons. And it was just outrageous. It was so outrageous that everyone erupted. And so the councils came out of that. People wanted power. They didn't realize they had it, but they wanted it.

So I wouldn't say it was a question of demands: it was a question of rights. We have the right to power. We have the right to self government, every person in this country, every group, every community, workplace, neighborhoods, art centers, the dentist's office, whatever. And so, the council movement which frankly, at the crucial moment, was like two people, was not a movement. We called it a movement, we tried desperately to start a movement. I have some problems with the notion of movement, because I think power needs to be in place. It needs to be where you live, that's where you meet people who aren't like you, you have to deal with them, you have to work things out.

So the neighborhood council idea was power in place. And power in place as a tool to revive community. I did a research project in South Los Angeles interviewing quite a few people–it was some weird academic project, I can't even remember what the reason was. But I was so struck by a couple of the people I met. One woman who was super active in moving the trash bins and cutting the hedges and sweeping the sidewalks. And the police hated her. They tried to set her up, they tried to frame her. They would shine their spotlights in her living room window. She was just the sweetest lady, about 70 at that point. And I said, you know, we're fighting for neighborhood councils, so you can have something for your neighborhood. And she was like, yeah, right, like the system's gonna give us anything.

Well, Mark Ridley Thomas, the political boss who ran the neighborhood, had a neighborhood council. But it was part of the political machine. And what we were talking about was power in place that is not connected to the political machine. In other words, it's based on where people live.

And this principle applies across the board. It's not just what we think of as politics, but in every facet of our lives. So do you have a say over your conditions? Can you say, I don't like these conditions, I want different conditions, I demand different conditions.

And power that can change our condition is in the ability to recognize in the moment where we are now, what we’re doing to hold up the system, to make it work, because it's not working.

So we need to say, No, we need to pull back and to withdraw. And we need to learn the lesson of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. And the neighborhood councils are very, very far from this. But there's a lot of No’s happening in Los Angeles. You see it every day now.

And those No’s are part, oddly enough, part of building a neighborhood and building power in place, because you're showing the problem with one of the fundamental tenets of democratic theory–which is that it's based on consent. There's no consent in this country! None. Does anybody disagree with me? There is virtually no consent. So the system is not built on consent, it’s built on something very different.

And we need to recognize this and figure out what it means. Taking responsibility for your lives and for the lives of others is not a burden. It's a beautiful thing. So neighborhood councils were a way to deal with the breakdown of the social order in Los Angeles. It completely broke down for about three days: the entire city was in anarchy.

And people said, What do we do? This is why it was beautiful. They had the chance and the inspiration to ask that question. And they came together across lines and neighborhoods to say we need to do something and we need power. We need to have some control in governing our own condition.

Now, the problem here was that the communities that most needed power were the minority communities that had been crushed, beaten, impoverished, riddled with drugs by the police department for one. So how do you convince people that don't believe in the system and suffer under it every day? How do you convince them to believe in politics. It's really hard.

One of the standard ways is to have a movement. The Black Lives Matter movement is very powerful because people are coming together and making claims and they're getting results.

Role of Cultural Spaces

Elias:

Fred, because you describe yourself sometimes as a cultural activist, what has culture and the arts got to do with all this serious stuff?

Fred:

Everything. I mean, does anybody have a poem handy? Let's read it. It has everything to do with it! (laughter)

Elias:

I know Beyond Baroque in Venice CA was and is today a kind of a civic center, a commons. You took a poetry center to mean a lot of things beyond poetry.

Fred:

Yes, and poetry, at its core, is about meaning, whatever our experiences with it in school or whatever. And one of the great contributions that Arendt was when she talked about politics being about meaning. That's the bridge. Now that has to be played out.

My taking on the poetry center was about trying to ground public space in a place and make as rich as possible a tapestry for people to realize they could reclaim their own experience. One of the programs I'm most proud of was the World Beyond series in Leimert Park–the center of Black cultural life in L.A.--which I crafted with Michael Datura. We would have these alternating readings at our two centers. And we both were like, man, this [geographical] segregation, it's impossible, you can't break it. It's unbreakable.

Of course, segregation is only a symptom of something else, which is the white power structure, but how do we alert other neighborhoods to our experience? How do we get their experience into our experience?

What we devised was a system of meetings of poetry, made by the poets in each community, Leimert Park and Beyond Baroque in Venice–which was thought of as the white poetry place, which it was to a great extent, but not altogether. And we would mix up these programs and move them back and forth from center to center. So Black poets would read at Beyond Baroque and bring their audience, and then the white poets would read it at the World Stage, this amazing, fantastic place in Leimert Park. And we expanded this out across the city into two citywide festivals. We brought in the Asian American community and Latino and Chicano community in East LA.

And we built up these crisscrossing poetry events in which the audiences from each community would drive across town, heaven forbid, and sit there with people they're scared to death of and share a common experience of beauty in words and language that often they did not recognize or maybe considered untrustworthy and wrestle with that. I mean, to me, that was totally political.

To wrestle with language, the language that you have, to hear the words that mean something, in a different neighborhood and community, not as a book, not as poetry day, but on an artists’ stage around which people can meet each other and find them as non-threatening. This is where difference begins to speak.

And that speech of difference, not just difference itself–is so crucial, because that's where you suddenly begin to experience reality. It's exhilarating. I mean, friendships were built out of these events that endure to this day.

When Michael and I first met to discuss this, something that we bemoaned and wanted to address was not being able to change anything. You know, tokenism is a huge problem in this country–in the art world, in the law, economics, the White House, whatever. So how do you get past tokenism to something real?

Poetry is actually a very good tool for that. It can be intense if people are real. I went down to the World Stage about two months ago and hung out for a music night, just amazing. Two or three people I knew were there, one of whom I'd hired from the World Stage to run our bookstore–A.K. Toney, just an amazing poet. His skin was as black as night and you can be sure that that guy experienced racism, even from his own community. I learned so much from A.K. and he learned from me. And now we're friends. I think what we need is more friendship. How do we build friendship? That's where poetry can come in–friendship and politics. That's a big subject.

Segregation By Class

Grace Potts:

I would just point out that segregation is terrible in the northeast, much worse than it is in the south, I think. Because it's not de jure segregation, even though it once was as recently as the late 70s and 80s. But it's a de facto segregation that's enforced along on class lines. And because in the United States, class functions as a proxy for race, right? The lines are hard and fast. I grew up in Connecticut, and those lines around class are very, very firm. There's more class solidarity amongst the upper classes than any other solidarity I've seen.

Fred:

Which includes Black and white folks.

Grace:

Yes, it does. There's an interesting story that was unfolding about eight, maybe 10 years ago, in my old neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut. There was a big kerfuffle because a bunch of middle class white teachers and hospital workers wanted to buy a house together in my old neighborhood, which was a very fancy neighborhood. And the neighbors freaked out. And they freaked out because they thought, we can't have all these people sharing a house together. Next thing you know, we’ll be like those frat neighborhoods over by the university. We can't have that.

But in many cases, you already had four families living in those homes: the owner’s family and the four families that work for them. You know, their live-in nanny, their live-in gardener, the live-in chef. Right? So four and five families live in all those homes on that street. But only one of the four families pays the rent. Their objection was because these people were not of the same class, they could not be in this neighborhood. Full stop. That was their objection, even if they wouldn’t say it in those terms.

Fred:

Is there a neighborhood council there?

Grace:

Gosh no, they don’t need a neighborhood council. They already own the city council.

Fred:

Haha, that’s right.

How would you propose two people who want to go in different directions and also have different skin color meet? In other words, Claire's question is where do we find the common?

Grace:

It’s in a shared need. The thing about the RV park metaphor is that, if you move into this RV park, and the water works and the electricity works, there's nothing to prompt you to meet. But when there's a storm and the electrical system no longer functions, that's your opportunity to form genuine community, right? It's like the classic moment when you need a cup of sugar. And ideally, your neighbor has the same culinary habits as you and uses sugar, right? Or maybe they don't?

So that it's those moments of crisis that present us with an opportunity to develop genuine shared community. I find it's an opportunity, though it's not a foregone conclusion. A lot of people do things that are contrary to building community and developing relationships in a crisis. So it's not a foregone conclusion. But I think that's when the opportunity presents itself.

Fred:

Well just to stitch together a couple of these questions, is there a space for that? Yes, you learn about your neighbor when you need the cup of sugar. And I think the question is, to some extent, those are private actions. So the question is, where are the public spaces for us to come together to talk about our conditions? That's really the issue.

How do you manage it so that it isn't just a cup of sugar between you and me, but a regular space where people can come together and get a handle on what's happening on their block, with their council that doesn't represent them, with a police department that is basically there to intimidate and divide.

Connecting Across Neighborhoods

Elias:

I think I know somebody might have a project that describes what you're asking for. Mike, I’m thinking of the post you made recently about the Writers Workshop in Chicago and what's going on with the Kola Nut Collaborative.

Mike Strode:

Yeah, I was just commenting here about the importance of culture as a sort of medium or context. And the way that factors into the work that I do with the Kola Nut Collaborative and timebanking is that I came to those spaces through other organizing spaces that were centrally focused on the work.

And the challenge is if you go to a space where you only see certain people when it's time to do a particular type of work, then burnout is very natural in that space. It's like, I don't really want to see you, because every time I see you, it's something I have to pick up. And I don't want to pick up that thing.

So the importance of culture in this space is like, there's something else to do, there's something else that we are here for. And so the Writers Workshop was that. And one of the other things that I was thinking about as you and Rebecca were talking was just the challenge of the context of Chicago, which has not gone very far from King’s day. I was just listening to one of my interviews with Stacy Sutton of the UIC Center for Urban Planning and Public Administration.

One of the segments that I pulled out to share as a piece of content at the Writers Workshop was the notion that if you study urban planning and you're from one of these communities that has historically experienced redlining and marginalization, your entire experience of the study of urban planning is a critique of that discipline–because planners were always at the table intentionally developing and designing communities that created these margins, these edges and these lines, the entire design of it.

So here’s the challenge for me. I can go outside in Southeast Chicago and I can rally my neighbors who might have different class dynamics, and we can have a conversation. And I have neighbors who have different relationships with the police. I have a much different opinion of the police than my elderly neighbors. But I've lived next door to them and there's certainly no animosity, there's a way that I can exchange with them.

So I don't have any cross-racial dynamics in my own neighborhood, right? But because of the design of the city, I would literally have to travel 45 minutes away from my home to get into an actual conversation that's cross-racial. And when I get over there, I probably don't want to talk to those folks because they've never really been interested in that conversation. So there's a lot of dynamics I would have to think through.

Fred:

My question to you, Mike, would be how do you build a space which is a regular place where you know you're gonna meet people from another neighborhood? That's the core of this whole thing. And I found poetry was a very helpful thing, because pretty much everyone, at least in that world that I was part of, had a poem. I mean, probably everyone attending this conversation has written a poem at some point, and sharing those is very helpful.

Let's say Bob's girlfriend was reading at the World Stage in Leimert Park, Bob would drive across to hear his girlfriend. They’re both white and they're on a program with a Black person, an Asian person, a Native American, a Latino. So this audience and the poets are completely mixed. Little groups are all there to hear their poets, their people.

So I think the question I would pose here is how do you get buy-in? How do you get people to drive across town and spend some time in a neighborhood of people that don't look like them.

I think what people discover is they want to cross the city, they want to be in a different neighborhood, to have a different experience. Because when you have a different experience, you're more grounded. If you only hear the experience of your white brothers and sisters, you're not going to be any more grounded. That's where poetry comes in. That's where art and culture comes in. I don't know, what do you think? Am I crazy?

Mike:

No, I do not see any crazy in you (laughs). There's a small area of concern that I find, which is just that we have a few of those spaces and some of them travel around neighborhoods to different parts of the city as cultural containers that do some of that work. The challenge is that the people who visit those containers are probably not the people who need the greatest level of work. And the people who might need the greatest level of work, probably need to do some work before they come to the container. Because there's a great challenge that a conflict will occur if they come in there undone, as it were.

Fred:

You're absolutely right. But what Michael and I were trying to figure out was how you get friendship. Your partner or your friend is reading in a foreign neighborhood which is like a foreign country. You get in your car, and you drive to the foreign country. And you're like, OMG, everybody here looks different and scary. And that's true across the racial groups. If you're a black person driving around in a rich white neighborhood, you're scared shitless, because you don't know what's gonna happen. So you drive across to this neighborhood, your partner or your friend reads and you have the experience of a bridge. And I think that experience of a bridge is what this is about, because if we don't build those bridges–this is going to sound liberal, how can I do this without making it sound liberal? But I can't, Rebecca says no, I can't. (laughs)

Okay, how about friendship? Will that work? Maybe?

The Beauty and Danger of the Present Moment

Elias:

We're running out of time here, folks, so let me give you one last one, Fred, which is about the present moment. I heard a Black actress say recently, this kind of a spontaneous moment [the George Floyd protests] is so powerful because it contains both beauty and danger. And so what's your sense of this public space? It's not one in any formal sense. But the protests have taken public spaces in a way that would have been absolutely unimaginable six months ago. Can you make an estimate of what is likely to come after, now that we’re seeing a global collection of protests in public space?

Fred:

What's going to come before is how I would rephrase it. We need to look at the before part of all of this–the history. But I think the danger issue is really real, especially since we have a cracker in the White House. A MAGA cracker!

That's the danger. I think the danger is from the political class or as I like to call it the political caste. It's not a class struggle. It's a caste struggle. Arundhati Roy has been talking about this for a while. Blacks notice the plantation society was a caste society and they are still stuck in it in the south. In the north, it's a caste society we have. And the political caste along with its economic subunits. I think we have to be very shrewd about this, because that's the danger. It's not us. It's the political people: they stir up conflict. And it's not just one party, it's both parties, keeping power by stirring up conflict. That is very dangerous. That led to a civil war.

It is a seldom recognized fact of political history that the South was not only run by one party, it was the first totalitarian state in modern history–totalitarian at the end, not all the way through. It was run by one party that is still very much half in charge of the country, the Democratic Party. And as Malcolm X said, a Democrat is a Dixiecrat in disguise. And that disguise is very well worked out.

So this is the danger in my view. I think we're in for a rough ride. But that rough ride, it's been there all along. It's just like Patrice Cullors and some of the other people in BLM have pointed out, we were just trying to show half the population what we deal with every day. So they took it up town, God bless ‘em. So in terms of the danger argument, this is an extremely violent country.

But where's the violence coming from? Do you hear this question asked? No, nobody asks this question. Back in the 1960s, they rubbed out eight or 10 of the most important energizers of civic life. Has anybody figured out who did that? I'm sorry to be controversial here but violence is pandemic, that's the real pandemic, and it saturates. It's at the heart of lying, it's at the heart of image making. Now it's the heart of just about everything. And so the danger that we have to watch out for is from the political order, in my view. And we must be vigilant, because we are going to be pulled into something if we're not.

And that was what was so beautiful about the neighborhood council movement was that we were pulled into a real mess. And then people started coming together.

This is something that Arendt talks about so beautifully in the latter part of her life, the spontaneous nature of council revolution. When a society breaks down in a political order is illegitimized, as I would argue it is, the people start to organize. So we look for where the people are organizing. And it's not just organizing a movement, it's like organizing in place, to get involved civically, to recognize that you have things to protect, to realize where the threat comes from.

And it's not just the police–who are working class, many of them, and they are really struggling. Probably 80% or 90%, maybe more–I don’t know, I don't have any cop friends. (laughs)

But I want to hold up one of the reasons I don’t–this was my California license plate, Freedom X. I took it off my car because I got stopped by cops. And nearly beaten.

I think the point here is: the danger is in our being tricked. In the Rodney King uprising, everyone was scared. My neighbor was out on the corner, shouting at the police, arrest those people, they're looting my neighborhood. I was scared. People looked at me like I was the problem when I was walking down Main Street. I understand that I'm not the problem. But I am the problem. I mean, it's very complicated.

So where does the danger come from? I think the danger is in each of us, just like the responsibility in each of us. And to be aware of and talk about real politics, not this baloney of the parties and this cracker in the White House. I mean, it's tempting, you know, and that's what they want us to do. They want us to buy into this party battle. Of course, it's important–we don't want Trump in there. But some others do want him. So what do we do?

I'd say get rid of the parties, they're illegal, they're not in the Constitution, for one thing. They are merely tools for winning elections, they should not be running the country. That's the danger. And if you go back to some of the whites who led the revolution, George Washington, in his final speech, was all about the danger of faction in parties. It's often interpreted as the danger of faction, the danger of difference of groups. But what he was really talking about was the danger of parties. The founders had all studied British history, and the civil war in Britain and so on. And they knew that once you have permanent parties, you have serious danger.

Grace:

Sorry, I know, we're getting close to time. And I just want to note this one thing–this mechanism of state violence that animates a lot of things, like precisely the structures that we're trying to fight against by creating spaces where we can connect with each other. And if I'm really honest about that question of how we can have these spaces, the fact is we can't, those spaces don't exist on purpose, and the unique opportunities that are presented in crisis–and mind you, it's a vulnerable moment, it's a dangerous moment, it's when authoritarians step in–but this is the moment for us to do something, to connect across our genuine needs, and develop the culture of meeting those needs, and to sustain and nurture that culture. And that is art is the mechanism that humans use to nurture and sustain that culture. So the poetry, the music, the experience of those times, is what calls us back into maintaining those relationships that we developed in crisis. And really, for the crises we face jointly right now, this is the space.

Fred:

Yes, yes. I just want to say one thing we need to do, it's beholden on us to plan for the future. Because if we only operate from crisis to crisis, then we are being controlled by the crisis. So we come together and we say, what is it that we want? Grace, what do you want? You know, what is the governing form that you want in your neighborhood? Let's just do pie in the sky, let's start planning for the coming moments when power is available. And if you're not ready to propose a structure, then the people that had the power before will take it right back.

So the trick is to be ready, not just to operate in crisis, but to say, what do we want? What would we wish for? As Claire pointed out to me in a wonderful song by the Beach Boys, wouldn't it be nice? Let's figure out what would be nice. Not from a point of view of crisis, because crisis is about violence, crisis is about being faced with something where necessity is so prevalent.

Grace:

Yes, I'm not actually disagreeing with you. But it is crisis that brought forth Mondragon. That's why it exists and persists today. Some of the things that we think are most valuable in our lives were born from crisis. And we took that opportunity to translate what we did in crisis into our everyday lives.

Fred:

But we start meeting, that's one thing that happens. The trick, I think, is to figure out what we want. Because, in Los Angeles, a moment came where the city looked like it would fall apart, not from the riots, but from political secession. And at that point, the political establishment said, Whoa, our power is on the line, we got to give the people something.

And we were there with a proposal for what to give the people. And this is why BLM is so effective, because they have a proposal for what the politicians should give the people. And I think that's our job, wherever we are, to think about what we would want, what we wish for, what we care about. So that in the crisis, when we come together, we say, not just vote for so and so. But like, no, we want self government, we want power, and what are the structures that we want? Okay, a regular meeting place. I mean, the resources of this country are so misallocated. Everybody focuses on Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial complex, which is totally justified. But what he also warned about was the disastrous rise of misplaced power. So how do we get power in the right place? And what are the structures we would want?

Elias:

Jeremiah Day has a good final comment: he says it’s too bad we can’t all go out for a drink and unpack some of this! Thank you, everybody, for showing up. And thanks, Fred, for an amazing conversation.

Fred:

Thank you, all. And long live Solidarity Hall. So great seeing everybody.

See you next time—peace.

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