Bread and Roses in Denver

I spent this morning at a big hotel in Denver, face to face with all the reasons I am happy that I don’t have to sit at bargaining tables anymore, but also all the reasons I miss my life in the labor movement.

I was part of an interfaith clergy delegation that the housekeepers at the hotel asked to come support them as they demanded more respect, better treatment and safer working conditions from their employer. Our delegation was made up of three Protestant Christian Ministers, a Muslim Imam, and me, a Unitarian Universalist (wearing a clerical collar for the first time!! What a weird feeling that was...).

We got to the bargaining room early and had a good time meeting the housekeepers and listening to their stories. They are amazing women from all over the world: Somalia, Ethiopia, Russia, Turkey and many places in Central and South America. Although several different languages filled the air at any given time, the workers clearly understood one another in all the ways that matter most, and the air of solidarity was palpable.

Then the management bargaining team came in, their expensive suits and manicured hands striking a vivid contrast against the bright red union t-shirts and easy smiles of the housekeepers. Each member of our clergy delegation was introduced to the managers and asked to say a few words about why we were there.

It was wonderful to hear my sisters and brothers in ministry speaking from their own faith traditions in ways that were so compatible with my own. Whatever doctrinal or theological differences we may have, it feels great to know that we are united in our commitment to justice for all people.

It is not at all clear how these negotiations will play out. These housekeepers are expected to do an enormous amount of work in an amazingly short amount of time. Although the industry norm is for housekeepers to clean about 13-16 rooms per day, this hotel requires the workers to clean up to 30 rooms per day!!! This breaks down to the expectation that a single housekeeper should be able to “deep clean” (make pristine) a room in about 20-30 minutes after guests have checked out. If guests are staying there for more than one night, and the housekeepers have to clean around them, the expectation is an absurd 8-15 minutes per room!!!

They have to make their daily quotas before they go home, and if it takes longer than eight hours, they simply have to keep working until they are done – and then their hours are cut for the rest of the week so they will not have to be paid overtime. So folks routinely work through their breaks and lunch hours; only to find that even so, they still have trouble finishing their work on time.

I would love to see the corporate brains who sit around designing these quota systems in some remote cubicle somewhere have to clean rooms for a week – for a day even – under their own systems! They wouldn’t make it to lunch time.

The bottom line is this: these women are honest, hard working people – and they are being worked into the ground so that some shareholders somewhere can earn ever so slightly more at the end of the fiscal year. The work these women are doing is not sustainable, it is not healthy and it is not just. I do not know if my support will make a bit of difference, but I will continue to answer every time they call. I feel honored to know them, and my thoughts, my prayers and my actions will be with them throughout their struggle.

And I guarantee that I am going to tip a heck of a lot better every time I stay in a hotel from now on!!!

Most Offensive Editorial Ever?

This morning in the Denver Post, blogger David Sirota prompted me to click on this link by declaring that this is the most offensive economics article he has ever read. Ever.

Now that's saying something! It was hard for me to believe that anything could top some of the economic tripe I've read throught the years, with the gentle sound of blood boiling in my ears. I had to check it out.

While I encourage you, dear reader, to go ahead and read this whole column (you might want to take some saftey precautions first, like stowing away any breakables you might feel compelled to throw across the room in a spasm of helpless outrage), let me whet your appetites by sharing a little quotation first. The column is structured around a list of lessons Wall Street pundit Michael Lewis has learned about poor people over the past few months as he watches his personal fortune stumble a bit because of the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry. The following is a real gem of wisdom that never seems to get old:

"4) Our society is really, really hostile to success. At the same time it's shockingly indulgent of poor people.

A Republican president now wants to bail them out! I have a different solution. Debtors' prison is obviously a little too retro, and besides that it would just use more taxpayers' money. But the poor could work off their debts. All over Greenwich I see lawns to be mowed, houses to be painted, sports cars to be tuned up. Some of these poor people must have skills. The ones that don't could be trained to do some of the less skilled labor -- say, working as clowns at rich kids' birthday parties. They could even have an act: put them in clown suits and see how many can be stuffed into a Maybach. It'd be like the circus, only better.

Transporting entire neighborhoods of poor people to upper Manhattan and lower Connecticut might seem impractical. It's not: Mexico does this sort of thing routinely. And in the long run it might be for the good of poor people. If the consequences were more serious, maybe they wouldn't stay poor. "

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a5lhZkEauCu8&refer=columnist_lewis

Cute, huh? While I would like to believe this column in really just a particularly dark bit of satire, I do not think it is, although I would love to stand corrected. While many of Lewis' columns are less...evil...than this one, he does appear to have a healthy disdain for poor people and for people who (in his opinion) foolishly feel empathize with the millions of Americans who are being chucked out of their homes and onto the streets as we speak.

Blaming the poor for their own poverty is one of the oldest lines in the playbook - but blaming the poor for the investment losses of rich people takes a special sort of gall. It is such an audacious claim that it renders me almost speechless. Oh, how my heart swells with compassion for the noble rich, who are dragged down by the poor ungrateful masses!

As I sit here trying to find an appropriate way to express how I feel about this, only one word comes to mind - one of my grandmother's favourites (although I cannot deliver it with anything like the flair she can...) - POPPYCOCK!

That's right - I'm talking to you, Michael Lewis (unless I am wrong and this really is a brilliant satire; in which case, bravo to you)!

But, when all is said and done, I am still not sure that this article rises to the level of "Most Offensive Ever." There are an awful lot of horses in that race!

For example, here is one of my recent favorites - which I also suspected of being a satire. Which it wasn't, as far as I can tell.

This delightful bit of poppycock (how did I ever forget what a wonderful word "poppycock" is?!) is entitled "The Theory of the Leisure Class: An economic mystery: Why do the poor seem to have more free time than the rich?" This one was in Slate. http://slate.com/id/2161309/

The article argues that poor people have more "leisure" time than those unfortunate people who (nobly, industriously, selflessly) make money by the bucketful - a state of affairs writer Steven Landsberg sees as patently unfair. Interestingly, some of his suggested remedies seem eerily similar to those of Michael Lewis. Must be all those years of drinking the cool-aid.

That, and probably never having met a single poor person, or at least not any who weren't washing their cars or mowing their lawns.

This reminds me of a passage from "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens. Maybe these gentlemen should read it.

"For the first time in her life, Louisa had come into one of the dwellings of the Coketown Hands; for the first time in her life she was face to face with anything like individuality in conexion with them. She knew of their existence by hundreds and by thousands. She knew what results in work a given number of them would produce in a given space of time. She knew them in crowds passing to and from their nests, like ants or beetles. But she knew from her reading infinately more of the ways of topiling insects than of these toiling men and women.

Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and over-ate itself when wheat was cheap; something that increased at such a rate of percentage, and yielded such another percentage of crime, and such another percentage of pauperism; something wholesale, of which vast fortunes were made; something that occasionally rose like a sea, and did some harm and waste (chiefly to itself), and fell again; this she knew the Coketown Hands to be. But, she had scarcely thought more of separating them into units, than of separating the sea itself into component drops."

The Flying Chalices: UUs Ride for Seniors in the Moonlight Classic

Last Saturday, August 18th, over forty Unitarian Universalists from First Universalist and First Unitarian rode together through the dark streets of Denver as part of the Moonlight Classic bike ride.

The Moonlight classic is an annual charity bike ride that raises money for Seniors, Inc., a non-profit that helps seniors live more healthy and independent lives. Our team raised almost $1500. We joined over five thousand other riders on a perfect night for a ride.

Our team was a diverse one, with riders as young as eight and as old as eighty-five, with all levels of bike riding experience. We knew we would easily lose one another in the sea of riders, so we all wore bright white armbands that had been decorated by the children of First Universalist with neon fabric paint. The designs were all various creative takes on the “Flying Chalice” name of our team.

But that wasn’t all – many of us made ourselves even more visible by wearing plastic martini-glasses on our helmets with bright glow-stick inside like flames! So we rode through the night together with flaming chalices bobbing over our heads.

I want to thank all the people who helped make this happen, and look forward to an even bigger, better ride next year!!! If you have a Moonlight Classic story you would like to share, please email Aaron McEmrys at aaron@firstuniversalist.org. I am eager to hear about your experience!

UUNITED Soccer Team: Stylish Even in Victory!

UU Sportswire, Denver. A rag-tag team of Unitarian Universalists emerged victorious after their first match of the season, a well-played game against plucky, “Just for Fun.”

The team, UUNITED, has a vibrant roster stacked with women and men from both the First Universalist and First Unitarian churches. Players range widely in age and experience, but all share the same UU-spirit. Their uniforms are navy blue, with a flaming chalice emblazoned on the chest with a soccer ball rising up from the flames. Very stylish indeed!

In the first half it seemed there were blue jerseys everywhere, with crisp passing, sturdy defending and creative offense on display. Most striking, however, was the playful sense of teamwork, a theme that really sums up this new team.

The final score was 2-0, and the team celebrated with fresh orange slices on the sidelines, and enjoyed the sun. As we were getting ready to leave, a young player from one of the other teams came up and asked, “Are you guys Unitarians?” “Yep”, I answered. “That’s awesome,” he replied, with a smile. Evangelism on the soccer pitch; who woulda thunk it!?

What I found most rewarding about the whole thing is the warm and playful spirit of togetherness that has characterized our time together, whether in practice, in "real" games and in all those moments in between: sitting under the shade of the big trees next to the field, sharing our well-deserved orange slices, or tossing a sun-warmed water bottle to someone who needs it.

The air of goodwill and genuine support of one another is pretty rare, in my experience - especially in the all-too-often testosterone and ego-driven world of sports. As one teammate put it to me after our first game, "It's great to be a part of a team that respects everyone else no matter the skill level. Keeping with that, I look forward to making some finely squeezed juice out of them juicy fruits (the name of the next team we play)!"

I also relish the kind of relationships that develop between us as we play. Running around together kicking and chasing bouncing balls over a big green field encourages a very different way of being together, of relating, than most of us experience in our day to day lives. There isn't a lot of opportunity (or spare oxygen) for deep conversation, but that doesn't mean the relationships are not genuine and deep. The laughter, the high fives, and the pats-on-the-backs are a language of their own, spoken without words - but nonetheless sincere and oddly intimate. After all, where else in our lives to we touch relative strangers so freely?

There are ex-teammates of mine in Chicago who I still feel very close to. This seems somewhat inexplicable, since in some cases I knew them for over a year before I even knew what they did for a living or where they lived! An odd kind of intimacy.

The split-second glances between myself and a team-mate who is streaking down the field is hard to describe - but in that frozen flash in time, we both know exactly what I am going to (try) to do with the ball, and what the receiver needs to do to make ready. Then, when the ball spins off my foot to my teammate's foot, it feels like much more than a ball has covered that distance. In a very real way, something of ourselves has passed between us in that instant. There is a kind of attunement there that I suspect requires embodiment - attunement that requires a more integrated kind of mind, body and spirit relationship than we ordinarily experience in our day to day relationships.

This is not to say that team sports is the end-all-be-all or anything, just that playing soccer now, with these people, at this time in my life - reminds me of how much more there is of me, and how much more I am capable of when I remember to be more fully embodied.

When, the fans ask, is the next game? Glad you asked – UUNITED’s next game will be on September 8th at 11:10am, when we will take on the intimidatingly named, “Juicy Fruits.” The game will be played on Grass Field #2 at Dick’s Sporting Good’s Park (where the Colorado Rapids play). So come on out and cheer your new (and did I mention, stylish?) team on!

While we're on the topic of Quanitfying the Unquantifiable...

I have always been a sucker for real-time counters. For example, when I lived in New York City as a young man, my friends and I used to go down to Times Square and just watch the numbers roll on by. Of course now they are rolling by faster than ever, and soon the clock will run out of room altogether.

But after that last post, I find myself full of awe (and anxiety) at the effectiveness of such counters. I like 'em a lot - and so I thought I would add a couple of my recent favorites.

The first one, at National Priorities.com (http://www.nationalpriorities.org/Cost-of-War/Cost-of-War-3.html is a counter I have been watching since the very beginning of the Iraq war. It not only tracks the financial costs of the war, which are mind-blowing - but also puts in in perpective by looking at how that same amount of money could be spent differently.

The second is one a friend emailed me a couple weeks ago. I didn't think much of it at first, but it has grown on me since, and I find it eerily fascinating. Neither are for the faint-at-heart, but I encourage you to check them out anyway. Iwould also welcome your recommendations for similar counters, which you can post in the "Comments" section of this post!

http://www.poodwaddle.com/worldclock.swf

Leinengen Versus the Ants

For the last few days I have found myself thinking about a story I read long, long ago, when I was a boy. It is called “Leiningen Versus the Ants", written by Carl Stephenson in 1938. I have no idea if this is still commonly assigned in elementary schools any more, but I suspect that for those of us of a certain age, this story might still be stored away on the hard-drives of our grey matter.

The story is about a man, “Leiningen” who owns a plantation in some “wild” part of the Amazon River basin. At any rate, Leiningen, with all the pluck of Colonialists everywhere and at all times (as portrayed in sympathetic literature) refuses to flee with his fellow plantation-owners in the face of a vast swarm of voracious ants, which wash forward like "an elemental--an act of God! Ten miles long, two miles wide--ants, nothing but ants!"

This army of ants, each approximately the size of a man's thumb, marches forward like an unstoppable tide, devouring anything and everything that falls in its path. Leiningen will not be chased off of his property though – not by God or ants ort anything else! He stays to fight.
For those of you who are not haunted by the ghosts of yesterday’s English teachers, the following is a bit of a summary from Wikipedia:

“Unlike his fellow settlers, all of whom have either fled or are preparing to flee, Leiningen is not about to give up years of hard work and planning to "an act of God." He assembles his workers, who are all or mostly Indians, and informs them of the inbound horror. Though the natives are a naturally superstitious and frightened lot, their respect for and trust in Leiningen enables them to remain calm and determined: "The ants were indeed mighty, but not so mighty as the boss." Later in the story, despite suffering setbacks and being given an offer of dismissal with full pay, none of the laborers desert Leiningen.

Much of the rest of the story is taken up with the days-long struggle in which Leiningen attempts to hold off the huge swath of ants. He uses an ingenious system of levees, moats and "decoy" fields to keep the ants at bay. For example, he draws off some of the ants to a valueless fallow field, while keeping a large portion of the others off of the central compound with a system of defensive canals. The ants are initially unable to cross over, but soon manage to build bridges on the bodies of ants who mindlessly sacrifice themselves to the waters. As the bridges of ant corpses begins to reach the near side of the canals, Leiningen opens a series of sluice gates, greatly increasing the flow of water, and washing away the prior ant bridges. He also employs gasoline and other petroleum flammables to great effect; the chemicals not only burn the ants when ignited, but also interfere with their chemically-based tracking and sensory organs.”
In the end, Leiningen floods his entire plantation, simultaneously destroying the ants and reducing his plantation to waterlogged rubble and ruined crops. The ants are defeated, and Leiningen lives on to rebuild. He is indomitable.

To this day, when I think of this story, I can still hear the disembodied voice of some long-forgotten English teacher saying, “And this is a perfect example of the “Man vs. Nature” (or possibly Man vs. God) genre of literature.” Oh the strange things we remember…

It has been a VERY long time since I thought about this story. As a kid, I loved the sense of heroic resistance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It seemed to me to be a very profile of the kind of courage I hoped I would someday be capable of. That’s what I thought when I was nine or ten, anyway.

But this week I have been thinking about this story a lot, and I have been struck by a question that is both intriguing and disturbing. Who are “We” in the story?

For so many years I uncritically assumed that We, “human beings”, “Men”, “Civilized People” – were represented by Leiningen himself, while the Ants represented the frightening forces of Nature, Chaos and all the unknown forces that threaten our sense of control and remind us of how precarious life can be.

This week, however, someone emailed me a link to a fascinating website. It is a collection of artwork by an artist named, Chris Jordan, and can be found here: http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

In this show, Jordan strives (and often succeeds) in trying to capture the seemingly uncountable, unquantifiable and incomprehensible in forms and images that we can make sense of – images that allow us to take in things on a scale that normally makes our minds simply switch off like old fuses in a power surge.

He focuses his attention primarily on consumption. Our consumption. Jordan constructs vast fields of trees used to make the junk-mail catalogues we throw out without reading, gargantuan expanses of the blowing and unrecyclable plastic bags we generate every five seconds, and immense carpets made of the cigarettes smoked by new teenage addicts every day.





I have looked at this website several times now, and have never made it all the way through in one go. Even with Jordan’s effective constructions, my mind starts to falter and sag after just a few images. Not only that, but the scale of consumption is so vast and so clearly destructive, that I my chest inevitably starts to tighten with panic.

Which brings me back to the question I have been pondering this week: “Who is the ‘We’ in Leiningen Versus the Ants?”

Looked at through Chris Jordan’s eyes, we sure look like a tide of mindless, ravening insects – possessed of little more than appetite. But I suspect it is more complex than that.
Are we not also Leiningen? Arrogantly defying Nature, and in doing so, god? Wasn’t Leiningen also driven by appetite? The hunger for control, power, ego and wealth?

In this way, “We” are both the ants and Leiningen fighting the ants. We are the consumer and the consumed. Just as Leiningen destroys his own plantation in order to save it, so our own appetites (so vividly captured by Chris Jordan) drive us to consume and consume and consume until nothing is left except ourselves and one another – which we will then consume as well.

Lest this post sound too dark, there are some positive readings here as well. The fact that we are consumer and consumed; appetite and that which struggles against appetite – this fact also gives us the ability to change direction and to behave mindfully, with intention. We do not have to be mindless, although we often act as if we are.

In the end of the story, Leiningen is left standing in the devastated ruins of his plantation. But the world has not ended, and nothing is beyond hope. With patience and hard work, it may be that Leiningen can rebuild from scratch – and perhaps this time, things can be different. Perhaps Leiningen can be different and so, perhaps - can we.

GOOAALL - Part II: Iraq Wins!

Iraq has won the Asian Cup for the first time, beating Saudi Arabia 1-0!

Ali Adeeb of the Times Baghdad Bureau writes:

Iraqis in different neighborhoods in Baghdad took to the streets cheering and shouting, “Play play Iraq!” and “Stay victorious Baghdad!” after the Iraqi team won the Asian cup today.

In Sadr city people of all ages poured into the streets, walking and driving cars despite the vehicle ban, waving Iraqi flags and singing in joy. People were seen in the streets distributing sweets and soft drinks to the celebrating crowds.

Abu Baqir, one of the celebrating men, said: “Congratulations to everybody. This is the greatest sign of Iraqi unity. Congratulations to all Iraqis. You can see the national feeling, it has always been there, and we hope this winning will be the beginning of the end of sectarianism. This team includes Shiite, Sunnis and Kurds, it is a team of all Iraqis.”

He added: “I swear if it was secure enough we would celebrate for three consecutive days”.

You can read more of this, and other coverage at:
http://goal.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/the-celebration-in-baghdad/#more-137