Category Archives: Social Commentary

The Copper Collar

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Its my 70th birthday. I get to say whatever I want…flat out. I’m too old a dog to worry. 🙂

America is on the leash…in the collar of Big Money.

Free speech is a basic right in America. But some of us are freer than others. Because the Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech. Some of us have lots of it. Most of us have a buck or two to support candidates for public office.

Montanans once referred to “the copper collar” worn by elected officials (federal, state and local), policy-makers, newspaper publishers and editors, journalists, business people, asnd relgious leaders. The copper collar kept them on the leash of the state’s largest employer and wealthiest campaign contributor, Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Montana was one big company town.

Photo of book “Forging the Copper Collar”

Step in a direction Anaconda didn’t like, and you’d feel a quick tug on the leash – a phone call, a note,  a pink slip, or worse. Want to run for office? Here’s the money. Money for things the average Montanan cannot buy, money for the “free” speech few can afford. Money for professional pollsters to learn voter attitudes and what scares them. Money for advertizing agencies that turn the polling data into ads that flood the airwaves, the internet, roadside billboards, and the print media.Money puts candidates and political parties in the collar. On the leash. Candidates who start to sniff to the side of the path on their morning walks feel a yank on the collar, a reminder that the dog isn’t walking on its own. It’s walking on a leash.  The “free” speech of candidates who stray or bite the hand that feeds them soon disappear. It was paid for by the owner.

The American colonies revolted against the ideas of a king and colonial rule. The political idea of royalty appalls us. We think of ourselves as the home of the brave and the land of the free. But aversion to kings and queens doesn’t mean we can’t be fooled into hoping that any one of us can climb to the top. We gripe about the wealth yet we aspire to it, and we think in personal terms we can understand more easily than the complicated matters of economics and arrangements between private and public institutions. The royalty and colonial privilege we love to hate find a way to disguise themselves as just another citizen with freedom of speech.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that corporations are “persons” with the same rights as a voter with “free speech” campaign contributions has put the collar on every candidate for public office. When candidates wear a collar, freedom of speech is a fiction, and the country we love becomes one big corporate town, the colonial town of the new kings and queens.

America is fast becoming a corporate town. We can bark. We can whine. We can vote. But the speech that matters isn’t free. It’s paid for. Democracy and freedom are on the leash…wearing the copper collar.

For a closer work at how it works, click “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult,” an insider’s look at what’s happening to America. Or click  “Confronting Ethical Emptiness of Wall Street” for a powerful piece, including the picture below of the raging bull.

The Wall Street Bull – symbol of ethical emptiness on Wall Street

Every day four or five emails arrive asking for a campaign contribution to fight Big Money. Just a $3 or $5 contribution will make a hug difference, say the appeals. But I know that once I give $3, the next one will be for $50 and then $100, and then…. Makes me feel real small…facing the bull.

But…if I don’t give….

The next time I watch a campaign ad, I’m going to read the small print to see who’s holding the leash to the collar.

You’ll make an old dog happy on his birthday by leaving a comment to promote some discussion.

Glory and Tragedy at Southern Cross

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There’s a sermon on Cable Mountain waiting to be preached.

The View from St. Timothy’s Memorial Chapel

Southern Cross, Montana is a ghost town, a former mining community on Cable Mountain west of Anaconda.  It’s also the site of St. Timothy’s Memorial Chapel, a tribute to the glory of God in loving memory of Timothy Dillon Bowman, the 18-year-old son who died tragically in a car accident following his freshman year at Stanford.

St. Timothy’s Memorial Chapel, Southern Cross, MT

Amid the abandoned buildings of the Anaconda Mining Company, one might say that St. Timothy’s Memorial Chapel stands as a witness to 20th century theologian Paul Tillich’s believe that

…[M]an and nature belong together,

in their created glory,

in their tragedy,

and in their salvation.

– Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations

Here’s the sermon from the pulpit of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, Minnesota, August 5, 2012.

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“…That side was made for you and me”

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This morning my friend Steve asked if I remembered the last line of Woody Guthrie’s folk song “This Land Is Your Land”? Here’s the last stanza. Scroll down to hear it.

There was a great high wall there

That tried to stop me;

A great big sign there

Said private property;

But on the other side

It didn’t say nothin’.

That side was made for you and me!

Behind the high wall of the U.S. Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, join Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen singing Woody Guthrie’s song on the way to “the other side.” And remember to celebrate hope Organize. Organize. And keep on singing.

“Love your neighbor” NOT unconstitutional

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Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia sent this email regarding the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act.

The Supremes have decided:

“Love your neighbor as your self”

is NOT unconstitutional. 

Mazeltov to them and to all of us that, when push came to shove, the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court mostly reaffirmed the notion that fellow-human beings and fellow-citizens owe loving-kindness to each other.

That we owe each other food when we are hungry, a place to live when some bank takes our home away,  money to tide us over when some boss or some bank  takes away our job.  And health care when we are sick.

That notion is rooted, thanks be to God, in our ancient religious traditions.  But over and over, it’s up for grabs.

And I do mean “grabs” –-  grabs of the merely wealthy to be super-wealthy, grabs of the super-wealthy to invest hundreds of millions in campaign ads and lobbying,  to grab still more power…

Even this decision treated some neighbors as not quite worthy of the same respect and loving care as others. This one gave the states a way out of their Medicaid obligations  — to the very very poor. No surprise. If somebody’s gonna be left out, who else?

It’s also true that this Supreme Court has done some terrible damage — that ironically misnamed decision “Citizens United,” worst of all.  And yet I’m tickled that this time Chief Justice Roberts did what his appointer, President “W,”  would not have wanted. The history of Justices whose lives turn out to have a tiny taste of freedom tucked away —  it’s delicious.

So there is still more work to do.  In the New Declaration of Independence from Corporate Domination we sent yesterday in honor of July 4, we mention Medicare for All.  That’s still the fully decent answer.

But for now, take a deep breath, grab your sweethearts and dance a dance of joy.

In the Passover Seder, there is a really strange song. It says, “If we had reached the Red Sea but it had not split, Dayenu! – good enough! If we had reached Sinai but there had been no Revelation, Dayenu! – good enough!”

At one level, this makes no sense. At another, it makes EVERY sense. If we want to transform the world, then we must celebrate each step on the journey, even if it’s only half a step. We know there must be another step; the song has many verses. But if we refuse to celebrate, we will burn out before we can take another step.

Today, right now, rejoice. Tonight, tomorrow, on the FOURTH itself, begin to plan the steps we still must take.

Enjoy the fireworks. They are celebrating one small step of Independence from the Corporate King George.

And — fly the Flag of Freedom. It’s right here.

Blessings of justice and joy —  Arthur

Who is the poorest person you will meet today?

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Written in honor of Dale Robb*.

Who is the poorest person you will meet today?

The senior or teenager who will hand you food

at the drive-through window?  Or tonight when you stay

in a motel, could you leave cash to make the maid

feel good for days?  A tip, gratuity, can let

a worker keep their dignity and pay a bill

as well.  (A teller in a bank, however, can’t

accept a tip–give them fruit, a sweet, they can sell

or eat.)  All folks who earn minimum wage are poor:

be generous, be kind, and share if you have more.

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL June 18, 2012

*I asked Steve about Dale. Here’s what he wrote:

“Dale Robb is a retired Presbyterian Pastor. For 25 years he served the First Presbyterian Church of Jacksonville, Illinois. Was a Campus Pastor at Miami of Ohio, & Presbyterian missionary in Asia.  McCormick Theological Seminay Alum of the year in the 1980s, University of Illinois grad (1943),attended McKinley Presbyterian Church, student officer in McKinley Foundation.  Retired to Urbana, he & wife, Arlene, attend First Presbyterian Church of Champaign…..  Member of the Reformed Round Table.

“The first question in the verse comes from Dale.”

Father Hardon

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Things seem to have quieted down recently regarding the objection of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to a federal mandate to include contraception in health care coverage.

Back in February Catholic News Service (“Obama’s revised HHS mandate won’t solve problems, USCCB president says”) reported on the story. Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, President of the USCCB, “said the bishops are ’very, very enthusiastic’ about the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, introduced by Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb. The cardinal said the legislation would produce an ‘ironclad law simply saying that no administrative decrees of the federal government can ever violate the conscience of a religious believer individually or religious institutions.”

A few days later, my son-law’s neighbor left something on Chris’s doorstep. It was an article from The Catholic Servant about someone named Father Hardon, S. J.  I’d never heard of Father Hardon.

I love the Jesuits. A small group of Presbyterian and Jesuit students met together for beer and theology the last Friday of the month in 1966 in Chicago. The Jesuits are brilliant.

My first impression reading the piece Chris handed me on Fr. Hardon was that it was a spoof, that John Hardon was a fictional priest, or, if the article was serious, I thought it must be misspelling. Surely it was Harden. Or Hardin. Not Hard-on.

I went home and looked him up. There he was…Father John Hard-on.

Hardon seal – Father John Hardon

I found him him on a website dedicated to his memory, including a famous speech of his entitled “Contraception, fatal to the faith?”

“What do we mean by the title,” asks Fr. Hardon, “and what is the thesis of this presentation? We mean that professed Catholics who practice contraception either give up the practice of contraception or they give up their Catholic faith.

“The grave sinfulness of contraception is taught infallibly by the Church’s ordinary universal teaching authority. Therefore, those who defend contraception forfeit their claim to being professed Catholics. Consequently, those who persist in their defense of contraception, deprive themselves of the divine graces which are reserved to bona fide members of the Roman Catholic Church.”

Every one of my priest friends is horrified by Father Hardon. Like him, they are celibate and know how difficult it is to stay morally erect, but, unlike Father Hardon,  they don’t walk around calling men and women who use condoms, diaphragms, or the pill “mortal sinners” who have placed themselves beyond the graces if the Church or its God.

My old buddies from the Bellarmine School of Theology welcomed the Second Vatican Council as a breath of fresh air, as did my Protestant classmates. They are now holding their breath because old Father Hardon is back with a vengeance.

None of my Catholic friends – priests or laity – has lived by what Father Hardon believed was an infallible teaching on contraception. Even if, like Father Hardon, they’ve  never worn a condom, they’re no longer entitled to the graces of the Church or the grace of God.

The elevation of Fr. Hardon (he’s been nominated for sainthood) causes me to grieve the loss of something very, very precious. I grieve it for all my catholic friends. I grieve for my own loss…. And I wonder…

I wonder if my religious conscientious objection to militarism and war might exempt me from paying my federal income taxes. I think I’ll write Rep. Fortenberry for inclusion in the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act.

Take Away our Numbness – A Memorial to Sydney Mahkuk

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These words were spoken on the sidewalk where 12-year-old Sydney Mahkuk died. Community leaders and Sydney’s family asked me to bring some kind of meaning and hope to the sidewalk where Sydney had been dumped from a car by the side of the funeral home.

November 4, 2005

Gordon C. Stewart

Executive Director, Legal Rights Center, Inc.

Once upon a time a proud people lived on this land. They called themselves Ojibwe, Anishinabe, Dakota, Lakota, and Winnebago. Occasionally a Menominee would visit.  They lived close to the land.  They hunted. They fished. They gave thanks to the Great Spirit for every day.  They saw themselves as part of nature. They rose with the sun. When the sun went down, they gathered in a circle by the light of the campfire.  By the light of the campfire, they listened to the elders, whose stories broke the silence to told the children who they were.  The children went to bed in safety.

Shabbona, Potawatami Chief, c. 1775 – 1859

They were people of great dignity.  Their ways were good ways.  They respected the land. They respected each other.  They honored their elders.  They cared for the children.  They trained their youth to become adults.  They died with dignity.  They were buried with honor. Earth was their mother. Gitchi Manitu, Wakan Tonka, the Great Spirit, was the common Grandfather of them all.

Then something terrible happened.  A plague came across their land.  It took their land.  It stole their culture.  It laughed at their spiritual practices.  It called them names.  It tore down their tepees, their longhouses and their sweat lodges.  And in their places the plague built big buildings – tall buildings, arrogant buildings, skyscrapers, they called them, that invaded the sky, turning the land into something it is not.  The Ojibwe and Dakota who lived here no longer rose with the sun.  They no longer gathered around the campfire.  They no longer heard the stories of who they were.  They knew only what the white plague had taught them – that unless they joined the plague, they were nobody, and that if they challenged it, they would lose.  They would die.

And so they lived in grief.  A sorrow too hard to bear.  A loss too great to carry.  And the plague offered them relief to numb the pain – firewater that would make them happy in spite of their despair.  Drugs to drive away the memories of who they were.  Escapes to make them numb.  To numb the pain.  Opiates to freeze their tongues.

The elders no longer acted like elders.  The parents were numb with grief.  There were no aunts.  No uncles. No cousins.  No grandparents.  Nobody dared to be a neighbor.  The children were left with no campfire at night – no community to tell them the stories of who they were and who they were not – and so the children and the youth drifted out into the night in search of themselves.  Locked in lonely prisons of confusion, the youth no longer knew Mother Earth as their Mother; they no longer knew how to give thanks to the Great Spirit for the day.  They no longer went to bed with the sun.  They wandered the night in search of the community they had lost and never known.  And the gangs and the drugs and the alcohol offered them the promises of a better life that was the kiss of death.  Ecstasy was no longer a way of life – it was a pill that would make them higher than the skyscrapers that ruined the once humble landscape.  And sometimes the alcohol and the drugs and the gangs that had promised to numb their pain took their lives and they were found in the morning as the sun came up.  They were found by strangers.

Sydney Mahkuk, RIP

Then one day a girl named Sidney, a 12 year-old Menominee-Portawatami, was found beside a funeral home on Columbus Avenue. How she got there nobody knew.  How she died, nobody knew.  But everybody knew why.

The community had unravelled.  It had become dry bones in the valley.

But on that day that the people gathered on the sidewalk on Columbus Avenue to mourn her death, there was a sound from heaven – a rattling, the sound of dry bones coming together, a resurrection of the once proud community. And as a result Sidney Mahkuk’s tragic death the community came together as it had not come together since the plague had begun.

On the day they gathered on Columbus Avenue – a street named after the European explorer who had not discovered their land – on that day, the community woke from its sleep.  It came together – Ojibwe, Dakota, Menominee, Potawatami, Lakota, African-American, Somali, Hispanic, Hmong …and, yes, even the descendants of Columbus.  And on that day, because of a little girl’s unexplained death, they stood together arm in arm and said “Enough” to the plague.  “Enough” to numbness.  They said, “No more. No more. No more death on Columbus’s Avenue.”  And it was more than words.  They looked up at the sun again and really saw it…as if for the first time. They looked down at Mother Earth and saw it, as if for the first time.  And they gave thanks.  Then they looked at each other and they said, “We are a proud people.  We will take back this land.  We will be the people who honor our elders.  We will be the people who support the parents and care for the children.  We will be the people who guide the youth.  We will be a people of hope, not despair.  We will be a people of love, not hate.  We are all Menominee-Potawatami. We are all grandchildren of one Grandfather.  We are the people who care for each other.  We are the people who refuse to go numb.  We are the people who will teach the children of Columbus – starting right here, right now… on Columbus Avenue – how to live in a good way with Mother Earth, in a good way with Iraq, in a good way with the rivers and the sky, the ozone and the sun.  We are the people whose spirituality will help to cure the cancer of the spiritual and economic plague that has left our people in despair.

From that day on, November 4, 2005 at twelve noon, 12 year-old Sidney Mahkuk – our daughter, our granddaughter, our little sister, our friend, our neighbor – would be forever remembered as the one whose deadly silence on this sidewalk spoke so loudly that we could not stay numb.  And we took the city back and brought it back to life.

Merciful God – Wakon Tonka, Gitchi Manitu, God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Jehovah, Allah, Grandfather, Great Spirit who breathes life into all things and receives all life at the end – Your’s is the air we breath, the land on which we walk.  Assure us that your love is stronger than every power to divide or hurt us.  Receive your child Sidney into your eternal care.  Wrap your arms around Glenda, around Sidney’s brothers and sisters, around all the defenseless children of the night, around all of us who mourn their plight and mourn Sidney’s death.  Re-kindle the light of faith and hope. Take from our souls the plague of hate, self-hatred and despair.  Take away the numbness and the apathy.  Make us a people of healing.  A humble and quiet people, but a proud people of love and spiritual strength. A people who are not afraid to feel the pain, who really feel the loss, who feel our feelings and do not fear them.  A people who dare to believe that every tear that falls from our eyes flows into the common stream of human suffering that leads into the ocean of community restored.  A people secure in the knowledge of your love.  Amen.

The Death of Sidney Mahkuk

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November 10, 2005

I stood there on the spot where she was found a few hours before.

An 11 year old girl dumped from a car onto the sidewalk…next a funeral home.

There were tokens of love and remembrance – a teddy bear, a Snickers bar, some fresh flowers, a poem, evidence that fear and intimidation could not stop the love of those who dared to reclaim that piece of land.

Sidney Mahkuk did not die of an overdose. She was overdosed. She was murdered. I wondered how it could happen. I wondered, as Sidney’s older sister would ask later at an impromptu memorial service on that same spot,

“Was she lonely?  Was she scared?  Did she know we cared?  Did she know we loved her?”

I never met Sidney. But I felt very close standing alone hours after her death on the spot where someone(s) had dump her body to send a message perhaps to someone else that you’ll end up here – at the funeral home – if you mess with us.

Then it dawned on me why this felt strangely familiar. This violence was not unusual.  It was ghastly, but it was not unusual.  Ask the prisoners who died at Abu Graib. Ask the parents of the Sidneys in Baghdad and Felujiah and Kabul. Ask the mothers and fathers of the young Americans who have lost their lives for what they were told was the noble cause of disarming Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and promoting freedom – American mothers and fathers, Iraqi mothers and fathers whose teddy bears and Snicker bars and poems are ignored…because nobody dares to stand there and say that violence and intimidation are not acceptable.

Sidney’s death is unique. Sidney was unique. One of a kind – a Menominee and Potawatome. Sidney was a stranger on her on own native soil. She was American Indian, one of America’s First People, as the Canadians say. But as a stranger on her own soil she is like many of us who, weeping and bewildered, seek to find our way in this strange and foreign land we call America.

The tears falling on the sidewalk beside the funeral home – and only the falling tears – can wash the blues away and lead again joy.

Sometimes I feel all blue

sad  sorry  blue

all down in minor key

a rhapsody in blue.

Sometimes

when blue begins to play

its melody in me, sometimes

the minor turns to major key –

Blue bursts into purple and,

leaping into joy,

a burst of sun-burst yellow

splashes  the blues away

And I feel all clean

all wet  all whole  up

like a purple-yellow rhapsody,

an Ode to Purple-Yellow Joy.

NOTE: I was Executive Director of the Legal Rights Center when I wrote this piece. The tears still flow. Like too many other cases in Minneapolis’s poorer neighborhoods, Sydney’s case is still “open”.

– Gordon C. Stewart

Why is pop culture fascinated with the end of the world?

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Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism asked the question after release of the film Seeking a Friend for the End of the Earth. Here’s how I responded.

Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death makes the case that our culture is death-denying.

One could argue that our fascination with end of the world films and stories is an entertaining and objectified way of dealing with one’s own personal destiny. Every death is “The end of the world.” The end of the world writ large on the planetary screen moves the issue into the world of fiction, fantasy and myth from which, like all cultures before ours, we create meaning in the midst of time.

There are other reasons for our fascination, of course. Supreme among them, in my view, is the dualism and the violence that saturate Western culture: God/Satan, Good/Evil, Moral/Immoral, Saved/Damned, Blessed/Cursed.

It is this misreading of ancient Jewish and Christian texts that makes the will to power the central theme of our time. The late Japanese Christian theologian Kosuke Koyama said that all “sin” has the same root. It is the claim of “exceptionalism.” Under the banner of nationalist exceptionalism’s shameless stealing of the metaphor of “the city set on a hill” away from its proper setting in Jesus’ nonviolent Sermon on the Mount, we assume Western Culture and the U.S.A. to be the Golden City and the agent of divine will. The exercise of that fallacious conviction results in wars of foreign intervention, occupation, and “pre-emptive strikes” in the name of national security.

We have become a national security state. The “end of the world” fascination in our time is heightened by the knowledge that global destruction – nuclear night – is entirely possible. We fear it. We know it. Yet we are also a culture addicted to entertainment where our worst nightmares get projected onto a movie or television screen where we know that what we’re watching is fiction. The fiction is almost always a high-tech version of the old racist and xenophobic dualism my generation grew up on: cowboys and Indians.

Beneath the question of why our culture is fascinated with end of the world is human nature itself. We human beings, like all other animals, are mortal. We may be exceptional in that we are (more) conscious and self-conscious, but first and last, we are animals. We are born. We live. We die.

As conscious animals, we are capable of great feats. We are also, so far as we know, the only animal capable of self-deception, denial, illusion, and species suicide. The denial of death is the great denial, and immortality is the human species’ great illusion.

The fact of death looms over life for each of us existentially and for the species itself from the beginning and in the middle, not just at the end.  Death is our shared destiny. Death is extinction. Our fascination with the end of the world is a strange Molotov cocktail comprised of all of the ingredients of the human condition, most especially the spiritual terror of annihilation, and the illusion of winning. It is the ongoing legacy of the biblical myth of Cain, humanity’s “first-born” who kills his brother Abel, the myth that describes our time and place in history.

If, like in the movie, you had only three weeks left before the end of the world… What would you do?

I’d do what I’m doing now only more consciously. I’d continue to write each morning. I’d do my best to live gratefully, attending to beauty in nature and in art (classical music and paintings) and to family and friends. I’d pray more thoughtfully. I’d walk my dogs more joyfully, stop yelling at them for barking, and find a place on the North Shore to look out to the horizon of Lake Superior. I’d eat lobster and Dungeness crab with lots of hot butter and salt, rib-eye steaks, garlic mashed potatoes. I would avoid Brussels sprouts! I’d end each meal with a Maine blueberry pie, flan, or Graeter’s ice cream, and a Makers Mark Manhattan.  Then I’d settle down on the couch next to the love of my life, Kay, by the fireplace, turn off the news, see if we can make a little fire of our own, get anchored again in the Sermon on the Mount, and return to sources of joy and laughter in the poems of Hafiz. I’d give up being intentional/purposive. I’d live in the moment.

Church to become home for homeless families

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Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska has decided to use its space as temporary overnight accommodation for homeless families. The press release and the Chaska Herald’s online story just made its way to AOL.com.

Click HERE for the story. The project is targeting to begin in February, 2013. To help with the project, leave a comment here.