Incident at the Lincoln Memorial

On Friday, January 19, 2019, there were many people involved in various protest or commemorative marches in the area of the Capital Mall of Washington, D.C., but an apparent confrontation developed between white students from a catholic school in Kentucky, black Hebrew Israelites who had participated in the March for Life and Native American activists, who had participated in the Indigenous Peoples March. Video of this intersection of groups has gone viral, and so many people have commented on it already. I nevertheless also feel compelled to respond.

I, as thousands have, viewed at the original clip (taken by one of the Native American marchers), and the longer video (apparently taken by one of the Hebrew Israelites). This is what I heard and saw, as succinctly as I can put it: One group with a religious affiliation was hurling negative value judgments and pejoratives at a crowd that included mostly white students and Native Americans. The students, for some reason that is not clear, stormed up to the group of Native Americans, invading their personal space and engaged in a staring match. I perceived a clear sense of menace and threat in the actions on either side; the Native Americans were between the Hebrew Israelites and the students. Unrighteous judgment was all around in the video footage. I certainly did not see the best example of nonviolent resistance in this charged atmosphere. Disrespectful behavior was evident.

Then, one of the Native Americans, Nathan Phillips, started to beat his drum and chant. I perceived this to be an attempt to diffuse and de-escalate a challenging situation.

How did I come to make that call? I am a minister in that way; I chant and I sing.  The beauty of the human voice offered in song is one of the greatest healing tools we have readily available to us. The gift that music keeps on giving the world is the creation of innumerable opportunities for unity to occur among people. 

Few are aware of an aspect called “entrainment” or that there is a study called “bio-musicology” that studies this aspect, which is simply defined as a synchronization of organisms by means of rhythmic music. When folks go into a theatre to hear a concert, and they all come out feeling moved or happy in the same way, humming tunes that they heard or singing, that is a simple example of entrainment.

When he started the drumming and chanting, Nathan Phillips was attempting to clear the space and call on the Great Spirit to enter into the discussion. I didn't know what he was chanting, but I knew this was his intent. It is the same thing people do in temples, synagogues and churches, around campfires, in sacred places everywhere - chants, hymns, whatever you want to call them, it is all the same--unifying people around the vibrational energy we all share. My sense of this was affirmed by a woman who commented on the thread of a Facebook friend about this incident. She lives in a community of Native Americans, and she indicated that she knew this was a prayers song.

Perhaps I should add that music first shifts people from where they are to another place or attitude, one where they are potentially prepared for entrainment. Singing/chanting activates both hemispheres of the brain of the singer; the opportunity for a different type of participation and awareness possible from all who are in the vicinity, whether they are singing or not. I've read on this in the past, but I'm not sure I could lay my hands on a definitive article. I do know that music therapy makes use of entrainment to assist in healing of all kinds, and I am sure the Buddhists discuss this from the aspect of meditation, as well as chanting. The ringing of any bell, for example, is the signal to awaken from one way of thinking to another. Do we heed the bell? Do we heed the song? Do we heed the call to change? That is always the question.

The human voice is the body's primary built-in coping tool. We cry out in the darkness so as not to feel alone. Our voices reach out to find others. Rarely do you find children that do not make up songs or hum to themselves when they are alone, quietly playing. This vibration that we generate is a precious tool for our whole lives. Unfortunately, great swathes of our society have been told they can't sing, music programs in schools have been limited or eliminated, and there is so much generated music, the majority of people passively listen and don't participate as much in singing as they used to. If people are listening to music, it is more often through earphones, rather than a shared public occasion. 

Instead of singing, people talk, gabble, gabble, gabble all the time. Much of this gabbling talk is generated by the judgmental portion of the brain; there is a lot of bad vibe being pushed out there, damaging to self and others. This is unfettered left-brain activity. 

Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.

- Jill Bolte Taylor, “My Stroke of Insight” (2008)

Dr. Taylor’s statement rather aptly describes the situation in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and it’s media fallout.

I write about this today because right now the earth is calling us to change. The earth cannot ring a bell. It can only sing a song of sorrow from the depths of the sea and the wind whipped mountaintops. The whole earth is a sacred place and we are supposed to be stewards of it; but instead we are mostly engaged in trying to conquer one another. One woman wrote, in the same Facebook thread on this incident I earlier mentioned, that the need for people to be right at all costs is both exhausting and crippling us. People yell at each other and fling blame. With all the yelling going on, it is no surprise that we can’t hear anything else. Further, seeking to be right is the chasing of a false idol. Righteousness is not something that can be claimed or owned by anyone; it is a honorific bestowed on someone who does good. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about radical love; this type of love is discussed in many holy books, in many traditions around the world. That is what today should be about. In the incident on Friday, Nathan Philips tried to open a door away from a difficult situation by chanting a prayer for healing and unity. (I am trying to find out more about his chant, and if I do, I’ll update this article with that information.) Love is what must overcome the negativity in our world and be the unifying element of our lives. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in a sermon:

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says ‘Love your enemies,’ he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies– or else? The chain reaction of evil–hate begetting hate, wars producing wars–must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr.,“Strength to Love” (1963)

I’ll end with a somewhat more cryptic way of looking at it for you all to ponder on as you do service today. This is about unison in music.

Equality is never found in the consonances or intervals, and unison is to the musician what the point is the geometer. A point is the beginning of a line, although it is not itself a line. A line is not composed of points, since a point has no length, width or depth that can be extended or joined to another point. So a unison is only the beginning of a consonance or interval; it is neither consonance nor interval, for like the point, it is incapable of extension.

- Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-1590), singer, composer and music theorist

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: What will you do?

Here we are again. Really, here we are, where we’ve always been. That weekend has arrived. What will you do? Will you celebrate?

Last year, we arrived at the 50^thAnniversary of one of the worst years in my personal memory, what should be remembered as one of the worst years in the history of this country. The civil war had been over for nearly a hundred years, but the war was not over, and civility had not been fully achieved. 

So, here we are, a year later and, my friends, I’m sorry to have to impart this to you (if you are not already aware), but the civil war is still not over. I’m loath to believe it, myself. I grieve to have to confess it. We are now more divided as a nation than we have ever been. A seething underbelly of irrational hatred has bubbled to the surface in hideous ways. We see it, we hear it, everywhere. The violence of irrational hatred is killing us and our children. The fear that breeds this irrational hatred seems all the rage, these days.

I have found, in my meanderings through this experience we call life, that once a good person has died, that person’s memory is held up for veneration. While that can be a very good thing and healthy way to deal with the pain of loss, it is a better thing if our veneration of that memory is an impetus to live up the example of the good that person embodied. 

Sadly, all too often our veneration is complicated, clouded or obscured by a tendency toward inactionon our part. This inaction takes two primary forms, both passive: adoration or “let’s have a party” (which must be the most empty form of acknowledgement). A day of service seems a better option, but what if this is merely an obligation ticked off a list, then set aside until next year? Commitment to change isn’t an event that can be handled in a few hours on a single day; this is daily work, a life’s work.

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday (which commemorates the birthday of Dr. King, but is so terribly overshadowed by his violent death), what will you do?

During the past several years, I have shared with my readers memories and nuggets of wisdom I garnered from my late friend Arthur, a sociologist, really a political historian. When he passed away, he left behind various notes and references to books that he did not have in his own extensive library (a fact that will astonish anyone who’d ever been in Arthur’s library), but no outline, no paragraphs that could be expanded into a thesis, no solid leads for anyone to pursue toward a proposed writing project he had preliminarily titled, “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Unfinished Journey.” Although we had frequently discussed King and his legacy, Arthur’s desire to write on the topic was not something we ever talked about in depth. This essay may contain a thread, weft to the warp, if you will, distilled from my interactions with Arthur.

In the years since Arthur passed away, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and wondering about what Arthur might have brought forward. What would it have revealed, if anything? I have a few thoughts (what a surprise!) that I’ll share.

In a 1957 article for Christian Century, “Nonviolence and Racial Justice”, Dr. King wrote:

… The basic question which confronts the world’s oppressed is: How is the struggle against the forces of injustice to be waged? There are two possible answers. One is resort to the all too prevalent method of physical violence and corroding hatred. The danger of this method is its futility. Violence solves no social problems; it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Through the vistas of time a voice still cries to every potential Peter, “Put up your sword!" The shores of history are white with the bleached bones of nations and communities that failed to follow this command. If the American Negro and other victims of oppression succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle for justice, unborn generations will live in a desolate night of bitterness, and their chief legacy will be an endless reign of chaos.

Later, outlining aspects of Non-Violent Resistance, Dr. King states:

A third characteristic of this method is that the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who are caught in those forces. It is evil we are seeking to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil. Those of us who struggle against racial injustice must come to see that the basic tension is not between races… The tension… is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is at bottom between justice and injustice… [Emphasis mine.]

And he follows that with:

A fourth point that must be brought out concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. In struggling for human dignity the oppressed people of the worldmust not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. [Emphasis mine.]

I propose that we pause, take stock and acknowledge that American culture and discourse in 2019 is the very embodiment of that thing Dr. King identified as danger, trap, and ultimate defeat. The struggle in this country is real, it is hateful, it is bitter and bloody—and it is inhuman. We’ve moved way beyond this being about race and class; identity politics has created new races and new classes, new reasons to have a chip on the shoulder, new ways to self-identify as a victim. With all these new divisions, we can all be offended victims, if we so choose. 

I will now entertain a notion that will instantly become unpopular because of it’s undeniable truth: Every step in time from the signing of the Civil Rights Act has been a step away from the obvious intent of equality and justice under the law for all people of the nation. 

Dr. King knew what was at stake in taking up the cause of justice for people of color: He knew that the mantle of equity had to cover the entire nation, all people. This is why he worked to create broad coalitions that included white people, religious people, workers, business leaders, politicians and others. That is what he did, to his dying day. 

What will you do, here, now, from this time forward?

For myself, I am taking time to reflect, reconcile, redress (where I can in the situations I encounter) and rehabilitate. Here are a few examples of what I mean, which I will expand upon through my personal, daily practice:

Reflection: Do I contribute to discourse and narratives that are unproductive? Do I assume I am right? Am truly I open to hear someone else’s wisdom, experience or pain. Is persistence or resistance appropriate to the present situation?

Reconcile: Do my actions and choices match the ethical views I claim? How can I be a factor in restoring unity or equilibrium in situations that occur in daily life? Am I either combative or non-confrontational in the way I handle challenges? How can I better work in cooperation with others toward a positive and joint outcome?

Redress: Can an appropriate remedy be found and implemented for a situation that is unfair or where a wrong has been done? Sometimes we make attempts that are patronizing or otherwise miss the mark; how can we be more sensitive to an appropriate response?

Rehabilitate: We have a lot of individual and collective work to do to vindicate, rebuild and restore people, communities, states of being, collective consciousness, the environment, integrity in our political narratives, truth to power. Where does it all begin? At home, at work, in your town, in our State, everywhere we are. There is much to done; we have to be willing to engage in the work, to strengthen our collective critical thought, and willing to welcome everyone to the party.

At the end of Dr. King’s article for Christian Century, within the context of non-violent resistance, he offers a prayer for us and for this work for human unity:

God grant that we wage the struggle with dignity and discipline. May all who suffer oppression in this world reject the self-defeating method of retaliatory violence and choose the method that seeks to redeem. Through using this method wisely and courageously we will emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright daybreak of freedom and justice.

Don’t let this be just another holiday weekend. I think the very best way to honor the memory of Dr. King is to continue the journey his untimely death thwarted, to build a world with no double standards, where each person is entitled to and equally accorded dignity, opportunity and justice. 

Keep the dream alive, and make it come true; nothing less will do.

___

Source: Christian Century74 (6 February 1957): 165-167.

Love Came as a Child

For them that walk in starkness,
a lucid dream appears;
for them, a retreat from darkness
draws on the horizon and cheers.

Yea, there was a second and a third,
but when was spoke the first word,
that indeed was a concept: Love.
(Sung, as if from somewhere above.)

Then, held safe from all harms
as might lie in the wild,
from Labor to a mother’s arms,
Love came as a child.

Love, appearing as light,
thus cast darkness away
into new realms of night,
visible as shades of grey.

Abundant, how abundant,
and full, oh, so verily sooth:
Love, to all life incumbent,
our charge, our care, our truth.

What the shepherds saw,
what, to worship, sages sought:
loving care should be the flaw
to defy any, all, prizes bought.

The metaphor of the cattle stall,
is both the sermon and reminder:
A peaceable kingdom is here for all,
but only when we are in deed kinder. 

Love, as a child, came down—
Incarnate Love, we cannot shirk;
Life, Love’s cradle and crown
is, in every generation, our work.

© 2018 Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Dear Ones, 

My wish for you, now and always, is that Love be your most abundantly shared and greatest flaw. Imagine the epitaph: “Their one flaw was that they loved too deeply, too much…” May your days be filled with everything that can be shared with love and laughter; even hardship is soon overcome where Love is lively and at work. Many hands move the work forward, onward and upward. Blessings to all!

All That You Touch

It is not enough
that each step moves forward
if there is neither measure,
nor meaning;
if the ground that offers support
isn’t also speaking,
or, if speaking, is not heard.

Know: All that you touch is also touching you.

Being is a reciprocity,
an opportunity and invitation
to participate in fullness, everywhere
         to glean,
                  to feel,
to make,
         to sing and
                  celebrate.

Remember: All that you touch is also touching you.

You are the butterfly sightings
the drumsongs of feet,
caught up in this epic symphony;
your instrument
is tuned to the entirety
of all that has ever been,
         of all that can ever be.

Every touch, every encounter,
is an opportunity and invitation to renew,
         to grow,
                  to learn,
         love,
                  laugh,
an invitation to linger in song.

Celebrate: All that you touch is also touching you.

An infinite smear of star dust,
twin enigmas of light and dark,
blessings of water and earth,
join in the marvel of you,
burnished by sun, wind and waves,
l’dor v’ador, in saecula saeculorum.

There is no need to discover,
the garden of wisdom,
the lake of merit,
the mountain of repose,
the vale of mysteries
—they meet on the
landscape of your soul.

For, all that you touch is also touching you.

There is no need to search for
mystical union,
for all that you touch is already touching you,
awaiting an answer to the eternal question:
“Will you be with us?”
—awaiting the resounding song of your soul,
the song of “Yes.”

© 2018 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

9/11 and the Sins of Division

Like the books that fall off shelves into my hands when I’m in book stores (and, yes, that really does happen to me), the universe has been sending me urgent messages about the nature of wholeness. Whether it is my feeling of being an integral part of creation while on a walk in the woods, or hearing someone talk at the grocery checkout stand about how great it is to see people come together after a tragedy, or the minister who talks about the admonition to “Love one another,” or the rabbi who indicates that the waters were divided, but this was pronounced “so,” not “good”… or a whole train of other messages, heard and unheard—well, I guess you could say I’ve had the spectrum of “together” and “apart” on my mind.

Everything that is a part of creation is one great, growing expanse. I’m being simplistic, I know; this is a huge generalization. But it is critical for the survival of at least our little terrestrial ball that we embrace this generalization. 

There are so many people out there who talk about “original sin” – usually to blame it on womankind. Adam and Eve… the snake and the apple… but, at the heart of that story is the dichotomy between need and togetherness, separation and alienation. Here’s the thing, if we are going to look to the origins of negativity, or perhaps better understood as its challenges, we must look to “creation” itself. And while I’m couching this meditation within a tiny bit of biblical exegesis, I don’t want to lose people who reject religion. All of us are part of the same story, whatever the story is; it is all a matter of perspective, and we are all peoples of myths, whether we attend temples of some sort, follow post-Enlightenment philosophies or post-modern existential/secular ways of thinking. As I tell my kids, “All words are built on all words; this is the basis of evolution and creativity.”

And so, I present this unorthodox set of notions, on this day of days, which commemorates a terrible event in our modern history.

In the mythological creation story from Genesis, Divine Entirety suddenly felt alone. This conscious awakening could be thought of as the primary point of alienation. Alone and in the dark. “Let there be light.” What does the light do, but make a sense of isolation all the more apparent?  

What to do? Well, what to do is to do, or to make. Identify raw materials from within the sea of integrity, and separate them out from one another; dividing materials into kinds makes them easier to use. (Just think of the world as an assembly project from IKEA or a never ending LEGO construct…) Once the materials are organized, they can be combined and recombined, molded into what you want, what you need. This is the essence of the creation story in Genesis. The world was created, then seen to have some flaws, and so was reinvented. Over time and many interventions, the thing that was created (and perhaps objectified) forgot its true origin, forgot its original language, forgot its purpose, forgot that it belonged to and had individuated from a singular source.

Seen in this light, it could be said that the primary flaw in creation was/is the act of division, and that this flaw is a natural aspect of ongoing creation, and the original commission of Creative Energy. Alienated Being desires intimate togetherness, and so creates more being(s) to accommodate that desire… and yet, the product can only promote more longing that leads to more separations, more creations… more divisions and differentiations, more exposures of an insuperable design flaw.

Divisions and differentiations, “devices and desires”, these are primary motivating energies, I should say. These primary motivating energies drive all of our actions in daily life, as well as our politics. In societies, we grow within community units that during our formative years comprise the whole world to us. Maturing into “adulthood,” our sense of what the whole world is pans outward. We discover that many of our decisions are made for us, and we sometimes find ourselves at the mercy of divided waters and diverted streams not of our own making. There are many distractions and manipulations controlling everything we do.

Truth is, all people are The People. All existing or created divisions between people are false, illusory divisions; at the most basic level, we all have the same needs. I have often stated, “That there are so many of us is for only one reason, so that we can help one another.” Certainly, this is the message of the Golden Rule, in all the different ways we see it expressed throughout world history. 

On September 11, 2001, we experienced what could be called a “Great Sin of Division and Discord” in the event and aftermath of terrorist actions that resulted from a magnitude of hate, death and destruction not seen before on our shores. This day continues to be a day of mourning and remembrance for the loss of so many lives, of so much potential for good, so much purpose. This day also continues to be an open, unhealed wound, perpetuated by systems of injustice that are politically motivated in order to consolidate money and power—actually to rob people of their personal assets and agency in order to feed the greed of powerbrokers.

Healing will not come until we acknowledge civil unity to be of primary importance. In the days following September 11, 2001, there was a sense of unity, even if tinged with anger over losses and against “foreigners,” and even through a profound sadness in the knowledge that it always seems to take a tragedy (flood, hurricane, war, forced migration, and the like) to bring people together— as if we cannot achieve unification by any other means. We huddled together in our grief.

Territorialism, nationalism, tribalism, ghettoization… these are all false constructs, designed to make people think in terms of scarcity and fear, rather than in more holistic terms, such as a recognition of abundance that is able to fulfill need wherever it exists. 

I’m grateful to Rabbi Jay LeVine for his discussion, yesterday, of a famous quote of the Prophet Amos, who states that feast days and hymns of praise and blood offerings are not the sacrifices desired by the Divine Source. Instead, “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” Rabbi LeVine said of social action that we must think of ourselves as drops of water, which join in puddles and pools, and rise with the rain to flow with power and might. Likewise, there is no more powerful agency in the world than people joining to work together, to help one another. 

In short, I suggest that togetherness and inclusion are the balms to heal a broken world. Today, I hope for you and for me, for all of us, that September 11^th be remembered as a call for unity to the common goal of being for each other in goodness, truth and equity. 

Let all that who are joined toward such goals never be put asunder.

© 2018 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

earth and air, water and light

—on the trail,
engaged in a counterpoint of breathing
over an ostinato of stepped footfalls,
meeting a rising and falling landscape—

ferns reach out to stroke ankles and shins,
as if to say,
too long, too long have you been away—

even the rising dust from these stamping feet
joins an alleluia chorus of motes,
dancing,
suspended in shafts of light,
trained and focused by the benevolent branches
of these sentinel redwoods
that guide this way;
it is a music of welcome,
quiet but potent—

sorrel and trillium,
their delicate blossoms content just to be;
even violet and columbine
speak a language of color and moment;
wild ginger carpets each moist patch below,
visually cooling the warmth of this day—

and ahead are the rocks,
tumbled there from time immemorial—

and imperceptibly the trail rises,
drawing nearer to a water music,
heard from over the next ridge—

mingled medicinal aromas
of coyote mint and yerba buena
drift from somewhere below,
or from over yet another ridge,
one that seems a world away—

an awareness overtakes,
of height having been achieved,
these feet drawn over pathways
traced earliest by small creatures,
then by migrations of deer,
and followed by others for millennia,
only to be discovered again, today—

then comes a sudden touch;
water reaches out whenever
riparian proximity is achieved
—playfully errant spray
tickles and teases the flesh
with its coolness—

rushing up from the depth and darkness
of its rock-hewn source to meet the light,
water rushes all a-tumble,
falling all over itself in joyous freedom,
to flow and drift into the meditative rest
of pools below blue-hued skies,
spiegel im spiegel,
there to be serenaded by what congress of birds
is berthed in the surrounding canopy—

too long, too long you have been away,chants the feathered choir
in their various languages,
but you are here with us now,
reply earth and air, water and light,
the only truth worth knowing—

but you are here with us now,
alleluia!

© 2018 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Labor Day, American Political Parties and Elections

“The mere fact of the existence of large fortunes concentrated in a few hands is of permanent demoralization in society; it belittles unassuming and honest work; it gives the rein to desires and appetites; it makes the pursuit of wealth the highest aim, the ideal of life, and drives all other aspirations out of the human mind…”

~ Moisel Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, Vol. II (1902)

I’ve been trying to complete simple archive of my late friend Arthur’s papers.  He was a Political Sociologist, a member of the Free Speech Movement, a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, an educator in the United States and in Britain, and a grass roots organizer for labor, along with many of his peers and colleagues, back in the day.

Many, many notebooks contain hen scratch lists and flowcharts. Arthur had read so very much for so many decades that he would write the outlines for talks and papers as lists of names and terms.  The lists would look something like this:

Ostragorski (vol. II)…

Plebiscitarianism…

key idea: hollowing out of democratic institutions…

Civil Rights aborted movement…

MLK, Jr.’s Unfinished Journey…
Labor movement, D.P. collaboration…

campaign finance laws…

“Technopopulism”…

atomised electorate…
why no third party?

Since I met him after he retired from teaching, I couldn’t tell you if he’d use these lists to speak extemporaneously or if he’d always develop the list-outlines into fully fledged lectures or papers.

The list above is not an actual list made by Arthur, but a composite one that I’ve composed from among several of his. I will use this list to explore the interrelated themes of Labor Day, Political Parties, and Elections.

Arthur believed in the labor movement and in unions. He helped with grass roots organizing here in California and in Detroit, and when he relocated to take teaching positions in Britain, he joined the British Labor Party. Arthur was convinced that democracy required strong parties built from the grassroots level, built from below with a strong and highly organized representation. He decried the fact that the American unions were yearly suffering defeats; in Britain, the same trend was afoot within the parliamentary system, led by neo-liberal leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. While I cannot cite authors, titles, chapter and verse, I can tell you that all the defeats trade unionism in America is suffering today are a direct result of the way the party “machines” work.

Political Parties, since federal times, have always been about consolidating power, which is to say they are and always have been run as top down organizations, demanding loyalty to “the party and party policy.”

The Democratic and Republican parties have their origin, more or less, in the “first phase” Democratic-Republican Party. It is crude of me to make this assertion, but if you look closely at bipartisan actions by our modern day congressional houses, you’ll see that the two parties have more similarities than one would expect, more similarities than differences—and that should be a disturbing fact. Democrats are not always so liberal as people who identify as Democrat would realize. Republicans are made up of a number of conservative splinter groups, divided on more lines than they would like to admit. 

Where do the interests of labor fall in this picture? That is an extremely complicated analysis to attempt within a short essay. Arthur and his peers and colleagues argued on this topic for over fifty years, books were written by them and upcoming generations of academics who studied the problem, but could not find adequate answers to the question or solutions to the existing problems.

The Civil Rights Movement provided a huge clue to Arthur.  The “twin” struggles of Civil Rights and Labor had the potential to move into greater groundswell of public support, but Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968 nipped that possibility in the bud. The movement remained strong, but suffered by the dissonance of a split between advocates for non-violent demonstration and a tendency toward militant Black Nationalism, particularly after national leadership of C.O.R.E. changed from James Farmer eventually to Roy Innis, in 1966. 

I have a friend, black woman in her mid-90s, who was at the National meeting of the Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.) in [I believe] late summer of1966. She told me (while I was helping her put together her autobiography) that Roy Innis came “with his thugs” who displayed weapons and took over the meeting, which I believe was held at the Henry Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, CA. An announcement was made to the assembly, composed of white and black rank-and-file, “Whites are no longer welcome; get out.” Innis had come with his posse from New York, funded by a “small business grant” from Ford Corporation. My friend, who had marched and participated in sit-ins and registered voters along side her friends, white and black, knew that everything had changed. She and her friends left the meeting that night in tears; they also quit the organization, to remain in solidarity with one other—there were other organizations where they could be active together.

The additional interesting outcome with regard to C.O.R.E. is that the organization went on to support conservative positions and political candidates, for example, supporting the candidacy of Richard Nixon in both 1968 and 1972. No one talks about this divisive turn in the history of the Civil Rights Movement—and while I have not read extensively in this area, I suspect no one has really written about it. 

Arthur and I never talked about this incident in the history of C.O.R.E.; I discovered that on my own. What Arthur and I did talk about was the pivotal 1964 Democratic Party Convention, held in Atlantic City. Black Freedom Democrats from Mississippi wanted to be seated at the convention, to be “integrated” with the rest of the party—this would have been the logical progression from the recent signing of the Civil Rights Act, but Lyndon Johnson need the support of the segregationist “Dixiecrats”, and tried unsuccessfully to put them off until the 1968 Convention, saying lamely, “It’s all happening too fast.”

Walter Mondale recalled, “Over the years, some veterans of the civil rights movement have claimed that the only moral position for the Freedom Democrats to take at the convention was ‘no compromise.’ They have argued that the Freedom Democrats should have accepted nothing less than all the seats for Mississippi, and that anything less than that would have been a ‘compromise with racism.’ But I think the Freedom Democrats were willing to compromise, and I believed there was room for a compromise.”

Ultimately, the Freedom Democrats had to settle for only two of their delegates being seated, one white and one black, along with the entire delegation of Mississippi Regulars (all white). The decision was made behind closed doors in closed committee, and the Freedom Democrats were not allowed to choose which two of their number were to be seated. As you might imagine, this did not go over well. To avoid this challenge at future conventions, the rules were changed… There was a lot of politicking that went into all this than I have room to describe, but suffice it to say the Freedom Democrats felt cheated—because they were cheated.

And what happened to the labor movement? In 1978, the Democratic Party invited Labor to come in under the Democratic Umbrella. “We’ll take care of you,” the party said. Since that time, under three different Democratically controlled administrations, Democrat lawmakers failed to pass labor laws that would benefit and protect unions. Labor has suffered loss after loss after loss. There’s a book in that; the title for it could be “An Inside Job; The Slow Death of the American Labor Movement.”

As for Martin Luther King’s “Unfinished Journey,” Arthur’s notebooks and handwritten flowcharts frequently contain references to this, and suggestions for further reading, including the “Beyond Vietnam” speech given at Riverside Church and writings by Bayard Rustin (though he didn’t include a particular book title). Arthur spoke to me several times, in the years before his passing, about his desire to write a book on this topic. I have found neither substantive notes nor any outline among his papers. I will take this opportunity to hazard my own guess.

The Labor Movement, as I said earlier, was simultaneous with the Civil Rights Movement, but the latter was stalling for lack of funds, not to mention the rise of militant splinter groups that were not honoring the non-violent style of protest to which the main movement had committed. Dr. King’s death was a huge blow. While Arthur focused on the “Beyond Vietnam” as having been the trigger for King’s murder, in the past few years, I have come to a different conclusion, and have found supporting evidence in other speeches King made, including his very last speech. Dr. King was suggesting that a much broader coalition, built on labor, class and race, would be unstoppable; blue collar workers men and women, white and black, union and non-union could join hands at bargaining tables en masse and wield immense power by initiating mass strikes. I think he was on to something. I also think that blue collar white labor was not prepared to have a university educated, charismatic and articulate black minister as their putative leader.

To reiterate, party politics in America is all top-down. The machine is run at the top by a collection of party committees headed by people of whom voters identifying as “party members” have never heard. The anonymous people at the head of the party wield a lot of money, and they decide who the best possible candidates should be, as well as how to steer the electorate to thinking those candidates are the best thing since sliced bread, spending a ton of cash on media hit campaigns against the opposition. I find it astonishing that there is always plenty of money to manipulate public opinion, but never enough to offer living wage and healthcare (tied to actual cost of living indices) to the struggling middle and lower classes. Interesting, how tax cuts benefit the wealthy, rather than the average person.

Read today’s news, and you’ll see that social media, money and corruption (on an international scale) all work their way into our living rooms. The atomized electorate is experiencing a demoralizing sort of whiplash of daily distractions and outrages, and is generally responding with knee-jerk reactions, followed by division upon division upon division, with identity politics leading the charge to divide us ever further to our detriment.

Arthur, in examining the Democratic and Republican parties, found very little difference between the two parties. I suggest that everyone take some time to examine the voting record of House and Senate representatives from both parties. You can make up your own mind. War-mongers, surprisingly, are well represented among both parties in administrations recent and current. The array of bi-partisan support for policies that disempower a wide array of people on the gender and color spectrums, as well as unionized and non-unionized workers, is breathtaking.

What can be done about this?

Arthur’s ready answers: (1) Organize in broad coalitions, and it must be grassroots, from the bottom up. (2) Vote, but not along partisan lines—vote for people and policies that help the average person and strengthen our republic, that uphold our constitutional rights and societal values. (3) Hold elected officials accountable; public opinion is a powerful tool, if it is used wisely by, again, broad coalitions.

I’ve always found that when holidays are proclaimed to “honor” something, the first consideration is the celebratory party, while the “honoree” is consigned to a shallow, hagiographic mention. This Labor Day, I invite you to remember the very real and horrible sacrifices of life, limb and liberty that unions and rank-and-file labor  have endured, and continue to endure, over the course generations for your sake. Lives were lost in this long and enduring battle; the lives and safety of millions owe a debt of gratitude to those, the brave and even the foolhardy, that fought and gave and strove to make life better for the average worker, the average citizen.