Roomin' House Blues

Over the years I have had many times when I have had to call out others on their words, behavior, or attitudes on race, class or ethnicity and I have used a variety of means to get my point across.  The first  such incident was when I was 13 years old and my sister and a friend were skipping rope to the rope song that uses the "N_" word.   I said we don't use that word in this place and the girls argued with me about it. I just said that if they used that word I would go tell Grandpa, and they complied.  In a high school the teacher had let the discussion degenerate and the topic of "welfare" came up and a girl stated  an old stereotype that my Daddy says "All the blacks go pick up their welfare checks in Cadillacs."  I wanted that direction of the conversation to end immediately, so I blurted out "Well your Daddy is a racist."  There was silence in the room for a couple of minutes and then the teacher changed the subject.  Whe...

 Striking at Bourgeois Values with "Free Stuff"  Why is it that in middle class neighborhoods no one would think anything of it if you are having a "yard sale"  or a "moving sale", spending your entire day selling your possessions at pennies on the dollar, a tenth of what you could get on E-Bay, making less than the federal minimum wage for your efforts, but they would shrink in horror from a "free stuff pile".  What is the world coming from that  they place so little value on material possessions that they would give it away for nothing.  Someone will surely complain that you are doing "illegal dumping", even if you tend the pile and fold things back up.  Fortunately for me, I live in a neighborhood with a heavy student population, north of Seattle's University of Washington campus, and such a pile is welcome.  Having purged the house of unneeded things that aren't worth my time trying to sell (unlike my art, which I will find ...

“If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, you will not find Him in the chalice.” St. John Chrysostom Not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth, but theirs.  St. John Chrysostom " The original 42 bishops who signed that day in 1965, and the more than 500 who eventually added their names, pledged to “try to live according to the ordinary manner of our people in all that concerns housing, food, [and] means of transport…. We renounce forever the appearance and the substance of wealth, especially in clothing … and symbols made of precious metals.”" https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2019/10/20/vatican-iis-forgotten-apostle-of-the-poor-stages-comeback-at-amazon-synod/?fbclid=IwAR0j0oA7f7UMwy4R_W-5wjC0Zp2VjGx5oESSUMxOjge26URzb0TnDY5dEik " In the document signed on Sunday, the participants of the Synod on the Amazon recall that they share the joy of livi...

My Political Biography  For various reasons, dear reader, I need to post my political biography before further political activities,  This is not intended as a monument to my ego, but for the edification of others I will be working with politically, and my other readers as they can benefit from it. The latter part of my post will deliberately read like a resume, the beginning more literary.  Aristotle says that man is a political animal and I have been very much a political animal in my life, starting from a childhood infatuation with JFK, my burst of tears on his assassination, an early addiction to newspaper reading, and my rapt attention to the 1964 party conventions. My first practical political activity in the conventional sense was to canvass for a school bond at age 15 to better fund my public school. But I learned I could use leverage  at age 14 when I told an unfriendly parish priest that I could resolve the matter at hand by calling a priest I kne...

The fall of the human being into distance from God was the fall from what it truly means to be human. We do not sin because we are human, but because we start to become more and more inhuman.   And just as we cannot love God whom we have not seen unless we love our neighbor whom we have seen, the more inhuman we become, the more we hate God, the less we love him.  When we detach ourselves from the value and dignity of human life and become anti-life, disguised as pro-some "choice" , instead of pro-life, we truly disfigure our humanity.  through this our whole culture is becoming inhuman.  And that inhumanity is eating, destroying the human from inside. Two news stories that touch on this have come to my attention in the last few days.  I have chosen to comment on both of them as a temper of our times.  The first story I found on a blog post on Patheos, and it has been confirmed as a real story.  According to the post, under the Netherlan...

One of the greatest looming crisis in the world today is the global water shortage. Both secular and religious social justice advocates are concerned with this and Catholics in particular are applying CST (Catholic Social Teaching for my non-Catholic friends) to this. I have always been concerned with inequality and it's savage effects, as a Catholic child, as a fallen away Catholic, and as a returned Catholic. But returning late in adulthood, and studying CST I have gained a entirely new set of tools to use on this problem. I thank my old Santa Cruz friend Kim MacKay for this article and here is my take: Water is becoming a a point of conflict between global capitalism and the poor of the world. It is being treated as private property of investors. Catholic social teaching starts with certain simple premises: the dignity and right to survive of every human being, The "universal destination of goods" (that the good things of the earth are ultimately everyone's, ...

My rosary meditations may sometimes lead  me down strange paths.  My meditations one the nativity has led me deeper into the relationship between Jesus and Mary.  In Rosary meditations my practice, as that of many others is to imaginatively model the behavior and thoughts of a character in the rosary mystery.  For those who don't know, the prayers of the rosary are organized into decades of ten Hail Mary's and an Our Father, each with a "mystery" of biblical origin, such as the "Nativity of Jesus" to meditate on while praying.  For me, meditating on the nativity leads naturally to the closeness of Mary and Jesus. There is no closer moment between a mother and child than the moment of breast feeding  Since the Virgin became the subject of painting, the depiction of Mary nursing Jesus has been the way to show there intimacy and union. In the Gospel of Luke the good doctor records that Mary remembered and contemplated all the moment of the nativity and...

The Irish Potato Famine of starting in 1845-1855 started a massive wave of Irish immigration to the United States. The Nativist backlash, sometimes refereed to as the Know Nothing movement because of it's secrecy called the newly arrive "Catholic Hordes. ".  The 1.5 million Irish who came during that period were matched by 1.4 million Catholic, Protestant and Jewish Germans. French Canadians, like some of my own ancestors, also added to the largely Catholic "hordes" Later, in the first two decades of the 20th Century, largely Catholic Italians, Eastern  and Basques from Spain arrived.  By 1910 there were over 16 million Catholics in the U.S. and immigration continued to swell our numbers.   It is largely because of this immigration that Catholics today are the largest religious body in then U.S. This immigration changed the character of American and build it up, industrially, culturally and spiritually.  That was possible largely because of generally tolerant...

Diatessorn?  Don't bother running to your Oxford Dictionary for the meaning.  I have borrowed it from the title of a mid-second attempt to harmonize the four Gospel--causing deletions, confusion and lack of consistency, and missing the unique purpose of each Gospel--but in the positive creating an easy reference for the essentials of the story.  The Diatessorn (made of four ingredients) was composed by Tiatin, a Christian apologist and an Assyrian.  Inevitably, to harmonize the four, important parts of the Gospels were excluded,  and while consistent within itself, the consistency to the separate accounts is lost. The unique emphasis of each Gospel is muddled. As someone who has worked with religious films series and viewed many biblical films, I view the fact that most Gospel films draw on more than one Gospel account and sometimes non-biblical sources as a problem for the artistic and religious value of these films.  The harmonization of the Jesus stor...

Today  Seattle's Women in Black/Homeless Remembrance project held it's monthly vigil for the homeless who have died.  There is a world wide Women in black movement composed of diverse and not necessarily affiliated groups who hold vigils to give witness for peace and justice. In Seattle one Women in Black group holds peace vigil's, and the other gives witness to those who have died in or because of the condition of homelessness. At the vigil downtown today four who died were remembered: Jeffery Davis, 44 by suicide 1/4/2015 James Carlson, 56 outside, cause of death pending 1/7/2015 Kevin Guempel, 49 , cause of death pending 1/13/2015 Juri Skolin, 60, found on Third Ave., cause of death pending. According to the Women in Black 45 homeless people died by violence or outdoors in 2014 and since then 5 more.  The Women in Black leaflet calls on us to be a community and to support a basic social network including shelter. It calls on us to stand with them and t...

One subject I have not touched on much in my writing is the actual manner of life in a rooming house.It is part of the economic condition of   the low income students and workers, the unemployed and the disabled who live in rooming houses and shared housing that there is very little home life.  Relationships in the home are transitory and most are superficial.Space is limited and communal activities are limited.  I have had some goo friendship develop from contact with roommates, and many who at least remain Facebook friends.  but this relationships were cultivated by going against the isolation and difficult living circumstances found in a rooming house. One of the things I do every year, to attempt to build community, is to try to involve roommates in some kind of Christmas  celebration.  I put up a creche set, I go by a tree.  I break out the decorations and try to get a tree decorating party going with a little music. Maybe we watch a Christmas ...

It has been said that the rich and poor need each other.  The poor need the rich to help them, and the rich need the poor for the opportunity to obtain salvation.  Jesus told the rich young man that if he wished to reach perfection to shed himself of his wealth to the benefit of the poor (likened to the camel that has all it's goods taken off so it could enter Jerusalem through the gate called the "Eye of the Needle."  While we perhaps lose our attachment to worldly goods in the state called purgatory, could we not profitably do this while we are still alive?  And do not the poor need the basics of a decent life? One of the severe criticisms of Pope Francis is that he (in agreement with prior Popes and the entire body of Catholic Social Teaching, although with more english the ball called solidarity)  has repeated called for more help for the poor from the church, from government and from the rich, and further has sought to limit neo-liberalism to the benefit...

Today in the Seattle Times, a guest op-ed titled "The Politics of Envy" in print, and prosaically  "We have a Fixation on Income Inequality" missed entirely what is really happening in today's economy. .  It's author, Richard Davis essentially claims income inequality does not matter.  He gives the misleading example that if the four richest men in King County moved to Boises income inequality would fall, but we would be not better off. This is utterly misleading for several reasons. We don't measure income using a median figure. The essential problem that some had benefited extensively from the relative poverty of others would remain and the poverty would remain.  And lastly, it would only be a matter of time when another handful of individuals would amass the same wealth as the first few. Davis says it is better to concentrate on generating employment and income opportunity for the lower income without a recognition of what has made them lower inc...

I have been studying the pronouncements, activities and history of Pope Francis with an hopeful intensity since his surprise election. His choice of name and, the simplicity of his of first appearance and his style of behavior became immediate indicators that something was different, but it remained to be seen what wold be the substance of that difference.  One of the immediate surprises is that after election, he went to pay his hotel bill, and then he moved into the Vatican guest house, Domus Sanctae Marthae, rather than the papal apartments.  He freed himself slightly from his staff by this, setting some of his own appointments, lived a in slightly simpler manner and became in my mind "The Rooming House Pope."  He had a Rabbi friend come and stay with him in the guest house, invited the Editor of La Republica over for an interview, kissed cleaned and kissed the feet of prisoners on Holy Thursday and did numerous acts that constituted his style. I explored his...

A recent trip back to California, where I spent the middle half of my life (the part between the Seattle bookends)  and other smaller events have made me reflective of past events and places.  My brothers and I stopped in Santa Cruz, briefly, where I had lived for years, and stopped by a nightclub I had spent time in, the Catalyst, and asked the bartender the current status of local things. I found out Club Zayante in the Santa Cruz Mountain had closed.  When I got home I researched the Club, which was once of the hottest nightclubs in Central California to learn what happened.  I found out the club had closed for financial reasons then burned down. But what I learned about the owner, Tom Louagie intrigued me. He had come out from the east coast on a romantic quest, to find the Cannery Row he had read in Steinbeck. He had the idea of moving there and living a literary dream from the past.  He didn't know that that Cannery Row had died...

Paul Ryan should perhaps look at the writings of Benedict and other recent popes on redistribution.  they are most definitely teaching redistribution to help the poor, as this America article attests. America Magazine Benedict XVI weighs in on "Redistribution" : 'via Blog this'

I recently subjected myself to a political spectrum diagnosis that tried to categorize people along a left-right, Republican-Democratic spectrum using only two sets of issues and a few questions.   The issues were the economic questions and social issues, with no foreign policy/military questions of civil liberties/ rights questions.  In some cases, such as immigration, I was not sure if the questions were economic or social.  The mean computation of my "social issue" questions placed me on the right side of the Democratic party or among the left of the independent centrists.  The economic policy questions placed me at the far left of the Democratic Party, and the mean of them placed me closer to the center of the party.  Adding foreign policy/military questions or other social questions, such as the death penalty, might have placed me further left in the spectrum.  But the entire process raised the question of were I fit...

The Glass Steagall Act was designed to protect us from the greed of bankers through regulation.  It was passed in the 1930's as a result of the major stock and banking collapse to regulate the financial industry and dismantled later at the prompting of banking lobbyists to allow the kind of activity that lead to  our recent financial collapse.  Instead of rules to protect the economy, bankers expect to be bailed out when there speculation goes awry.   This is a link to apetition asking for The Glass Steagall Act to be reinstated.  http://signon.org/sign/reinstate-the-glass-steagall-5?source=s.em.cr&r_by=1682043&mailing_id=5614    

I noticed her walking "The Ave", as the non-avenue, University Street, near Seattle's University of Washington campus is known.  Then I saw her sitting at a table in the neighborhood Tully's Coffee Shop.  Or perhaps I should saying sitting over, her head and hair hovering over the table as a result of her weak and deformed back.  Perhaps an extreme case of  osteoporosis, or perhaps something else.  I didn't have the medical knowledge to know.   An old women with long grey here, hunched over completely, almost as through she could break in two. She looked incapable of standing erect.  And old woman in dress and attachments, the classic bag lady.  One look at her sufficient to evoke sorrow for suffering humankind. Nightly, I do a bible study, inclusive of reading the gospels. That night the gospel spoke to me about her. I opened the pages of Luke and it spoke to me.  In chapter 13, v.10-17 it spoke to me about her.  ...

Faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love, writes the Apostle Paul. In the development of theology in the church these three became known as the theological virtues. But while grouped together both in scripture and tradition these three have often been separated by theological disputes and the disposition of believers.   Some shout for salvation by faith alone and it's companion--solo scriptura. Some place all their marbles on hope, as if salvation were a gift of humanist psychology.  Others, using some mangled near universalism,   seize on the smallest charitable act or sentiment of brotherhood as absolute proof that people totally alienated from the gospel are just as saved as the greatest Christian saints, and that what you believe has absolutely no bearing. The last is a rootless love, destined to topple as surely as a tree whose roots have rotted through.  The sentiment of love without a relationshi...