Progressive Wednesday

Clergyman Charlie: On having an open mind

I'm pretty worried about our country. When a person must raise millions of dollars even to have a chance to be elected to national office, integrity is compromised. These gifts may not be outright bribes, but of course they have an influence. They are given with the expectation that the person receiving them, once elected, will favor the interests of the donors.

I heard Robert Kennedy Jr. speak the other day at Daemen College. He spoke of the “fairness doctrine,– which stated that the airwaves belonged to the people, and any TV or radio station desiring a license had to be accurate and balanced. When Ronald Reagan was president, that ruling was cancelled and it has not been renewed. He said that 80% of the American people receive their news from Fox and from Talk Radio. There's not much balance there. That is pretty scary, I think.

Speaking of Fox, he said that in England they still have a fairness doctrine, and that Fox has been fined more often than Al Jazeera! If people are not truly informed they can not vote intelligently.

The Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. Sometimes I wonder if an American President declared that we were under dire threat and the Constitution must be suspended, if people would accept that! Once freedom is lost it is difficult for it to be regained.

In some countries, especially recently in Eastern Europe and in the Philippines, thousands of people had to take to the streets to demand change. That also happened in the former Soviet Union. Sometimes such a mass protest works, sometimes it results only in violence by the government against its own people, as in China's Tiananmen Square.

I have a friend who no longer votes; he feels that both major parties are too compromised to make it worthwhile. I'm not ready to give up yet.

Maybe sites such as ProgressiveWednesday.com and columns such as this one will help urge people to become informed. Read newspapers; get both sides of issues. Turn off speakers who ridicule and shout down those who don't agree with them. Look for sensible, informed dialogue.

And as a minister, I'll add “pray a lot!– After all, most Christians pray “The Lord's Prayer– often, and it says “Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.– That is a hopeful prayer. We wouldn't have been taught to pray it if there was no hope of it happening. So we need to work as hard as we can but trust that if we do, reform can still occur. Don't pray that prayer and then do nothing yourself to show you mean it. If we want a better world, and ask God's help, we'd better show our sincerity by what we do. And I think that includes alerting people to what is happening and urging them to start becoming better informed.

Doing Work for Hard-Working Families

Problem:

Eric and I have held oodles of very different jobs. Here's a list: bookseller, McDonald’s cashier, factory worker, shop foreman for a construction company, maintenance worker at a state park, newspaper reporter, office assistant, courier, audio/visual equipment operator, audio/visual specialist, college professor, substitute teacher, children's writing instructor, home theatre sales associate, customer service associate in a bank, residence life assistant at a college, and phone surveyor. Most of these jobs are the kind that could best be most kindly described as “learning experiences.–

Partly because of these variegated occupations and partly because of where we've been lucky enough to end up in our careers, we have intense sympathy for hard-working families. We know first-hand how hard it can be to sweat all day and feel depressed by the lack of digits in our paychecks, to watch the walls of a cubicle, to live below the poverty line and live payday to payday, to run up credit card debt to make ends meet, to lack health care and have to struggle through illness because we couldn't afford a doctor's visit. Now that we're in better financial positions, we want to do more to help the kind of people we used to call co-workers, the kind of people we still think of as friends.

Work is something Americans think of as the most identifying quality of a person after their name, and yet we tend to treat our hardest working Americans as lesser citizens, as if their low-paying jobs are their own fault. It's a myth that working harder will necessarily make you more money: we know folks who've slaved away at 60-hour-per-week jobs with no advancement. It's a myth that a higher education means a better paying gig: we know PhDs who work in bookstores. There's a myth in America that we live in a meritocracy. We don't.

The American Dream shouldn't be work. The American Dream shouldn't be to make ends meet. The American Dream should be pleasure in all its permutations like spending time with your friends and family, doing things that strengthen, stimulate, and lift our bodies, minds and spirits.

We owe it to one another to care more about how we all make a living. It's that last word, “living,– that we seem to forget.

Photo thanks to this hard worker.

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Make Progress:

The Declaration of Independence reaffirms that we all have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But it's hard to pursue happiness when you lack health care, when you run up ridiculous dept to survive, when you can barely pay for meals, when you can't see an end in sight for a desk job that you despise. It's hard to pursue happiness when you bring work home with you, literally and mentally. Work is hard for all of us, nurses to farmers, temp workers to truck drivers, pastors and cops and folks who man the factory belts.

Dear readers, work is one of the few things that unites us all as people and states. It's about time we made some 9-to-5 progress.

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Doing Work for Hard-Working Families: Vote

Vote:

My fellow Americans, progressives, brothers, mothers, fathers, and sisters, it's time to get your democracy on.

Below you'll find our first of many polls to come. We plan on returning to the subject of work, both through our regular daily posts and in a forthcoming Wednesday (maybe around Labor Day, go figure). We'd like to know what you'd most like to read about. So, give us a click (is it just me or does that sound a little dirty?) and vote.

Many thanks.

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