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Signs of the Times  •  4 September 2020 •  No. 206

Labor Day 2020

Above: Painting by Blue Bond

¶ Processional. “As we go marching, marching / In the beauty of the day / A million darkened kitchens / A thousand mill lofts grey / Are touched with all the radiance / That a sudden sun discloses / For the people hear us singing / Bread and roses, bread and roses.” —“Bread and Roses,”  performed by Bronwen Lewis, as sung in the 2014 move “Pride,” based on a true story, where a group of British lesbians and gay men support a Welsh miners’ strike

¶ Call to worship

Creator God, we give thanks this day for work: for work that sustains; for work that fulfills; for work which, however tiring, also satisfies and resonates with Your labor in creation.

As part of our thanks we also intercede for those who have no work, who have too much or too little work; who work at jobs that demean or destroy, work which profits the few at the expense of the many.

Blessed One, extend your redemptive purpose in the many and varied places of our work. In factory or field, in sheltered office or under open sky, using technical knowledge or physical strength, working with machines or with people or with the earth itself.

Together we promise:

To bring the full weight of our intelligence and strength to our work.

Together we promise:

To make our place of work a place of safety and respect for all with whom we labor.

Together we refuse:

To engage in work that harms another, that promotes injustice or violence, that damages the earth or otherwise betrays the common good; or to resign ourselves to economic arrangements which widen the gap between rich and poor.

Together we refuse:

To allow our work to infringe on time with our families and friends, with our community of faith, with the rhythm of Sabbath rest.

Together we affirm:

The rights of all to work that both fulfills and sustains: to just wages and to contentment.

Together we affirm:

That the redeeming and transforming power of the Gospel, with all its demands for justice and its promises of mercy, is as relevant to the workplace as to the sanctuaries of faith and family.

We make these promises, we speak these refusals and we offer these affirmations as offerings to You, O God— who labors with purpose and lingers in laughter—in response to your ever-present grace, as symbols of our ongoing repentance and transformation, and in hope that one day all the world shall eat and be satisfied. AMEN.

Left: Art by Ricardo Levins Morales, ©RLM Art Studio

¶ “Labor Day History.” The Canadian roots of Labor Day observance in North America.  (3:13 video)

¶ “Labor Day: Quotes, quick-facts, extracts”

¶ Hymn of praise. “God Like a Woman in Labor,” drawing on the image of Isaiah 42. (Thanks Kathy.)

¶ Meditation.

My primary Labor Day memory comes from seminary days. I was assistant pastor at a church in New York City, and for several years running I was the designated preacher on Labor Day weekend. The congregation shrank to 8-10 people that Sunday, given the New Yorker tradition of leaving town in August, returning on September’s first Monday evening.

My favorite Labor Day tradition (unfortunately cancelled this year) is also a churchly affair. Members of my congregation hike in the Black Mountains east of Asheville, then convene under a picnic shelter in a nearby park for a leisurely, intergenerational potluck dinner and conversation, with plenty of playground equipment and a gentle stream for wading.

Picnics and discount sell-ebrations are synonymous with Labor Day, along with the cheap sentiments of Presidential Labor Day Proclamations. The latter’s sanctimony this year is dramatized by the wretched statistics of how the pandemic is disproportionately affecting low-age earners. More than 90% of the jobs cut during the pandemic have been from restaurants and other hospitality industries.

—continue reading “Labor’s bread and lovers’ roses: A Labor Day meditation”

Right: Photo from the 1912 "Bread and Roses" strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts

¶ Hymn of confession. “What makes a gringo your smart aleck lingo / When he stole this land from the Indian way back when / Don't he remember the big money lender / That put him a lincoln parked where his pinto had been / The almighty peso that gives him the say so / To dry up the river whenever there's crops to bring in / Such a good neighbor to take all his labor / Chase him back over the border till he's needed again.” —Merle Haggard, “The Immigrant”

¶ In Christian mysticism, the Latin phrase Ora et Labora reads in full: "Ora et labora, Deus adest son has" (“Pray and work, God is there,” i.e., God helps without delay.) The pray and work refers to the monastic practice of working and praying, generally associated with its use in the Rule of St. Benedict.

¶ Hymn of intercession. “There's an evenin' haze settlin' over the town / Starlight by the edge of the creek / The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down / Money's gettin' shallow and weak / The place I love best is a sweet memory / It's a new path that we trod / They say low wages are a reality / If we want to compete abroad.” —Bob Dylan, “Working Man’s Blues”

¶ Call to the table. “A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.” —Albert Einstein

¶ Altar call. “Those who participate in [sabbath] break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competition.” —Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance

¶ Benediction. “The ones who work behind the plow / The ones who stand and will not bow / The ones who care for home and child / The ones who labor meek and mild / The ones who work a thousand ways / That we might celebrate this day / The ones who raise our cities tall / For those who labor, one and all .” —John McCutcheon, “Labor Day”

¶ Additional resources on Labor Day

• “Labor in the shadow of sabbath,” a Labor Day sermon

• “Meditations on Labor and Leisure: Several reflections on Sabbath keeping”

• “Blistering Hope: A stonemason’s meditation on perseverance”

• Special issue of “Signs of the Times” on Labor Day (2015)

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©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org. Language not otherwise indicated above is that of the editor. Don’t let the “copyright” notice keep you from circulating material you find here (and elsewhere in this site). Reprint permission is hereby granted in advance for noncommercial purposes.

Your comments are always welcomed. If you have news, views, notes or quotes to add to the list above, please do. If you like what you read, pass this along to your friends. You can reach me directly at kensehested@prayerandpolitiks.org.

 

 

Signs of the Times • 28 August 2020 • No. 205

¶ Processional. Northwest Tap Connection: #Blacklivesmatter

Among my bedrock theological convictions is that biblical spirituality is always personal but never private.

In this sense—and this sense only—do I identify as an evangelical Christian. Which is to say, transformation entails a profound shift, deep within, which leverages a corresponding change in behavior and allegiance.

A disarmament of the heart (which usually does not happen all at once but typically grows incrementally) is the unfolding of faith—which, as Clarence Jordan wrote, is not “belief in spite of evidence but life lived in scorn of the consequences."

In so doing, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell, "we learn to read history from below."

Of course the actual practice of disarmed living then renews, refines, and deepens the contours of the heart. Hearts and hands form a mutual learning pact.

Such faith imitates and participates in God’s transforming initiative in the Beloved's' enfleshment  (“while we were yet enemies of God”), relinquishing privilege, and then by way of Jesus' inauguration of the Reign to Come, setting in motion the disarmament of every ruthless power through the cross and resurrection. That selfsame movement—People of the Way—invites our participation even now.

This journey is not distinguished by a particular pattern of ritual observance, or precise doctrinal formulations, or set of moral strictures, or piety norms, or quality of emotional experience. The cruciform life lived inside resurrection’s promise is oriented by a beatific vision oriented to the coming Reign of God.

The work of grace is not like an emotional high, or a spa visit or an aromatherapy treatment or a mindfulness training. It is much more rigorous and robust. Grace has the power of displacing shame and fear, so that we develop the facility to living graciously, on the one hand, and fearlessly on the other, such that we receive the capacity to stand up against the threat of every malicious power.

“Freedom's just another word,” Kris Kristofferson wrote, “for having nothing left to lose.” This is our secret resurrectionary power.

Asking which comes first—disarmed hearts or disarmed hands—is a fruitless question. The one always guides and corrects and emboldens the other. These are not segregated acts but one unified exercise. Not unlike the relation between inhaling and exhaling.

The work of disarmed living—where the work of mercy mediates the demands of justice with the prerequisites of peace—is also holistic. It applies to every relational context of our lives, from the largest and most public to the most immediate and personal.

In this issue of Signs of the Times, I am offering examples from my own experience of attendance to the full range of where attention is needed: public policy, interpersonal relations, and familial kinship.

The first entails attention to the headlines, of needed public action, of attention to both the wretchedness and the hope of history’s large pallet. The second, an example of how we live with and care for friends and acquaintances. The third, how we sustain healthy relations within the intimacy of our own households (or at least with extended kin who gather for Thanksgiving meals).

The strategies we use for the work of healing in all three areas can be very different. None is more important than others. Different people give varying degrees of attention to one or another. But we all urgently need to be part of communities of conviction that nurture and encourage the work done in every level of our common life.

¶ Confession. “This old house is falling down around my ears / I'm drowning in a river of my tears / When all my will is gone you hold me sway / And I need you at the dimming of the day / You pulled me like the moon pulls on the tide / You know just where I keep my better side. —“Dimming of the Day,” Bonnie Raitt and Richard Thompson

PUBLIC POLICY

Kindred, the news is bleak. For we live in the valley of the shadow, when:

        • the stock market reaches record-breaking levels in the midst of near-record-breaking rates of unemployment;

        • when 1% of US citizens control $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half is saddled with more debts than assets;

        • when the median wealth of Black households is a tenth of that of whites;

        • when yet another unarmed Black man is shot—in the back, seven times, while getting in his car where his children are sitting—by police;

            —continue reading “Kindred, the news is bleak: Rouse yourselves to maintain custody of your heart”

¶ Hymn of assurance. “I don't feel no ways tired, / I've come too far from where I started from. / Nobody told me that the road would be easy, / I don't believe He brought me this far to leave me.” —The Voices of Light, “I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired”

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

Watching the dual storms track through the Caribbean tonight make me remember a similar experience. Several years ago I was up late watching the course of a hurricane and remembering friends in several Caribbean countries and in South Louisiana where the storm was headed. It prompted a poem, which I dedicated to my friend and pastor, Rev. Francisco Rodés, in Cuba.

        —read “Weather channeling prayer: In advance of a hurricane”

¶ Hymn of intercession. “A greeting from my heart to Beirut / kisses to the sea and to the houses. . . . / My people’s wounds have flourished / And mothers tear / You are mine, you are mine / Ah, Hug me.” —English translation of lyrics in “Li Beirut” (“To Beirut”) performed by Fairouz 

FAMILIAL KINSHIP

Once a year in August my beloved catches up to me. For 14 weeks from late April, I maintain seniority in the house of age.

But then, in the dog days of summer, I lose my precedence. To be truthful, though, neither of us relish the accumulation of candles on our cake. . . . There have been hallelujahs and heartaches. Ecstasy in one moment, the laundry in the next.”

        —continue reading “Testifying on my beloved’s birthday: On the occasion of her 7 August 2020 birthday”

¶ Recessional. “The Blessing,” performed by an ensemble drawn from the churches of Aotearoa/New Zealand

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©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org. Language not otherwise indicated above is that of the editor, as are those portions cited as “kls.” Don’t let the “copyright” notice keep you from circulating material you find here (and elsewhere in this site). Reprint permission is hereby granted in advance for noncommercial purposes.

Feel free to copy and post any original art on this site. (The ones with “prayerandpolitiks.org” at the bottom.) As well as other information you find helpful.

Your comments are always welcomed. If you have news, views, notes or quotes to add to the list above, please do. If you like what you read, pass this along to your friends. You can reach me directly at kensehested@prayerandpolitiks.org.

 

 

Signs of the Times  •  18 August 2020 •  No. 204

Special issue on
THE US POSTAL SERVICE
AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY

(Additional documentary material is posted at the end of this article.)

Who would have thought that Mr. McFeely, the lovable deliveryman and avatar for our nation’s postal carriers on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” could be the flash point of a fierce struggle for the preservation of democratic institutions in the US.

Of course, Mr. McFeely worked for “Speedy Delivery,”  and because of copyright laws couldn’t sport a United States Postal Service (USPS) logo.

Time was, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." Now, with the pandemic making life dangerous in long lines at polling places, the USPS has become the center of a big time partisan spat. Our president and many of his minions vote by mail but do not want hoards of citizens doing the same.

The Postal Service, far and away our most popular governmental agency, is neither a private business nor a government-owned corporation. After that, its status is complicated, being “independent” but not “private.” Its immediate oversight is in the hands of a Board of Governors that sets budgets and policies. It operates off its own income as “an independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States.”

But the USPS is now bowed under financial burdens. Its business model took a financial hit with the advent of electronic communication mechanisms beginning in the ‘90s, replacing a large volume of first class mail; then another with the Great Recession of 2007-2009; and yet again, with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The bunker buster came in 2006, when Congress approved a bizarre piece of legislation, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which effectively required the USPS to pre-fund employees’ pension and health benefits decades into the future. (See Jeff Spross, “ How George Bush broke the Post Office,” The Hill)

The weeds get tall when you attempt to sort out all the details, including convoluted accounting arguments. Keep in mind that a bunch of men (and increasingly, women) in expensive suits have long wanted to privatize the post office, which is consistent with the dominant character of modern plantation capitalism: privileging private wealth over the constitutionally mandated “common welfare.”

Left: Ochopee (Florida) Post Office, the smallest in the US, photo by David Lee Thompson

The USPS’s own general postmaster, Louis DeJoy—a major donor to Trump’s campaign, appointed in May, who owns tens of millions of stock in some of the USPS’ competitors—has already mandated the removal of 671 high-speed mail sorting machines from post offices around the country, eliminating the ability to process 21.4 million items per hour.

Just this past week the Postal Service sent a letter “to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted.” (Erin Cox, Elise Viebeck, Jacob Bogage & Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post)

Also this past week, DeJoy fired or reassigned two dozen top USPS officials, consolidating power in his office. (See Market Watch)

On top of all this, the Republican Party just announced it has budgeted $20 million to blanket the courts with lawsuits opposing absentee balloting. (See Ian Millhiser, Vox)

I can’t imagine what Mr. McFeely would say about these developments. But I think it’s important to keep five things in mind.

—continue reading “The US Postal Service and the struggle for democracy”

§  §  §

 

FURTHER DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

The challenge we face

¶ “When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total. . . . I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.” (President Donald Trump, reported in Ted Koppel, “Rewriting the limits of presidential powers,” CBS Sunday Morning, 10-minute video with accompanying text. Thanks Abigail.)

¶ “The great lesson of American history is that giving equal freedom to un-equals always ends badly for all concerned. Equality before the law works only among people who possess comparable intelligence and character. . . .  Widespread belief in [Thomas] Jefferson’s false and foolish mantra that ‘all men are created equal’ is now wrecking American society. . . .” —letter to the editor, Asheville Citizen Times, 10 August 2020

§  §  §

 

The Postal Service’s role in public life

¶ “In forming the Post Office, the Founding Fathers had wanted a service that would bind together the scattered populous of the new United States. . . . Over the course of two centuries, the agency would drive the expansion of roads and transit, strengthen the nation’s connections with its rural communities, and brave all conditions to bring packages to citizens’ front doors.” —Boyce Upholt, National Geographic

¶ “The post office was the midwife of America’s democracy, and the first triumph of its federal state.

        “By facilitating communication between every far-flung, culturally disparate settlement within the early republic, the agency formed the material basis for a national consciousness. By subsidizing the dissemination of newspapers, the post office enabled mass civic engagement and the formation of modern political parties. In the early 19th century, the institution embodied America’s most egalitarian impulses and ambitious conceptions of the role of government. —Eric Levitz, “Americans Must Defend the Postal Service Like Our Democracy Depends on It,” New York Magazine

Right: Protestors outside Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's home. Photo by Eric Lee, Bloomberg

¶ “A key part of the post office’s ethos has long been that it has a ‘universal service obligation,’ binding the nation together’ and ‘facilitating citizen inclusion. . . .’

        “[M]ost Americans . . . believe that there are some things that should be universally available, even if providing those things isn’t profitable, because they’re important components of full citizenship.” —Paul Krugman, New York Times

¶ Only the Postal Service is required to “go the last mile,” i.e., to provide service in rural areas.

        “Its private rivals—FedEx, UPS, Amazon, etc.—are under no such obligation. If you live out in the rural hinterlands, and providing you service isn't profitable, those companies simply don't run delivery routes out to you. . . . The idea being that, if the Postal Service's legal mission requires it to do things private firms wouldn't do, it should also have some built-in market advantages to make up for that handicap.” —Jeff Spross, “The U.S. Postal Service should not be a business,” The Week

¶ The postal service delivers to 160 million addresses in the US, handles 48% of the world’s mail (including military and diplomatic personnel around the globe). —For more see “Postal Facts”

¶ The Postal Service took a huge hit with the advent of electronic communication. But its principal burden is a 2006 law passed by Congress requiring the agency to pay decades in advance for future employee retirement benefits (including for future employees not yet born), something which no other public service or private business is required to do. —For more see Jake Bittle, “‘Disastrous at a time like this': the US Postal Service is on the brink of crisis,” Guardian

¶ For more background see “A Brief History Of Political Interference In The U.S. Postal Service,” Christianna Silva, NPR.

 

Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth

¶ “Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth” documents the fact that more people in the US are struck by lightning than commit voter fraud, and cites nearly three dozen other studies and court verdicts that conclude the same. For instance,

        The Brennan Center for Justice “reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003% and 0.0025%. . . . An exhaustive investigative journalism analysis of all known voter fraud cases [out of billions of votes cast] identified only 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud from 2000 to 2012.”

Left: Despite the Wisconsin governor’s stay-at-home order due to the pandemic, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature refused to postpone the April election. The city of Milwaukee normally has 180 polling sites; but, because of a shortage of people willing to work the polling stations, only five were open, causing long wait time for voters. Photo by Patricia McKnight/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

¶ 0.00006% – national fraud rate for mail-in ballots over the past 20 years

  17 million – minimum number of names purged from voting rolls from 2016-2018

  21 million – number of US citizens without government-issued photo identification —Sojourners, Sept/Oct 2020

¶ Documented cases of voter fraud, including absentee ballots, are infinitesimal in proportion to the number of votes case. The special commission President set up after he alleged the 2016 election was marred by “three to five million” illegal ballots eventually disbanded after finding nothing to report. —Marina Villenneuve, Associate Press

¶ “The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee sued Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and local election boards on June 29 over their plan for mail-in balloting for the November 3 elections. Trump’s team claimed the plan provides fraudsters an easy opportunity to engage in ballot harvesting, manipulate or destroy ballots, manufacture duplicitous votes, and sow chaos.’

        U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan in Pittsburgh, a Trump appointee, gave the president’s campaign one day to turn over evidence to support its claims of widespread mail-in voting fraud or admit that it doesn’t exist.” —Bob Van Voris, MSN

¶ The president’s not afraid of fraud; he’s afraid of losing. “President Donald Trump frankly acknowledged Thursday [in a Fox Business News phone interview] that he’s starving the U.S. Postal Service of money in order to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots, which he worries could cost him the election.

        “‘If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money,” Trump told host Maria Bartiromo. “That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.’” —Snopes

¶ Trump is “sabotaging an election in broad daylight (and admitting it on camera). . . .”
— former FBI agent Asha Rangappa.  Quoted in John Nichol, The Nation

Right: Cartoon by Gary Anderson.

¶ CNN quoted an unnamed senior Trump campaign official who said “the game plan is to fight [new mail-in voting laws] at every turn,” and reported that the Republican National Committee plans to devote as much as $20 million to contest “voting laws and policies that they view as unconstitutional and potentially damaging to the President’s prospects of winning.” —Aaron Rupar, “How Trump’s mail voting sabotage could result in an election night nightmare,” Vox

 

Manipulating the Postal Service

¶ Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who owns tens of millions of dollars in Postal Service competitors, a Trump appointee and major donor, who served in 2017 on the Republican National Committee’s finance team] “took charge in June, has imposed service cuts, personnel changes, an overtime ban, a hiring freeze, schedule shifts, and routing changes that American Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimondstein says have already slowed down and ‘degraded’ mail delivery.’” —John Nichol, The Nation

¶ “The Postal Service is in the process of removing 671 high-speed mail-sorting machines nationwide this month, a process that will eliminate 21.4 million items per hour’s worth of processing capability from the agency’s inventory. This process that will eliminate 21.4 million items per hour’s worth of processing capability from the agency’s inventory.”

 ¶ “Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted.” —Erin Cox, Elise Viebeck, Jacob Bogage & Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post

¶ “Republicans should fight very hard [against] state wide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” —President Trump, 8 April 2020 tweet

¶ “What we've never seen before is a president say, 'I'm going to try to actively kneecap the Postal Service to [discourage] voting and I will be explicit about the reason I'm doing it.” —former President Barack Obama, in a podcast interview with David Plouffe, criticizing President Trump’s opposition to absentee voting and stalling efforts to adequately fund the US Postal System to accommodate national elections during the pandemic, in Dan Merica, CNN

¶ “The only way we can lose . . . is if cheating goes on.” —President Trump, at a 14 August rally in Pennsylvania, in David Smith & Sabrina Siddiqui, Guardian

News you can use

¶ States, not the federal government, stipulate the details of how elections are held. So, in terms of absentee or early balloting, check with your city/county board of elections to find out what your options are.

¶ Or go to “Plan Your Vote.” A state-by-state map with absentee and early in-person voting information. NBC News (Thanks Deborah.)

¶ By all means, check to make sure you are registered to vote at your current address. Go to USAGov. Click the “Confirm Your Voter Registration” button. Then “How to Check Your Voter Registration Information.” Then “Can I Vote.” Then “Registration Status.” Then “Select Your State.” Finally, fill in the relevant information and hit “search.”

¶ Breaking News: Just before posting this issue of Signs of the Times, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy issued a statement staying the USPS would delay “cost-cutting” measures until after the November election. —Emily Cochrane, Alan Rappeport & Hailey Fuchs, New York Times

 

Be prepared

“This summer, a bipartisan group of former government officials, political professionals, lawyers and journalists held a series of war game exercises about how the 2020 election might go wrong. Convened by the law professor Rosa Brooks and the historian Nils Gilman, it was called the Transition Integrity Project, and the results were alarming.

        “‘We assess with a high degree of likelihood that November’s elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape,’ said a resulting report. President Trump, it said, ‘is likely to contest the result by both legal and extralegal means.’” —Michelle Goldberg, “Trump Might Cheat. Activists Are Getting Ready,” New York Times

Right: Cartoon by Steve Breen.

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©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org. Language not otherwise indicated above is that of the editor. Don’t let the “copyright” notice keep you from circulating material you find here (and elsewhere in this site). Reprint permission is hereby granted in advance for noncommercial purposes.

Your comments are always welcomed. If you have news, views, notes or quotes to add to the list above, please do. If you like what you read, pass this along to your friends. You can reach me directly at kensehested@prayerandpolitiks.org.