Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.
According to Tom Cornell, the only recording of Peter Maurin’s voice was taken from a wire recording made circa 1946-47. Several copies of this were pressed to 78rpm and sent to supporters of the Catholic Worker. He’s reading his easy essay “Makers of Europe,” or “When the Irish were Irish.” (The Catholic Worker archives lists this as c. 1939.)
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Our friend Alice Swanson died yesterday. She was hit by a truck while biking in Washington, DC.
She will be missed.
It seems that a chapter in Iain Dale’s Guide to Political Blogging in the UK states:
The green blogosphere can go from the extra-respectable Christian Greens of the Evangelical Ecologist or Pie and Coffee to the anarchist horror box that is The Void whose irresponsible and vituperative rants are often a joy to behold.
508 is a show about Worcester. This week’s panel includes Brendan Melican and Jeff Barnard.
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After a short attempt to remain a parks commissioner, Bruce Wahle has stepped down. The auto event called the Summer Nationals is in Worcester this weekend; lots of blogging by Jeff, and a great interview with the founder in Worcester Magazine.
Tom Lewis’s retrospective art show has opened. The head of AIDS Project Worcester wrote a strong rebuttal to a letter by Barbara Haller and Billy Breault. The T&G had a nice photo of the fireworks; many more on Flickr. The whole Charter/NebuAd/customer betrayal thing is unravelling; kudos to WoMag for covering it, and fie on the T&G for ignoring it. Security Now has a two part podcast explaining the technology and issues involved in this sort of thing.
Mike talks about the Catholic Worker gathering and rosary trial update, already blogged here. Central Street is still not named after MLK. A local was busted for buying fake drugs. People like real drugs. (We talk about drug legalization in Massachusetts at length.) Mike reads some Jordan Levy headlines.
The City Council will discuss street vendors again on Tuesday, and likely vote on whether to restrict their activities. If you support vendors, it’s not a waste of time to contact your councilor, because they’re still divided on the issue.
The Union Station garage isn’t open; some of the vacancies there will be filled. There is cool art in Elm Park.
Piedmont Street: A campaign office focusing on registered Dominican voters living in Worcester?
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A few weeks back, Ken Hannaford-Ricardi went into the Worcester federal building to see about getting a permit to hold a political/religious event there. After being sent to various offices, and waiting several days for people to check around about a permit, he was told that nobody knew about such a permit. He wrote to the judge in our civil disobedience case, letting him know that getting a permit was not so straightforward as the US Attorney made it out to be.
Now the Government has written a letter in reply, saying that the Building Manager is the person to approach, as per Code of Federal Regulations 41 S. 102-74.460 through S. 102-74.555.
When we’ve had a chance to approach the Building Manager, I’ll post the results here.
Just a reminder that the national Catholic Worker gathering, in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the movement, is at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Worcester July 9-12. More info here.
You may recall my frustrated critique of the essay “Nonviolence as Racism.” One of many things I disliked about this essay is that it didn’t back up many of its assertions, and seemed more off-the-cuff than the subject deserves.
In trying to understand this line of argument, I stumbled across some references to Peter Gelderloos’s How Nonviolence Protects the State. I haven’t found much of the meat of this book online, but I did find this 7-part critique of the book by Parke Burgess. I plan to read this over the weekend.
I have chosen to devote considerable space to a critical review of this work not because it represents a formidable challenge to nonviolence in itself, but because it appears to collect under one title many of the grievances and frustrations of militant activists toward those who advocate nonviolent tactics.
(Everyone I talked to about “Nonviolence as Racism” disliked it, some intensely, but I have second-hand reports of people who agree with parts of it. I hope to track them down and talk about it.)
P&C contributor Kaihsu Tai had a letter in yesterday’s Guardian:
Don Touhig and the Co-operative party’s People’s Rail campaign (Letters, June 25) has no credibility. The party is the junior partner in government with Labour, which has already had a decade to sort out the railways by reversing privatisation. As taxpayers, the citizens are already “shareholding members” of Network Rail. Adding another layer of membership is not going to make it a “mutual” – any more than an NHS trust becoming a foundation trust (with nominal, non-shareholding membership). The Co-op needs to break from its electoral pact with Labour and cooperate with voices for real collective change.
Kaihsu Tai, Janet Warren, Sid Phelps
Oxfordshire Green party
As usual with British politics, I have no idea what is going on.
Tracy Novick takes us on a tour of Worcester’s Cascading Waters, a project of the Greater Worcester Land Trust.
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Wild turkey at Cascading Waters
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I find this article from the Cleveland Catholic Worker to be deeply stupid: Nonviolence As Racism.
It jumps from a mild claim–that sometimes people promote nonviolence in a racist way–to extreme conclusions.
“. . . the system that white people have built to benefit us and only us — our courts, our laws, our whole political system . . . .”
Isn’t it racist (or perhaps just ignorant) to claim “the system” in this country is exclusively white? Haven’t people of all races and genders contributed, albeit to a lesser extent than white men, for both good and ill?
“As white radicals, we need to stand in solidarity with all liberation movements –regardless of the tactics they chooses.”
Really? If some ethnic group in the Balkans decides to use mass rape to liberate what they see as their homeland, should I support that? As someone whose ethics are based on my understanding of the teaching of Christ, I would find that hard to do.
“Criticizing ‘insurgents’ in Iraq who use any means necessary to combat the occupation and the white colonization of their land is racist.”
Can I criticize the methods they use to combat colonization by non-whites? What about that chunk of insurgency that’s about international smuggling and other crime rather than human freedom? Can I criticize their violence? What if I’m not close enough to the insurgency to tell the difference?
“Promotion the nonviolent struggles of King and Gandhi as if they were our own, commending these movements while criticizing other struggles for choosing other tactics is racist.”
I don’t want to dismiss the corrosive effects of white privilege, but are King and Gandhi on the other side of some absolute wall from me? Can’t I promote King’s philosophy as that of a fellow Christian American, while keeping in mind that he was to some extent struggling against my grandparents? Can’t I promote Gandhi’s struggle as that of a fellow inheritor of British imperial culture and a fellow human being? Isn’t linking my effort to theirs, despite their non-whiteness, in the spirit of them linking their efforts to Thoreau and Tolstoy?
“because this structure and the systems it creates are the real source of violence in this world.”
Why not claim the source of all violence is based in gender rather than race, or in Original Sin, or in power imbalances that predate “whiteness,” or in class, or in the fundamental orneriness of people? Why not acknowledge that the roots of violence are complex, and explore that complexity, rather than indulging in this breathtaking reductionism?
Personally, I think we should encourage everyone to practice nonviolence. We shouldn’t be racist about it, but we shouldn’t let our fears of promoting it imperfectly keep us from promoting it. We should keep struggling to love while helping others to do the same.