FAITH IN NATURE – THE SOURCE OF ACTION FOR JUSTICE

 

Introduction:  “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”  (Jeremiah 31:33)

Christine Newman Ortiz is the executive Director and founder of Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant workers center. Voces is well known for its participation in the struggle for worker rights.  On May 1^st every year Voces organizes a march in which thousands participate.  Christine animates the action for justice as nature - the natural law dictates.  

She is the daughter of a Mayan mother and a father who was born in Germany and earned a PhD in science.  He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. 

Christine’s Faith or Trust in nature is expressed in a poem she wrote after her father’s death.

Es un guerrero, mi corozon (My heart, a warrior)

For Opa

You won’t believe me.

Or maybe you will?  

The day after my father’s soul

Departed his body

While he slept in our home

He came back the next day.

In the form of a sparrow                                                                                                                                                                           

Hovering

On the other side of the window

On the second floor of our home

Like a hummingbird                                                             

Holding itself in flight.

Fixing his gaze solidly to mine

For five long deep breaths

It was as if I was seeing through a crack in the universe

something wondrous, vibrant mysterious.

My father, a proud Berliner,

A hard working responsible German immigrant

Who allowed himself moments of tenderness, expression, 

and sentimentality

Towards the end

Was reaching out 

Across a great chasm

In the form of his beloved sparrow, Pio-Pio

And his childhood nickname 

Clear as daylight

Loud as thunder

To say “Look I am still with you. Do not grieve. I am here.”

Epilogue: 

The two sources of Revelation are Nature and the Bible.                    

Thomas Aquinas

Heart and Fist’  Graphic

Diccionario del Corozon                                                                                                                                                                         

Grabados de Naul Ojeda

Taller Leñateros, San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico  2002                                                                                        

  

                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                                                                                                                              

 

 

 

Resilience and Equity in a Time of Crises: Investing in Public Urban Greenspace Is Now More Essential Than Ever in the US and Beyond

 

ABSTRACT

ijerph-18-08420.pdf

The intersecting negative effects of structural racism, COVID-19, climate change, and chronic diseases disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities in the US and around the Urban populations of color are concentrated in historically redlined, segregated, disinvested, and marginalized neighborhoods with inadequate quality housing and limited access to resources, including quality greenspaces designed to support natural ecosystems and healthy outdoor activities while mitigating urban environmental challenges such as air pollution, heat island effects, combined sewer overflows and poor water Disinvested urban environments thus contribute to health inequity via physical and social environmental exposures, resulting in disparities across numerous health outcomes, including COVID-19 and chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases (CVD). In this paper, we build off an existing conceptual framework and propose another conceptual framework for the role of greenspace in contributing to resilience and health equity in the US and beyond. We argue that strategic investments in public greenspaces in urban neighborhoods impacted by long term economic disinvestment are critically needed to adapt and build resilience in communities of color, with urgency due to immediate health threats of climate change, COVID-19, and endemic disparities in chronic diseases. We suggest that equity-focused investments in public urban greenspaces are needed to reduce social inequalities, expand economic opportunities with diversity in workforce initiatives, build resilient urban ecosystems, and improve health equity. We recommend key strategies and considerations to guide this investment, drawing upon a robust compilation of scientific literature along with decades of community-based work, using strategic partnerships from multiple efforts in Milwaukee Wisconsin as examples of success.

WRITTEN by 

Jean C. Bikomeye

 (1)

Sima Namin (1)

 Chima Anyanwu (1)

 Caitlin S. Rublee (2)

 Jamie Ferschinger (3)

 Ken Leinbach (4)

 Patricia Lindquist (5)

 August Hoppe (6)

 Lawrence Hoffman (7)

 Justin Hegarty (8)

 Dwayne Sperber (9)

 Kirsten M. M. Beyer (1)* 

1

Institute for Health & Equity, Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Rd., Milwaukee, WI 53226, USA

2

Department of Emergency Medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Rd., Milwaukee, WI 53226, USA

3

Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers, Environmental Health & Community Wellness, 1337 S Cesar Chavez Drive, Milwaukee, WI 53204, USA

4

The Urban Ecology Center, 1500 E. Park Place, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

5

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Division of Forestry, 101 S. Webster Street, P.O. Box 7921, Madison, WI 53707, USA

6

The Urban Wood Lab, Hoppe Tree Service, 1813 S. 73rd Street, West Allis, WI 53214, USA

7

Department of GIS, Groundwork Milwaukee, 227 West Pleasant Street, Milwaukee, WI 53212, USA

8

Reflo—Sustainable Water Solutions, 1100 S 5th Street, Milwaukee, WI 53204, USA

9

Wudeward Urban Forest Products, N11W31868 Phyllis Parkway, Delafield, WI 53018, USA

*

 

The Working Catholic: Labor Day Part II by Bill Droel

 

         Covid-19 brings us an opportunity to experiment with different work arrangements, including shorter hours. For example, the 100 employees at Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com), a popular crowd-funding platform, will work four days per week in 2022, a minimum of 32 hours. Their pay remains the same as when the company required 40 hours. Aziz Hasan, Kickstarter CEO, says this is not a gimmick. “It’s really about…a more potent impact… [And] it opens up so much more range for us personally.”

Autonomy (https://autonomy.work), a research firm in the United Kingdom, has completed its participation in a five-year study of over 2,500 employees in Iceland. Backed by unions and civic groups, the workweek was four days with 36-hours per worker. Productivity remained the same. Sick days decreased. Customers noted better quality of service. Now, 86% of Iceland employees are allowed a four-day week. Another Autonomy study is under way in Scotland. For more on this get Autonomy’s Overtime: Why We Need a Shorter Working Week by Kyle Lewis (Verso, 2021).

The motivation for a shorter workweek on the part of executives is the realization that attracting and retaining competent employees, particularly because of Covid-19, is an expensive challenge. Some companies adopted employment flexibility long before Covid-19. For example, since the 1990s, Metro Plastic Technologies (www.metroplastics.com) has used six-hour days with 30-hours per week at comparable pay as a recruitment tool. The company has few worker shortages, according to Wall St. Journal (7/31/21).

Here are some considerations about a shorter workweek.

There will be complaints from a supplier or customer or worker or investor. A manager has to stand secure, resisting a premature return to old ways.

Flex-time and shorter workweek experiments can fail when they are implemented top-down, neglecting a genuine buy-in from employees from the start. Experiments originating with employees likely turn out better.

Workaholics are a further challenge. Some employees think clocking 50+ hours per week is noble in itself. A workaholic culture has infected many firms.

Keep in mind that the purpose of a shorter workweek is betrayed if time off is spent on unnecessary consumption. Waiting for the Weekend by Witold Rybcznski (Penguin Press, 1991) is a fascinating examination of how people carry their working day mentality into their time off by, for example, working on their putting.

Josef Pieper (1904-1997) says this mentality exists because our culture is one of “total labor.” The true purpose of time off is to establish “the right and claims of leisure in the face of the claims of total labor,” he writes in Leisure: the Basis of Culture (Ignatius Press, 1952). The obstacle is an economy premised on total work. It needs “the illusion of a life fulfilled.” So instead of genuine time off, it puts forth false leisure with “cultural tricks and traps and jokes.”

True leisure, Pieper concludes, is festivity or celebration. It is the point at which “effortlessness, calm and relaxation” come together. And true leisure “ultimately derives its life from divine worship,” even though people may not be conscious of the association.
“Have leisure and know that I am God.” –Psalm 46:11

Droel is with National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629)

The Working Catholic: Labor Day Part I By Bill Droel

  

         International Workers Day (May Day), the counterpart to our September Labor Day, was inspired by an 1886 event here in Chicago. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor obtained a city permit for a May rally/demonstration in the Haymarket area (now a trendy restaurant spot).  Late in the evening someone at the rally threw dynamite. Police began to fire wildly into the dwindling crowd. Soon seven officers and four workers were dead.

Eight workers were quickly rounded up, including a lay minister, a printer and others. Seven were found guilty by August. Two got life sentences (one of whom was killed in jail); one was given 15 years. The remaining four were hanged in November.

A couple years after the Chicago event European countries designated May 1^st as Labor Day to honor the Haymarket Workers. For that reason, May 1^st became the feast of St. Joseph the Worker.

And what was the issue that brought the workers to the Haymarket rally? Shorter work hours.

This was hardly the first effort in our country to reduce the working day. The 1830s saw an Eight-Hour Day Movement, details Mike Konczal in Freedom from the Market (The New Press, 2021). As part of that movement, Boston Trade Unions issued the “Ten-Hour Circular.” (Presumably they thought eight was unachievable.) This statement prompted six months of rotating strikes and protests across Boston. It was used in Philadelphia to start a general strike. There was a big parade after which the city passed a ten=hour workday law. In Baltimore the city mechanics, drawing on the same statement, won a ten-hour day. “Demands for time could unify workers facing different working circumstances,” writes Konczal.

By 1868 Pennsylvania had “set an eight-hour workday as the default” suggestion. When it came to enforcing this suggestion or any other work-related law was overcoming the prevailing attitude that contracts are “a foundational form of freedom and government should never interfere with markets,” says Konczal. The contract need not be a written document. The worker knew the score when she or he took the job. The freedom of contract assumption, then and now, is a fallacy because “government and courts intervened in important ways,” but not in the interest of workers. Laws and court decisions were intended “to boost the power of bosses and owners while limiting and stymieing the actions of workers.”

The notion of an eight-hour day gained traction during the Great Depression. In 1930 W. K. Kellogg (1860-1951) changed the work schedule at his cereal company. Production went to three shifts per day, six hours each. An employee normally clocked 30 hours per week. Wages were increased by 12.5%. “This will give work and paychecks to the heads of 300 more families in Battle Creek,” Kellogg said.

The union at Kellogg proudly issued progress reports, documenting improved efficiency, decreased unit cost and dramatic reduction in injuries. Other well-known companies (Remember Hudson Motor Car?) joined the experiment. However, after World War II workers and their unions wanted to participate in the consumer boom. They pushed for more hours in order to get more pay, including overtime. Kellogg gradually phased out the 30-hour week and completely eliminated it by 1985, writes Benjamin Hunnicutt in Kellogg’s Six Hour Day (Temple University Press, 1996).

Covid-19 presents an opportunity to experiment with remote work, flex time and other work arrangements. The topic of shorter hours is also in the mix because our Covid-19 economy has meant a shortage of competent workers in some key sectors. Thus, some business executives see reduced hours as a tool for recruitment and retention.

To be continued…

Droel is associated with National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629).

The Working Catholic: Loneliness Part II by Bill Droel

 

A major cause of our loneliness epidemic is the 50-year deterioration of intermediate-sized groups—ethnic clubs, lodges, parishes, neighborhood associations, precincts, young adult clubs and even families. The extended family no longer lives within walking distance. Seniors relocate among strangers; their children often live in other towns.

A person who uses a social media platform has, on average, about 150 “friends.” Several surveys reveal that if friendship implies steady, close and dependable, the actual number is less than five. The Gallup Poll reports a steady decline in friendship. The small friendship circle is further restricted because it increasingly contains only siblings and first cousins. A recent Cornell University survey defined friend as “someone with whom you discuss important matters.” The average number of such friends is two. The saddest in this survey were those who say they have no important thoughts or feelings to discuss.

OnePoll, a survey company, broke down friendship into levels. The number of close friends with whom you share important thoughts and feelings is three. Those three, by the way, are people from high school and/or college days or siblings. The survey says that most people make no new friends after their early 20s. According to this survey, a person has five more friends that they “like” and on occasion “meet one-on-one.” Finally, that person refers to eight other friends, but does not seek them out or spend time with them. This understanding of friendship without contact is baffling.

Let’s use parishes and young adults as an example to further this topic of intermediate groups and aloneness; the phenomenon of hanging out but not joining. Of course, one blog column will not make for a mutual, solid attraction between young adults and a parish. And, any parish that reverts to 1950s-style will—despite good intentions—quickly squander any sustainable attraction for young adults. It is also inaccurate to say that “young adults are leaving churches in droves.” Or put it this way: A change in Roman Catholic gender exclusion in its ordained priesthood will not suddenly bring hundreds of young adults through the church door. To be accurate, let’s note that a fair number of young adults do worship regularly, but not at the pre-1970 rate.

Parishes and congregations are still the main entity for social capital, details Timothy Carney in Alienated America (Harper Collins, 2019). Not only do people make connections through church, those churchgoers are more likely to belong to other groups than non-churchgoers. Those other intermediate groups do not have to be sponsored by the parish. For example, a young adult who volunteers in a tutoring program for immigrants or for high school students is likely to also be a church member. Yes, some non-religious people are involved in circles of friendship and in volunteering, particularly with other college grads. But “the best predictor of civic virtues is regular attendance at church,” Carney writes in his important study.

Further, young adult churchgoers in general have better employment opportunity, stability in marriage, less drug use, less resentment and more frequent use of libraries, parks and museums. No, this doesn’t apply only to the upper-class. Immigrants who attend church or mosque or synagogue are upwardly mobile. Nowadays it is primarily working-class whites who do not attend church. These young adults hang out but don’t connect. Their conversations are superficial; their use of TV and mobile devices is often excessive.

Surprisingly, those people who are most likely to say that religion is very important are the least likely to attend church, Carney finds. They are not searching for a vibrant expression of their faith. They are stuck and largely disconnected. This is a sizable and growing number.

What will happen? To be continued…

The Working Catholic: Lonely in Crowds By Bill Droel

 

 I’m against social distancing. I’m into physical distancing instead. There is already too much social distance in our country.

Covid-19 is accompanied by a dramatic increase in the amount of time people spend alone. “People last year spent far less waking time—an hour and a half less [per day], on average—with people outside their own household,” write Ben Casselman and Ella Koeze in N.Y. Times (7/29/21), summarizing a report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov). Time spent all alone increased by about one hour per day. Of course, Covid-19 restrictions on visitors increased the loneliness of those in nursing homes. In general, seniors spent the most time alone,” says N.Y. Times. But teenagers too were alone: One and a half hours more each day than before Covid-19.

Covid-19 is not the cause of aloneness; it only accelerated a 50-year societal trend. Robert Putnam of Harvard University tracks the loss of social capital, of togetherness. His 2000 book, Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster) exhaustively crunches all the numbers to conclusively prove the steady depletion of community life in our society since about 1970. His latest report with Shaylyn Romney Garrett is titled The Upswing (Simon & Schuster, 2020). The two discover that our current separateness is not brand new, yet isolation has not always been so. In a parallel to today, our society was individualistic from the late 1800s into the early 20^th century (the Gilded Age). Inequality was extreme; culture was polarized. However, our society gradually became more cooperative as the 20^th century evolved. Bowling leagues, clubs, denominations, veterans groups, civic endeavors, associations, school boards, neighborhood organizations and like attracted members and enriched society. But then, starting in about 1970, there was a major relapse.

Sustained isolation harms individuals. We become pessimistic. We are prone to scammers—those soliciting over the phone and those peddling conspiracies on cable TV. It is worth recognizing that loneliness and isolation can just as readily occur in big cities with crowded events as it can in rural towns.

Sustained isolation harms society. A sense of victimhood can overwhelm any impulse for the improvement of institutions, neighborhoods and culture at large. Collective virtue, which is acquired and practiced in social interaction, gives way to collective apathy or at times to narrow, one-off outbursts of fragmented dissatisfaction. A healthy give-and-take over differences is replaced by uncivil culture wars over abortion, same-gender unions, a woman’s place in society, the status of science and other issues. In fact, as the affliction of loneliness grows, individuals grasp for identity in an affiliation with extreme factions.

This analysis is totally wrong, some say. The boring social groups of the past are replaced by lively social media. That’s where today’s young adults meet and interact.

Facebook, which owns the other major social platforms, pitches community in all of its reports, its publicity and its Congressional testimony. Nonsense, writes John Miller in America magazine (8/21). Facebook is selling community but it can’t really build it. Some of its executives and engineers have so little experience of real community that they half-believe the company’s line. Other Facebook leaders are fully aware that the “company’s business model relies on making money by selling advertising to companies based on information it has gathered about its users.”

The presumption that healthy connectivity is aided by computers is backward. Computer-aided connections are a symptom of the loneliness epidemic. By design, they turn up the volume of disagreement and accentuate slights. They add to the widening polarization of isolated factions from the common square of democratic conversation. Technology, by nature, individuates. Policing the content of Facebook and other sites is not the remedy.

What can be done? To be continued…

Droel edits a printed newsletter on faith and work, INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629)

WHY CATHOLICISM IS NEEDED IN THE SOCIAL JUSTICE DEBATE

 

(From the left bank of Underwood Creek, Wauwatosa, WI)

Matthew Walter, editor of the Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a contributing editor of the American Conservative, wrote an essay entitled, This is Why America Needs Catholicism.  Walter is concerned about ‘the soulless tyranny of secular liberalism.’  Wait a minute!  Lincoln did not need Pius IX to dictate to him the Gettysburg address, especially since the Roman Catholic Church has a history of supporting slavery.  But social justice is a political issue and support is needed from all including the institutional Catholic Church.  Aquinas writes, ‘Every truth without exception and whoever may utter it is from the Holy Spirit.’

Advice from the Faith Community is essential.  Let’s look at some examples: 

The Warrior Prophet:  In his Commentary on Jeremiah, Thomas Aquinas explains, ‘A prophet has been consecrated to overturn, root up, destroy, and again to build and renew.’  

The Mystic:  A seer who focuses on the path of justice, respects science and becomes aware without the restrictions of place, space and time.  Sharing of revelation can be through music - a mode of expressing truth.

(Caution: Aquinas was condemned by the Church as a materialist in 1277; He was later canonized by Avignon Pope John XXII in 1323.)