Vote for Joe

I sat in on a Passover Seder last night at the Holy Trinity Newman Center at Northern Arizona University. Then gave a talk to the group. (The Seder commemorates the Exodus of the Jewish slaves from Egypt.) During the ceremonial dinner there were readings about how hard the Egyptians worked the Jews, having them carry heavy stone “and toiling long hours in the fields.” At one point in the dinner, you eat a bitter herb to commemorate the bitterness of slavery. Toward the end of the dinner, the promise is that because of the pain these people knew first hand, they would stridently “defend liberty” in return… After the dinner I said to the some 40 college students that it was no longer Old Testament times, but rather: “the year 2006.” (I try to stay up on these things.) And I said in our current time, there were still “slaves” worldwide. (All you have to do is read Amnesty International’s literature.) I said among this slave population, I believed, were many of the illegal immigrants in this country who are ‘toiling in the fields” of the San Joaquin Valley in 110 degree temperatures sun up to sun down for minimum wage, or less. Or they are ‘carrying’ heavy burdens in the garment district sweat shops of L.A. and New York. Or they are sweating in the frigid cold, or oppressive heat, of chicken processing plants in the Midwest. Or… Then I said why many of these people leave family, friends, culture, country, is because their children are hungry or they are under political oppression. I told the students about traveling to Juarez, Mexico, where people work for $3 a shift in multi-national factories and live in cobbled together shacks with no running water, no electricity, and their children are hungry. Then there is Heraldina in Nicaragua. Tiffin, Ohio’s Sr. Paulette Schroeder told me she heard Heraldina’s story during a trip to Nicaragua on a “Witness for Peace” tour. She said Contra forces had undertaken a campaign of terror there to undermine strides toward moving people out of poverty. In one village, she said grenades started exploding amidst intermittent gunfire. Heraldina grabbed her eight-month-old child and ran. A bullet pierced her back and lodged in the leg of the baby. Heraldina survived, barely. The baby lost his leg… I asked the students if they were living in a similar situation, how many would seek refuge in, say, America? Everyone raised their hands… I then exhorted the students to not come away from the dinner with just a bunch of empty symbolism about the “bitterness” of slavery and the “sweetness” of freedom. But rather, the night should motivate them to help free those in bondage to slavery today. I exhorted them to protest in solidarity with the immigration rallies of today. To flood their campus and local newspapers with letter to the editor about social justice for the illegal immigrants. I asked them to consider setting up a Sister Church project with a Church in Latin America to get as much help to the people there who want to stay, but are in seemingly dead-end situations… And I closed by saying none of the people in the room were “poor college students.” I said that was an absolute myth fostered by our insular socio-economic class system here. That is, if they were living in a dorm room with central heat and air, a nice bed, couch and CD player, a full refrigerator and full closet… and what’s more, were moving toward a career that would set them up nicely in suburban America — they were, in fact, “among the most privileged in a world — where billions live in abject poverty.” And there was one other perception they might want to lose as well, I said. That is, no matter what profession they were aiming at — “it isn’t any more important than a farm worker’s job.” That is, a farm worker helps provide us with life giving food, I said. So even if society doesn’t acknowlege (monetarily, or status wise) that a farm worker’s job is as important as, say, a lawyer, or accountant, or stock broker — “at least now you know,” I said. And I continued it something God knew as well. “So,” I said, “if you leave here and begin making, say, “$45,000 a year, and decide to spend most of it on yourself as opposed to sharing close to half of it with a farm worker and his family (who is making $7,000 a year and doing just as important a job, if not more important) what do you suppose God might say to you at Judgement? I told the students He might, oh, echo the passage in Isaiah 10 about: turning aside the needy from justice and robbing the poor of their right. Later in that passage it asks specifically of those who rob the poor of their right: “What will you do on the day of Judgement?”… An apt question, not only for all the college students currently moving into “Generation Me” — but for all of us. Note: In Flagstaff, Arizona, the other day I saw a bumper sticker that read: “Lord, help me to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.”

I talked to some 500 people at an Immigration Rally in Flagstaff, Arizona, today. Through a bull horn, I said several years ago we went to the dusty streets of Juarez, Mexico, to research the conditions there. I graphically talked about 200,000 people living in cobbled together shacks made of scrap wood and rusty tin on the city’s westside. There was no electricity, no running water and little food, I continued. At one point in the tour, I explained I stood on a ridge with a vantage of both Juarez and El Paso, Texas, to the north — which looked like OZ in comparison to Juarez. The priest who was giving us the tour (and who ran an orphanage in Juarez) pointed to the face of poverty (slums) in Juarez, then to the face of relative affluence (suburbia) of El Paso. Then he pointed to the fence on the border and asked: “If you were Jesus, what would you do with the fence?” The crowd this day in Flagstaff didn’t have to wait for an answer. They just cheered, loudly… After I finished talking, I was interviewed by Channel 3 News out of Phoenix. I said we would push for an immigration policy that would provide amnesty and family reunification for the some 12 million illegal immigrants in this country… In an interview with a reporter from the Northern Arizona University’s newspaper, I said besides pushing for amnesty and family reunification, our administration would also push to get as much humanitarian aid in the form of more funds, more Peace Corps help and private citizen initiatives to Latin America to help people there become as sustainable as possible. I told the reporter our platform hinged on “common sense.” And we believe common sense would say a lot of people in Latin America don’t want to leave their countries, their families, their friends, their culture… to come here. It’s just, well, in most cases their kids are hungry… Then during an interview with Flagstaff’s Channel 33 News (Spanish TV), I said that ultimately we’d like to see the fence come down and we’d like to see a move toward a ‘North and South American Union’ (like the evolving European Union). By opening the borders and encouraging much more interconnectdedness between countries, we believe we’d increase rapport between countries tremendously as we got to know each other better. We think this would pave the way to much more cultural exchange, joint environmental conservation projects, more of a flow of humanitarian aid help. It’s the type of globalization that doesn’t hinge primarily on economics (read: NAFTA), but rather a multi-dimensional focus aimed at the common good for, well, everyone.

We stopped at Holy Resurrection, a Byzantine Catholic Monastery out in the desert in Newberry Springs, California. After attending early evening prayers with the Fathers here, we were invited to dinner. It was a simple fare of spinach sandwhiches, salad and rice. We sat in a rectangle with a podium positioned in the middle of the tables. The whole time we ate, one of the Fathers read from the book The Ladder of Ascent by John Climacus (a Lenten ritual at the Monastery). This particular night the essay was: “On Gluttony.” Some excerpts included: “Gluttony thinks up seasonings and creates sweet recipes… If a visitor calls, then the slave of gluttony engages in charitable acts — but for the reasons associated with his love of food… So let us restrain our appetites with the thought of the fire [read: Hell] to come… What we ought to do is to deny ourselves fattening foods, then foods that warm us up, then whatever happens to make our food especially pleasant… Fight as hard as you can against the stomach. The man who fights his stomach causes it to shrink… You should remember a demon can take up residence in your belly and keep a man from being satisfied, even after devouring all of Egypt and after having drunk all of the Nile…” Now while I had been oscillating, it was after this last one that I decided not to ask for seconds… On a more serious side: Several years ago during a campaign stop in Vermont, I interviewed Fr. James Noonan who has been a Maryknoll priest in Cambodia — amidst extreme poverty and hunger. He said to me that we in America are “food terrorists.” That is, we take the abundance God has given us and waste tremendous amounts of money on non-nutritional junk food or spice up (“…make food especially pleasant”) and then overeat it — while scores of little children starve daily in the Third World. Yet from the pulpit (unless it’s a small Monestary in a California desert) do we seldom, if ever, hear this called what it is. The sin of: gluttony. Note: In a case of interesting timing, the next day after the monestary experience, the Arizona Republic newspaper ran an AP story saying the US Center for Disease Control just released an updated report saying a larger portion of Americans, than ever before, are overweight — and we were now one of the most overweight populaces in the world. A phenomenal 30.5% of all American adults are now considered obese and a staggering 64.5% are overweight. And one-third of U.S. kids are now overweight as well… Meanwhile, 17 million people stand on the brink of mass starvation in drought stricken East Africa.

In honor of Cezar Chavez Day today, I worked on a position paper about farm worker issues this morning. One of the points I make in the paper is that our administration would push to make this a National Holiday because of the social justice importance of what Chavez accomplished… I also interviewed Jennifer and Ruben De Anda today. They live on the Monterey Penninsula in California. Jennifer was born in America. Ruben comes from Lago de Moreno in the State of Jalisco, Mexico. (He is now an American citizen.)… Ruben proposes a fascinating concept. He pointed to the coming together of countries to form the European Union and wondered why we couldn’t form, say, an “Americas’ Union,” involving as many countries as possible in North and South America. With this Union would come a unified monetary system (like the Euro), open borders, more idea and investment exchanges… In other words, undertaking things together might well create more of a common bond, more conduits for mutual aid, and better camaraderie in general between nations… The De Andas have three young children. The children are learning to speak both English and Spanish. Jennifer explained they get the children bilingual books, attend bilingual church services and are also taught a lot about their father’s country and culture. “Just learning the language doesn’t tell you how people think, or about their customs and social standards,” said Ruben… The couple is also quite concerned about the recent immigration policy debate in the U.S. They said some of the extended family is legal, some not. If the policies enacted are quite stringent, the De Andas are worried about deportation and the havoc that could cause in splitting some of their extended family, and so on… Note: We came across a group of some 50 Hispanic men congregated around a 7-Eleven store parking lot in Seaside, California, yesterday. They were trying to hawk their services. One of the men, Oscar Domingus, said he had arrived at 5 a.m. (it was now 10:30 a.m. and he still hadn’t been hired). Domingus, who moved here from El Salvador four years ago, told me the men gather here every day early in hopes of being hired to do day land scaping, or mechanical work, or contruction work, or farm work. Some get hired. Some don’t. These guys live in quiet desperation on the margins of society, day in and day out. How many of us (spiritually) turn our backs because, well, we’re already ‘hired?’

I picked up a Time Magazine in Seaside, California, yesterday. There was a “Special Report” on global warming. It was titled: BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED. And after I read the articles, I was. (That is, even more than I already was.) The crux of the article is that a host of scientists believe that, not only is global warming real, but that the earth stands at an alarming “tipping point.” Glaciers at the North and South poles are turning to slush at a highly accelerated rate, Greenland is also going through a major meltdown. Global warming is also causing wide spread (and rapidly increasing) drought now. It is playing tremendous havoc with plant and animal species. Cyclones and hurricanes are increasing in intensity… It’s as if the earth is trying to “shake off a fever,” reporter Jeffrey Kluger wrote. The article also noted the question anymore isn’t whether global warming is real, but rather: Are we capable of reversing it in time?… This morning at St. Francis Xavier Church in Seaside there was somewhat of a roundtable discussion. I said I believe a big part of the answer to global warming is for the churches to take the lead in teaching that the environment is, indeed, a hugely significant moral issue. And each of us have a major personal responsibility (and spiritual culpability) in all this by the lifestyles we lead. [Hint: The U.S. has 5% of the world population and emits 25% of the greenhouse gasses. Read: gluttony.] And I also prayed this morning that the church members (and the church as an institution) would develop the charism St. Francis had for the environment — “so the next generation, including our children, has a world to live in.” Note: For more on the specifics of what we can tangibly do to reverse global warming in a dramatic way, see our “Energy Policy” position paper under “what joe stands for” on this site.