Running to win: victory in the clean power campaign

Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it.

-          1 Corinthians 9:24

I love long-distance running. Ever since I started doing cross country during my junior year of high school in the mountains of central Pennsylvania, running has been one of the ways that I reconnect with the earth and my body. However, I occasionally run competitively as well, and that’s a different kind of running. I watch my pace more, put my head down as I ascend hills, and always save just a bit of extra energy for the “kick” in the last 400 meters.

I often compare long-distance running to organizing for social change. They’re both endurance sports, so don’t get involved unless you’re willing to commit a substantial amount of personal time, emotional energy, and physical activity to the point of exhaustion. Once you’ve gone on for a while, the fastest way home is just keep running. Victories usually come in the form of personal records, not headline-making races.

However, I recently saw a huge victory that made headlines in all the news outlets in Chicago. The Chicago Clean Power Coalition has been working to shut down or clean up Crawford and Fisk coal-fired power plants for 10 years. The group includes the environmental groups, student organizations, labor unions, and community based organizations. Bridgeport Alliance, the neighborhood group that my neighbors and I started with the help of the South Side network SOUL, officially joined the coalition as soon as we settled on a name last December.

I learned about Fisk power plant last July when a couple of Sierra Club organizers came to my near South Side church.  I learned about how Fisk and Crawford put deadly levels of particulate matter into the one of the most densely populated areas in the country—and Fisk was only about a mile away from my doorstep. I checked out the peer-reviewed articles from Harvard, and, having been sufficiently convinced of its evil, I started gathering petitions and going to actions.

Bridgeport organizing really kicked into gear when a Green Corps organizer was assigned to the neighborhood. Soon we had a visible base out in the streets, bars, and coffee shops and we were collecting signatures and photo-petitions challenging Chicago and corporate leaders to put people over their profits. Clean power came to mean more than only green energy but also a more transparent, inclusive decision-making process. Through these efforts, Bridgeport Alliance was born and was turning dozens of people to events.

It was an incredibly exciting autumn for me. Soon it became clear that we were part of marathon relay team, and we were running the last leg of the race. Today the Chicago Sun-Times broke the story about how Mayor Emmanuel and Midwest Generation had reached an agreement to shut down Fisk by December 31^st of this year. Victory.

Of course, like long-distance running, after a victory, we can’t simply stop. That invites cramps, so runners need to run a cool-down. And then we still have miles to run to stay on track for our training regimen.  Too often our elected officials claim victory prematurely, and their constituents settle back only see the problem continue. Many community organizations accepted donations from Midwest Generation essentially as hush money, but that funding will disappear without a good community benefits agreement. And of course we still have hundreds of acres of contaminated industrial property in our backyard.

Though we still have a lot of work to do, a victory gives me some time to reflect on the race. The campaign has had a profound effect on me. Because of the neighborhood outreach we did, I fell in love with Bridgeport and committed to living there for another three years as I study theology at Chicago Theological Seminary. This victory wets my appetite to continue organizing my neighbors so that we can keep our unresponsive local government accountable.

I’ll be thinking about these things when I run the Shamrock Shuffle on March 25. I’ll be running for a prize.

On power and repentance: community organizing during Lent

“Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing”

-          Joel 2:12-13

“We want to see our values in the world today. And how do we do that?” asked the trainer.

“By building power!” we responded.

“And what is power?” asked the trainer.

“The ability to act!” we responded.

“And what are the two sources of power?”

“Organized people and organized money!”

“How do we organize people?”

“Through their self-interest!”

This was an exchange that I participated in several times throughout last week at Cedar Lake, Indiana. It was probably the most intense training I’d ever done, a sort of community organizing boot camp. We came from all over the upper Midwest, and while we worked on a variety of campaigns—shutting down dirty coal power plants, fighting foreclosure of homes, divestment from the big banks—we did share a common goal that week.

We wanted to learn to build power.

The ironic part is that as I do my one-on-one meetings to identify my neighbors’ self-interest (more on that methodology here), I have ashes on my forehead. While I cut issues and do power-analyses, I contemplate my own mortality. As I plan effective meetings with my partners in the newly formed Bridgeport Alliance, I practice self-denial and penitence.

Like the season of advent, Lent is a Christian liturgical season of preparation, fasting, and penitence. It seems like an unlikely counterpoint to the community organizing that my neighbors and I are currently doing on the near South Side of Chicago. Often in organizing we tap into our anger about how the world around us is so different than the one we want desperately to see, but Lent is about seeking humility as we approach the immanent suffering of the cross of Christ.

However, Lent is also a season of repentance, or better said, metanoia, the Greek term that appears in the New Testament and for which English has no perfect, exact translation. I’ve heard that the concept goes beyond the guilt and self-correction that often goes along with repentance. Metanoia is more like a reorientation of one’s heart and mind, but it also requires action. It requires the changing of old habits so that we can begin the long sanctification process which, at least as far as I can tell, has no end.

If we look at Lent as a season of metanoia and sanctification, then really organizing for power in my South Side neighborhood is an appropriate response to the imposition of ashes. Towards what end are my neighbors and I oriented? Is this same end that the residents of the metaphorical Clout Street?

Methodists’ ancestor is faith, John Wesley, stressed how while Christians must be disciplined in our quest for personal holiness, we must also always be just as disciplined in our quest for social holiness.

I learned some things about that discipline at that powerful training in Indiana last week. After all, if I will return to the dust anyway, what will I lose by running the race to win the prize (1 Cor. 9:24)?

On the contrary, we have a pretty good shot at winning.

Crossroads of America: faith, labor, and "right-to-work" in Indiana

Most of the folks that I worked with in Indianapolis went through the day at an absolutely break-neck pace, but that was inside the political vortex that had engulfed the Indiana statehouse for nearly a year. Outside the vortex, I found a different pace and different perspective that perhaps was best encapsulated by a two-minute conversation with a custodian.

When my coworker and I explained our role in organizing faith-based opposition to Indiana’s “right-to-work” bill, the custodian grinned at us and said, “You know, right-to-work sounds really good, but if the politicians want it so badly, it can’t be that good.”

After several weeks of speaking with clergy, labor officials, juridical leaders, and lay members, no quote better voices the popular ambivalence to the so-called “right-to-work” law that the Indiana General Assembly recently passed.

To give just a bit of background, “right-to-work” refers to a kind of state law that bars labor unions from including provisions in their collective bargaining agreements that require their members to pay dues. It originates from section 14b of the Taft-Hartley Act, a union-reform bill which was passed in 1947 (and needed Congress to override President Truman’s veto). Since then, 22 states have enacted such laws, most of them in the virulently anti-union South. Indiana is the first state in more than 10 years to pass a right-to-work law, and it is the first Midwestern Rust Belt state to do so.

I think we can confidently say that America is at a crossroads in Indiana, just like the state motto proclaims.

I came to Indiana to help engage faith communities in the opposition effort against “right-to-work”. It can be a hard issue to explain quickly, and given the crisis-level activity in the legislature, including a 5-week walk-out by Democratic representatives in 2011, faith leaders often regard the right-to-work issue as “too partisan” to bring up in their community. The interesting part is that when I talked with “just-folks” Hoosiers, they were always very interested in the subject, even if they disagreed with my politics. However, in our sound-bite news cycle, people couldn’t find a place to talk about right-to-work without shouts or threats from either side.

For this reason, the local interfaith coalition set up several public forums where folks could learn about the right-to-work issue. We always made sure to invite representatives from both sides to participate. I, for one, am confident that in an open, honest debate people will realize how harmful and, as one South Side Indy resident put it, anti-social right-to-work is.

One of the best faith-based analogies goes like this: One day after a worship service, a man greets the pastor and tells her how much he likes the church—the worship service, scripture study, fellowship times, outreach—all of it. In fact, he likes it so much that he wants to be a deacon of the church. The pastor says, “Well, that sounds like a great idea. Let’s sit down later and see how we can make that happen.” But the man interrupts her. “Just one more thing that I think you should know, reverend. I don’t feel that members of church need to tithe, so don’t expect me to give any money.”

It’s an imperfect analogy because faith communities and labor unions obviously operate differently, but it shows the basic conflict that the right-to-work laws introduce. Right-to-work justifies the concept of a free lunch. Labor unions spend a great deal of money in organizing workers and in collective bargaining, money that comes from members’ dues. According to federal law, labor unions still must represent members even if they do not pay dues, and that slowly but surely eats away at the effectiveness of the union.

Proponents claim that right-to-work frees workers from having to financially support a union that they don’t politically support, which is superficially true. Then again, going back to the “tithing-optional” analogy, that is also like refusing to financially support their faith community for that same reason. It’s all well and good—until the building’s roof caves in.

We live in a cynical time, and unions and faith communities alike are suffering materially from that cynicism. The caretaker for one of the venues where we held a public forum was seriously afraid that the participants would “tear the place up” because there were union activists in the audience. In the public forums we held, more than once I heard someone snarkily quip about Jimmy Hoffa’s body.

The folks I worked with in Indianapolis were not all like the former Teamster president. In fact, they were very much like the church folks I worked with—honest, hard-working, compassionate, concerned for the future. Inside and outside the vortex of activity that is the Indiana statehouse, that concern for the future resonates in a most non-partisan way.

Faith communities responded almost always in positive ways when I asked them to act in opposition to the right-to-work bill. People of faith, while not always having a deep understanding of labor law, have an intimate understanding of mutual care, what Christian traditions term loving your neighbor as yourself, and of unity through faith. Right-to-work effectively drives a wedge between workers, weakening all of them. When people of faith understand that, they respond as their faith compels them—to action.

I remember a man at one of the public forums we held—the same guy who was afraid that the union folks would “tear the place up”. When my colleagues and I went to leave for the night, Thomas held us up, sharing with us how his view of unions and the right-to-work bill had changed. He linked his new understanding  to his own testimony as a Christian and to his conviction that God empowers the weak to do awesome things.

Amen, brother Thomas. Nobody inside the Indiana political vortex could say it better.

Red Poppy Fields: Dave's Story

Since I moved to Chicago in fall of 2010 to serve as a US-2 missionary of the United Methodist Church and then started this blog, a few folks have asked me why I named it "Red Poppy Fields". A few people have also noticed that I wear a red fabric flower--a red poppy--sewn to the collar of my jacket. This post should answer those questions.


I remember the day pretty well. My then girlfriend and I had traveled down to Maryland to do Christmas with her extended family. We were hanging out in the living room in the far wing of the rather rambling house when I got a call from my buddy Rich from home. He asked if I had heard the news. I told him that I hadn't. Rich told me that he had heard that Dave Dietrich had been killed in Iraq. I stood up from the couch, now pacing the room like I do when I get anxious, and said that I hoped that it was some sort of sick joke from a spiteful girlfriend.

I don't recall anything else about that visit to Maryland. It was Dec. 29, 2006.

It wasn't a sick joke. Dave had been killed, and the shock started permeating the small, central Pennsylvanian communities where he had grown up before joining the Army. Dave had had a rough childhood, but due to his loyalty and hard work, he had managed to graduate high school, albeit a few years later than others his age, and get into the military. I knew him best from Boy Scouts, where Dave found a second family to more or less replace his perpetually in-abstentia family. I knew that he could be little mentally slow and quick to anger, but he was as strong as an ox and rarely shirked his work. He also work on stage crew for plays and musicals at the high school and was on the football team. We were proud that Dave had gotten into the military.

The military is pretty popular in the hills where I grew up, and Dave was far from the only friend who went into the armed forces. Before I recognized my call to ministry, I had flirted with military service, too. After we got news of his death, rumors started floating around that he was up for an award for bravery. However, I started noticing things that began to sour my perspective on what had happened. At a candlelight vigil to remember Dave, his father appeared, something he hadn't done in many years, even when his son was living out of a Ford Bronco. At the memorial service in Mechanicsburg, the military chaplain told a long story about how Dave had unexpectedly accepted Jesus into his heart only weeks before he was killed. It was one of the first times that I had gotten such a wretched feeling that I was being lied to.

A year and a half later the national magazine Newsweek did a long article titled "He Should Never Should Have Gone to Iraq", which recounted Dave's story in the military. It talked about how Dave had failed the military entrance exam once, and the military couldn't explain why they had let Dave in after the second time. Dave struggled mightily in basic training, and he had been killed in his first patrol away from the base in Baghdad. The quote that titled the article came from the Army recruiter who had guided Dave through the paper work of enlistment.

I only read that article during this last autumn.

In the years after Dave's death, I had changed quite a bit. After a three-year relationship, I broke up with the girlfriend in whose family's home I first received the news. I started studying the causes of poverty and oppression, sometimes by accident, other times knowing what I was doing. I became a pacifist and started describing myself as a Christian anarchist of the Dorothy Day school. And Dave's story grew more and more important to me.

I had kept the red fabric poppy that the American Legion Auxiliary had given me outside of the funeral home where Dave's memorial service was held. A few years later the flower was held to the stem by only some putty. On the evening before I left Bucknell University for winter break in 2009, I had some sort of radical, idealist discussion with my roommate, and coincidentally I found the red poppy again. I took the flower off the  stem, threw the bent stem away, and then sewed the flower to the collar of my Carhartt jacket. I vowed that any time when someone asked me about the red flower on my collar, I would answer  that "it helps to remind me of the true costs of war".

Today I usually just say that the flower came from the memorial service of a buddy who was killed in Iraq. Few statements take the wind out of a conversation like that one.

I am sure that Dave would disagree with my stance on the military. I can't even pretend that he would agree with me. Just like so many hard-working folks in the lower echelons of contemporary American society, whether in Perry County, Pennsylvania or South Side Chicago, Dave believed in the conservative narrative of America. If we just work hard enough, then the goodness of America will naturally come out and freedom will reign. Neither would Marysville, Dave's hometown, agree with me. Dave is a martyr there, honored with a memorial path around the town park and with a patch of state road that leads west from the town.

I think Jean Paul Sartre said it very clearly when he said "when the rich wage war it's the poor who die". This basic sentiment--that the rich and the powerful exploit the poor for their own purposes--is what inspired the protesters around the world in the last year. It's what inspired me to sew a red poppy to my collar.

So I work in the Red Poppy Fields
made of red fabric flowers
torn fathers' flags
worn women's washrags
Plough, sow, harvest
In silos' shadows
Through markets' smoke
Over churches' altars
We all work in the Red Poppy Fields

On Incarnation and Social Change

"Thus it is rightly and truly said: God is born, was nursed or suckled, lay in the crib, felt cold, walked, stood, fell, wandered, ate, drank, suffered, died, etc." 

- Martin Luther, Tischreden, VI:68, 18-40)

It is very nearly Christmas, a holiday that is quite dear to me. Not only is it a time that brings back warm memories of childhood traditions with my family in the hills of Pennsylvania, but Christmas is also a time in which I reflect on the incredible, even ineffable, nature of God's incarnation as Jesus Christ.

Which makes me think about organizing for social change. Doesn't it do the same for you?

I recently had a conversation with a friend who is an organizer at a workers' center, and after a while the subject of the Communist Party USA and the Industrial Workers of the World came up. I don't remember exactly how this subject came, but such topics are not unusual in my conversations. We both agreed that in general that we supported similar stances as the radical organizations do, but they are not viable vehicles for social change any more. Specifically talking about the IWW, or better known as the Wobblies, my friend sighed and said that the focus on the general strike as an all-encompassing strategy to bring the capitalist class to its knees just doesn't organize workers. Workers will only strike as a last resort because working is what puts food on the table, not striking.

It's a basic failure to identify with their sisters and brothers, which brings me back to the concept of incarnation.

One of the reasons that people are so moved by the gospel of Jesus Christ is that he was so human. He got angry, got sad, got hungry, and was just generally human. It is one thing to fear one is so unlike yourself--the "numinous" of Rudolf Otto--but it is something else to follow in the footsteps of that one. We may sing praises to the one we do not and cannot identify with, but we strive to emulate the nature of the one who like us in nature. Christ himself is what makes possible the fulfillment of his command to "be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). That is why Christ is Emmanuel, God With Us.

I am convinced that if we want to change the world, to make the world more like the kingdom of God, then this is the philosophy that we should live and organize by: we must understand intimately the concerns of those people around us whom we wish to draw into the kingdom of God. We must become like them. We cannot stand on pedestals and proclaim the gospel of Marxist ideology and expect the masses to sacrifice themselves for the grand utopia. People only become martyrs because the kingdom of God has already been born in them; the incarnation is already within them.

Maybe this is why Jesus commanded the rich young ruler to sell all his possessions if he truly wanted to enter the  kingdom of God. And certainly this is why Jesus said that entering the kingdom of heaven is impossible for people, but with God, all things are possible. 

So in this season so close to Christmas, let us lay us aside our ideologies and principles. It is the season of incarnation. If we want to imitate the nativity, instead of extravagant pageants, let us live as the poor, the undocumented, and the marginalized live. Let us not only marvel at the little baby in the feeding trough, but let us live as if our own newborn slept that way. Perhaps then we would not be so quick to pay our debts by selling our little ones into slavery. And perhaps then the masses would indeed cast off their chains.

I can think of no better Christmas story.

Migrant Truth

“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

-          Lev. 19:33-24

My pastor at First Lutheran Church of the Trinity often repeats what makes a story true, especially one in scripture, is not that it happened once a long a time ago but that it happens over and over and over again, even today.

I wish that weren’t so true about the migrant narrative of the Christmas story.

On Tuesday night I attended a vigil at the Chicago Temple, which is home to First United Methodist Church and is situated just across from City Hall, the courthouse, and a few blocks away from the federal building. I settled into my seat in the small chapel on the second floor, and then a man shared his story.

A true story.

Charles Bayo was born in the Belgian Congo, now officially called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He moved out of the country of his birth when the nation gained its independence, and hasn’t really stopped moving since. Charles lived in Belgium until the authorities told him to move out because he was a colonial and not a Belgian citizen. Eventually he settled in Chicago where he had his own landscaping business. Then ICE knocked on the door.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is in charge of carrying out the United States’ very flawed immigration laws, and they certainly catch hell from all sides. However, the way that various enforcement agencies treated Charles is inexcusable. He was held in a county prison for a month, and then he was held in a detention center for people caught in the immigration system. He repeated how he wasn’t allowed to go outside for six months. He was treated as a common prisoner, although no one could ever truly land on what it was that he did wrong.

That is a true story, and not just because it happened this past year.

The Hebrew scriptures speak repeatedly of the chosen people of God as strangers and wanderers. Memory of this migrant experience was codified in the Mosaic Law. And later, when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem, once again the Hebrews, now called Jews, dispersed throughout the known world, from Babylon to various nations of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Christmas story, too, is a migrant’s story. According to the Gospel of Luke, the authorities in far away Rome decided that everyone needed to go their ancestral home for an imperial census. Thus the Prince of Peace was born in a stable, far away from the family and community that would normally care for a birth. The story from Matthew’s perspective is even more troubling: Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus had to flee their home to escape certain death at the hands of Herod the Great, a regional powerbroker known for his construction projects and his Machiavellian power lust.

These are true stories.

Around the country and around the world events similar to the one that I attended on Tuesday occurred in order to express our grief at how our governments and our societies treat the marginalized and displaced folks in our communities. In our contemporary, secular American culture, Christmas at its purest form is a time for family and friends to appreciate and love one another. The manner in which immigrants are treated in our country violates even this watered-down version of Christmas.

However, Christmas, in its deepest sense, is a celebration of incarnation, of Emmanuel, in our very, very messed up world. God in her most transcendent, ineffable form became human and then suffered as we suffered. Jesus was born smelling of manure, and then he couldn’t even stay there. But that is what is means to be human for a staggering number of people in our world.

Due to war. Due to disease. Due to famine. Due to greed. Due to the worship of mammon.

It’s a true story, not only because it happened once a long time ago, but because it happens over and over and over again, even today. Even to your neighbors. Even to you and me.

Join with me and celebrate Truth this Christmas.

Just Jobs

I have a friend named Bob. I know him primarily from the worship band at First Trinity Lutheran where I go to church, and all of us that play with Bob on Sundays will quickly admit that he's the glue that keeps the band together. Bob also plays sousaphone at various protests in Chicagoland with his anarchist marching band, and he organizes concerts at the church's community for the nicest punks you could ever hope to meet. On a personal level, I know Bob as a guy who just plain cares for people. That point was driven home when he stayed all night at Grant Park and then the police station on 18th and State until I came out with fellow Chicago Occupiers early in the morning.

 And Bob is officially unemployed.

At this point there shouldn't be any shame at that fact when so many millions of Americans are in the same boat. While Department of Labor statistics showed that the unemployment rate went under 9 percent for the first time in few years, the announcement was accompanied with the clarification that unemployment was down because so many people have officially stopped looking for jobs. Whether young people just entering the job market or overqualified veterans who fetch salaries that companies are looking to shed, the workers of the United States are in the middle of the toughest times since at least when my parents were getting their undergraduate degrees, and perhaps not since my grandparents were growing up.

With the incredible advances of technology in the second half of the 20th century and the deregulation of global trade, the United States has lost the manufacturing jobs that gave us the mid-century economic boom. We now have a service-based economy, and only 8% of private-sector jobs come with the protection of labor unions. Global capital moves as quickly as a high-speed internet connection, and a missed keystroke can mean a drop of nearly a thousand points in markets.

All that is to say that we live in very unstable times.

That was why a year ago Interfaith Worker Justice, the organization I work for as a 2-year missionary and organizer, started the Faith Advocates for Jobs campaign. The campaign has three basic goals: create a national network of faith communities that directly serve unemployed workers, use that network to advocate for public policies that assist the unemployed, and develop a speakers' bureau that can educate the public about the jobs crisis in the United States. I have personally been helping to organize Chicago faith communities to serve, advocate for, and minister with unemployed workers in and around the City of Big Shoulders. As I've worked, I've found just how daunting the task is.

On the South Side of Chicago where I live, the unemployment crisis is especially crushing. So many former factories and warehouses stand empty, eerily reminding us of a not-quite-forgotten past. In my neighborhood, the most stable jobs used to be city jobs, but as companies kept moving their business further and further away from Chicago, the tax revenue dried up. And let's face it--Chicago, the Windy City, isn't exactly known for dealing with money in a fair way to begin with.

Which brings me back to my friend, Bob. He was a music teacher in the Chicago Public Schools system, but he was laid off along with hundreds of other teachers. I saw what Bob can do with kids and instruments and the most minimal of resources. They had an amazing concert back in August. All I could think as I watched and listened to these kids from the West Side was, "how the hell does CPS  not have a place for this man?"

Friends, we, as citizens of this country, must ask that same question of our entire nation. How is it that we don't have jobs for so many of our neighbors? We must re-evaluate our current government policies. What are our tax-dollars doing? Are we funding infrastructure projects, or funding both sides of the war in Afghanistan? Are we promoting nutrition and health through local education programs and grocery stores, or are we helping agribusiness to flood foreign markets with unimaginably cheap grains? And can it be a just a strange coincidence that as we have deregulated  trade, income inequality has sky-rocketed?

As we come to grips with the answers to these questions, consider these actions. First, check out and join Faith Advocates for Jobs. Next, call or visit your congressperson, and tell them to extend unemployment benefits. You can find out who your congressperson is by following this link. Lastly, pray, preferably with other people, for guidance and strength, especially during the Advent season, which is both liturgically and realistically a season of stress and anxiety.

My friend, Bob, has said that he doesn't really like talking about unemployment because he doesn't enjoy receiving people's sympathy. And he doesn't consider himself a music teacher; he's a music enabler. Bob still looks to help other people, even when times are tough.

We can all learn a lot from Bob, and it's just not just about music.