Rev. Barbara H. Gadon

Interim Senior Minister

First Unitarian Church of Chicago

November 13, 2011

          After the service today, about 12:15, there will be a group from this church headed downtown to LaSalle and Jackson Streets to the General Assembly of Occupy Chicago. We will be joined by members from Second and Third Unitarian Churches, Unity Temple, and possibly others from the Chicago Area UU Council. We will bring gifts of food for the protesters.  We will stand with them in support, as our Social Justice Council voted to do last month. Yours truly will be there, as will the Reverends Alan Taylor of Unity and Brian Covell of Third Church.  After some debate, we agreed to wear suits and minister’s stoles, as we have heard occupiers appreciate the presence of clearly identified clergy.  And just to make sure they think the occupiers are just a bunch of raggedy hippies, I will be wearing my pearls.  Some will carry signs.  We want to be seen for what we are:  a religious movement that is choosing to align ourselves with a secular moral movement, a movement that is concerned with the common good.  I am already proud. 

          And I am curious.  Some of you may have been part of this movement already, having gone down to the protest site nearly every day.  You may have been watching and reading from a distance.  You may be skeptical about the whole thing – an honorable, time-honored Unitarian stance.  But… aren’t you curious?  About what kind of protest, what kind of movement has had people camped out and working together for almost two solid months? 

          Here is how George Lakoff describes the Occupy Wall Street movement in the Huffington Post:  “Democracy starts with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that sense of care, taking responsibility both for oneself and for one’s family, community, country, people in general, and the planet.  The role of the government is to protect and empower all citizens equally via The Public.” 

The public funds have provided all the things that helped me and my family prosper when I was growing up – the public schools that had access to fanciful things like art and music, good public parks to play in, a good public library where I prowled the stacks all summer and felt rich, rich, rich.  The public university with access to student aid and student loans.   Along with the GI bill which gave my father a chance to have an education and low-interest home-loans for veterans returning from WW2 - All of these public goods gave me a chance in life.

But they are shrinking now.  They are pushing to become privatized.  This is an elegant term, meaning “available if you have the money.”  We are starting to hear that these are luxury goods, and that we as a society no longer have the money to afford them.  What’s happened?  The wealthiest 1% of America has decided that they do not owe anything of what they have or who they are to The Public.  They do not feel an obligation to contribute to the common good.  That is, not enough to pay its share of taxes.  Not enough to have their profits regulated.  This did not happen by accident, either. 

In the same speech by Bill Moyers we heard from earlier, he gives a compelling narrative for how it happened. 

“The rise of the money power in our time goes back 40 years.  We can pinpoint the date.  On August 23, 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell – a board member of the death-dealing tobacco giant Philip Morris and future justice of the Supreme Court – released a confidential memorandum for his friends at the US Chamber of Commerce.  We look back on it now as a call to arms for class war waged from the top down.

“Recall the context of Powell’s memo.  Big business was being forced to clean up its act.  In 1970 President Nixon put his signature on the National Environmental policy act and named a White House Council to promote environmental quality.  Nixon then agreed to create the Environmental Protection Agency.  Congress acted swiftly to pass tough amendments to the Clean Air Act, and the EPA announced the first air pollution standards.  There were new regulations directed at lead paint and pesticides.  Corporations were no longer getting away with murder.

“Powell was shocked by what he called an ‘attack on the American free enterprise system’.  Not just from a few ‘extremists on the left’ but also from ‘perfectly respectable elements of society,’ including the media, politicians and leading intellectuals.  Fight back and fight hard, he urged his compatriots.  Build a movement…

  “Powell imagined the Chamber of Commerce as a council of war.  Since business executives had ‘little stomach for hard-nosed contest with their critics’, and ‘little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate,’ they should create think tanks, legal foundations and front groups of every stripe…

“The public wouldn’t learn of the memo until after Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court that same year, 1971.  By then his document had circulated widely in corporate suites.  Within 2 years the board of the Chamber of Commerce had formed a task force of 40 business executives – from US Steel, GE, GM, Phillips Petroleum, 3M, Amway, and ABC and CBS (2 media companies, we should note).  Their assignment was to coordinate the crusade, put Powell’s recommendations into effect and push the corporate agenda.  Powell had set into motion the agenda of the rich. 

“The Chamber of Commerce, in response to the memo, doubled its membership, tripled its budget and stepped up lobbying efforts.  It’s going stronger than ever…”  (“Our Politicians are Money Launderers in the Trafficking of Power and Policy” a speech by Bill Moyers made on November 2, 2011, to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the Public Citizen.  Excerpted in The Nation; full text and video on truth-out.org.) 

 Well, so what, someone might say?  So some people get a big slice of the pie.  Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to be searching for?  A way to get ours?  Don’t corporations need these tax breaks to have successful businesses that create jobs for everyone else?  Show me the jobs, I say. 

From 1979 to 2009, according to the Congressional Budget office, the top 1% of our country saw their wealth rise a spectacular 275%.  These were not wages, by the way.  They were from investments, and from being allowed to keep a larger share of business profits.  And in more recent times, from 1995 to 2009, the tax rate for the wealthiest Americans was 30.4%.  Unemployment at that time was 5.6%.  In 2009, the tax rate for the wealthiest Americans was – get ready – 22.4%.  And unemployment was 9.3%.  And if you include people who are working part-time jobs but want to work full-time, bump that figure up to 17%. 

I hear something like this and I get furious.  It’s also tempting to feel powerless.  It starts to sound inevitable.  The rich get richer, don’t they?  That’s just how it is.  But there are a growing number of people in our country that are saying no – no it isn’t. 

On September 17 of this year, 2,000 people amassed to protest.  Now if this were a protest on Washington, I would not have been surprised.  We are used to protests on Washington, on state capitals, even city hall.  But this was not a protest of government, our usual idea of where power resides.  This was a protest on a new seat of power, one that does not depend upon our votes, but our money.  Banks.  Investment firms.   Wall Street. 

And if this were a one-day demonstration, I would not have been surprised.  This, however, has become a demonstration of two months and going strong.  It has been a demonstration in large cities and small towns all over America.  Occupy Philadelphia and Occupy Roanoke.  Occupy Boston and Occupy Bangor.  Occupy Oakland.  Occupy Chicago.  Occupy everywhere. 

It has been filled with all sorts of people.  Many young people – especially students with massive loans and no job prospects.  In some cities, it has been mostly led by white people.  But here in Chicago, that’s changing.  Now we have Occupy the South Side.  Occupy the Hood.   And there are older people.  A group of seniors from Montgomery Place went to Occupy Chicago on Monday – they were taken on a bus by the Jane Addams Senior Caucus, a rowdy group of lefties protesting cuts in social security and Medicare.  They sat down in the street, some in wheelchairs, refusing to move, being willing to be arrested.  People have gone to jail for this.  People have been beaten and shot at.  And many, many thousands of others have simply rejoiced in having found their voice.

Some have criticized the Occupy movement for lacking structure, a clearly identified leader, a strategy that will impact the political system – in the way that the Tea Party, I hate to say it, did.  But these criticisms miss the point, I believe.  They miss just how important it is to find your voice.  To find your people.  I see people shifting - from a kind of hip weariness and cynicism, to believing that things just don’t have to be this way.  That you could protest, and others would join you.  That you don’t have to be reasonable, and quiet down, tamp down the outrage you feel.  And that you don’t have to go it alone. 

And liberals do tend to feel alone.  I grew up too late for most protest movements, but I have been reminded of their glories all my life. As a child, I watched such movements from a distance.  My family was basically a-political.  Not interested in protests, not understanding what the fuss was about.  With one exception.  When I was about 7 or 8 years old, I saw a picket sign resting on our front porch.  It was probably there because it had gotten dirty, and my mother didn’t want it in the house. I don’t remember what it said, but I knew what it was for.  This was the late 1960s, and signs like it were all over the television – they were waved at sit-ins, and carried in marches for civil rights, women’s lib, and against the Vietnam War. 

It actually belonged to my father.  My dad’s teacher’s union was on strike, and he was out on the picket line.  School was shut down for a few weeks, which I considered a plus.  I was pro-union in that regard.  Actually, I found it kind of thrilling that my father was in a protest.   My father was far less excited, middle-aged and nobody’s activist.  But he was loyal.  Perhaps he was thinking about his own father, a railroad man, who did hard, physical, and somewhat dangerous work, and valued the protections that came from belonging to a union.  He grew up in the 30s, one of the most powerful and positive times associated with unions.  Mostly, I think he was out there because they were his friends, and he just couldn’t face them if he didn’t go. 

This, it turns out, is our greatest hope.  People tend to fight the good fight because their friends are fighting; they see an obligation.  Malcolm Gladwell writes  that prolonged social justice movements require strong ties among members.  Studies of the sit-ins and summer voter registration drives of the early 1960s show that about a quarter of those who started dropped out.  This is not surprising.  Participants in the freedom rides as they were called, were arrested, shot at, beaten and sometimes kidnapped and murdered.  They were often followed by young white men in pick-ups carrying rifles.  Helping with the Freedom Rides was not for the faint of heart.  (“The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”, Malcolm Gladwell, October 4, 2010)  Those who stayed were not the ones who were the most passionate about racial justice and the movement.  They were the ones who had friends also committed to the movement. 

The four original college students who sat in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, were two pairs of dormitory roommates.  All four had gone to the same high school.  The night before the sit-in, Franklin McCain said to his three friends as they talked late into the night:  “Are you guys chicken or not?”  From those humble beginning - four young men daring each other and unable to back out - 70,000 students became activists.  It was like a fever. 

Tina Rosenberg, in her book, “Join the Club:  How Peer Pressure Changed the World”, says exactly the same thing.  (And I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in social change – or the future of churches.)  She is a journalist who chronicles successful social change movements all around the world – from convincing young adults in South Africa to use condoms to prevent AIDS, to preventing American youth from starting to smoke tobacco, to creating student protests in Serbia that eventually sparked the mass movement that toppled Slobodan Milosovic.  Most attempts at social change, she says, usually involve giving people information or trying to induce fear.  And campaigns based merely on information and inducing fear have been spectacular failures in reducing AIDS, smoking, and inducing political involvement in a scared and defeated country.  We are interested in having information, and we need to be educated, Rosenberg says.  But it doesn’t get us to do much.  And telling us scary things just makes us curl up and want to escape.  Nobody wants to think about suffering or death, a remote future that requires you to do something unpleasant or psychologically difficult right now. 

What did work in all these cases?  Peer pressure.  Friendships.  Offering people a chance to belong to a new peer group that gave them a new identity.  Being a part of something that suddenly made them feel strong.  We have a powerful need to belong, she says, and this is our greatest hope for change.  Finding the right people with whom we can belong. 

Social change can take a long time.  It takes a lot of patience.  The civil rights movement started in the early 1900s, if you remember that the NAACP was formed in 1909, that there were movements in the 20s and 30s.  The Montgomery Bus strike happened in 1955, and it took 9 years to get an amendment for equal voting rights. 

Such a long time, by our standards.  But they stayed in the fight.  They stayed in the fight because the churches were organized as means of support.  They stayed in the fight because of what it meant, not just for their own families but for whole communities.  They had each other for support.  They had each other expecting them to fight.  Like my father’s friends, they would not let them off the hook.  Like Franklin McCain’s friends, they counted on each other.  They didn’t want to lose face. 

Do you want to know what finally got me off the dime, and suggesting that we check out Occupy Chicago?  Facebook.  I’m not kidding.  Facebook.  I was watching my UU minister friends, all posting about going to occupy Boston, Philadelphia, and Denver.  All over the country.  Now instead of doing my duty to live up to my lonely liberal values, every day I was reminded of what my peer group was doing.  It looked exciting.  And I felt some pressure.  Friendship.  And peer pressure.  Friendship is also bringing out the other Unitarian Universalists out today.  We are expecting something from each other. 

And friendship is what might just draw you into this activity, even this movement, today.  I’m telling you that friendship is quite likely the one thing that will keep you going in anything that you care about.  We don’t know what we will encounter downtown, but we hope that it is exciting and encouraging to the heart.  My dearest hope?  That we find our friends.  And that we encourage the hearts and lift the spirits of this community of friends, at this church, so that they do the same for us.  And we feel drawn to something we sense is there.  Something exciting, something to feed our own hungry souls.  Something that speaks to what we have hardly dared hope for, have been hoping for, for many years.  So may it be.  Amen.