I Feel The Earth Move

The Loma Prieta EarthquakeIt’s earthquake season here in California. 

Actually earthquakes happen all through the year, but every October we mark the anniversary of our last big quake, Oct. 17, 1989.  At 5:02 PM the ground shook, buildings swayed and collapsed, people died. The Loma Prieta earthquake, 6.9 on the Richter Scale, killed 63 people in Northern California and destroyed hundreds of buildings, bridges and roads. 

For the next few weeks we’ll have many anniversary news stories and photos. (We get another round in April, anniversary of the 1906 quake, but only a couple people who were babies then and are now over 100 take part in those annual commemorations.)   We ask one other, “Where were you on that October afternoon?  Are you prepared for the next one?”  We store back up water and flashlights in the house and car.  We bolt major appliances to the wall so they don’t “walk” and fall and kill. Entrepreneurs try to sell earthquake insurance.  But can one ever be really ready?

Scientists warn the next one will be really, really big, 9.0 or more. (Each added digit on the Richter scale is exponential; the 7.9 1906 quake was 10 times more powerful than the 6.9 Loma Prieta one.)

The Loma Prieta EarthquakePeople often tell me, when I travel, that they would never want to live in California because of the earthquakes, how scary and dangerous they are. I sort of scoff at that attitude.  I say something about every place having its natural disasters - I’d take earthquakes over tornados or hurricanes any day – we hardly every get those events.

But I wonder - are people formed by their local landscape and natural disasters? Are Californians different from Kansans because the earth moves under our feet and we run to stand in door jambs, while they, like Auntie Em, hide in storm cellars so they won’t get blown away to Oz? And the landscapes; do the flat hot Midwest plains form personalities that are different than those of us who live near a wild and vast ocean? Do landscape and natural disasters explain something of our regional differences?

I think Californians are a people on the edge and on the move.

We are on the far western edge of our continent.  Our local Carmel poet Robinson Jeffers began his poem “Continent’s End:”

     At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain,
             wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,

     The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the
             ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

     I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established
             sea-marks, felt behind me

     Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent,
             before me the mass and doubled stretch of water…..

The Loma Prieta EarthquakeMost of our nation tends to look east. Californians and Kansans both look to New York and Washington DC for government, news, entertainment, and from there to Europe as the source of our heritage.  Ellis Island in New York Harbor is the gate through which most immigrants came. But when I moved to California from New York I learned a whole different US history story, how the Spanish sailed up the California coast from Mexico and landed in Monterey in 1603, years before Plymouth Rock or Jamestown.  How bold Chinese sailed across the Pacific in small wooden junks in the 1840’s. Later came Japanese immigrants, and in the 20^th century Vietnamese, Filipino, Samoan, all kinds of immigrants from the west, came across the Pacific and through the Angel Island immigration gate in San Francisco Harbor. We take Asia as seriously as Europe.

The Loma Prieta EarthquakeOur western edge is also the vast and deep Pacific Ocean. Here, unlike the Atlantic, we have the ocean phenomenon called upwelling.  Only in five places in the world, where also are the most productive fishing industries, on west coasts, does cold nutrient-rich water, come from the deep to the surface. A vast deep sea current system, water that travels around all the world’s oceans and stays down there for centuries, meets this west coast, in the spring and summer, this water from far away and long ago, and it upwells.  And up comes food for whales and squid and sea stars and kelp and all of us. It is a rich, diverse, productive edge.

This deep sea current also brings our famous fog, and in the years when the upwelling doesn’t happen, we call it an El Nino year.  Instead of all that food from the deep, we get the warm currents from the southern hemisphere, around Christmas time, the Christ-child “El Nino” (Little Boy) and long wet winters of torrential rain and wind. Love California, it’s cold and it’s damp.

So being an “edgy” people helps us Californians be a bit more open to diversity than those Easterners, I think, to welcome new and different surprises from the west and from the deep. Some years ago I edited a collection of poems written by a wide variety of folks inspired by a local state park, Point Lobos, and I called the collection, “Dancing on the Brink of the World,” which is a line from a song of the native folks of this region, the Ohlone.  I like that word brink.  I could picture those ancient ones, dancing on this edge, this brink, between land and sea, field and granite, east and west, safety and danger.

“Brink” also describes how we perch on a network of the north-south earthquake faults that striate our state, shaking all the time.

So we people on the edge are also a people on the move, especially those of us along the coast, west of the large and deep San Andreas earthquake fault. We are literally separate from the rest of the state, because we live on the Pacific Plate of the earth’s crust.  That plate moves in a completely different direction, slowly northwest, at about the same rate as our fingernails grow each year. Last year we were two inches farther south than we are now.  The rest of the state is slowly moving south east. From that scraping and sliding fault come the earthquakes.

But no matter where we live, we Californians are all accustomed to earthquakes, a little instability underground.  We know that things do not always remain the same, static.  I think that makes us more open to the new.

Now of course there are edgy folks on the move in Kansas. And New York.  We have lots of hubris here in the Golden State that we are the only ones on the move. And we are stupid enough to keep building gas lines and houses and hospitals directly on top of our hundreds of earthquake faults.  Are we really ready for that big one?

But I’d still rather ride out a quake above ground than hide from a tornado in the cellar. 

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

By the Numbers

This column is brought to you by the numbers 47 and 99.

I was at a meeting this week led by a woman with a new baby.  Sometimes she held him, sometimes she handed him off to another staff person.  She was orienting a group of us to be volunteers at a big Blue Ocean Film Festival here in Monterey next week.  She encouraged us to keep track of mileage and parking and food costs; we could claim them on our tax returns as deductions for volunteer service.

“I’m learning more about taxes,” she said, “ever since I gave birth to this deduction.”

 “Oh,” I said, with mock scorn, “You are now part of the 47%?”

“No!” she replied in horror.  “I’m in the 99%.”

I let it go.  She’s got 5000 people coming to this film festival and she’s training 200 volunteers and she has a new baby.  Guess she hadn’t heard yet Mitt Romney’s comments to a $50,000 a plate fundraiser that were released this week.  Referring to the 47% of people who pay no income taxes, he said:

"It’s not my job to care about those people who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement...I will never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Much reaction and fact checking on Mitt’s comments.  Even neo-con NY Times columnist David Brooks said Mitt got it all wrong.  Most of those 47% do pay payroll taxes, taxes taken right out of their paycheck, for Medicare and Social Security. And when they receive that income, which Mitt scornfully calls an entitlement, it’s exempt from taxation. These are called the elderly and disabled.  The 47% is also the working poor who earn too little to pay taxes ($26,000 for a family of 4), and veterans getting disability.  Republicans happily spent $8 trillion over the past ten years to send those men and women to war, but now say their injuries make them lazy? The 47% are not welfare queens at the breast of an equally lazy government; this is one more of his racist dog whistles.

And does he include in the 47% the over 200 zillionaire execs who pay not a dime of income tax either, thanks to perfectly legal off shore financial tricks. Execs who use phrases like “those people.”

I happen to think a President should commit to being President of all the people, that the job actually is “to care about those people.” 

My friend’s desire to be identified with the 99% refers of course to the Occupy Movement, which celebrated its first (another number!) anniversary this week with small protests around the nation.  “We are the 99%!!”   For a movement that resisted any focus on one issue or any identifiable leaders, that number made a huge impact on our culture, and began a year of intensive math education for our nation.

Yes, it’s like we are in math class all day. Unemployment figures, families living below the poverty line, money left in Social Security, unemployed veterans, veteran suicides, test scores, high school graduation rates, this month’s unemployment insurance claims, the same numbers last year, up or down, etc. etc. 

Mitt finally this week provided a number he’s been hiding for months, his tax return’s.  A sad, shameful number.  14.  He paid 14% tax, thanks to most of his income being from investments, which are taxed at a lower rate. Most Americans pay 20-30%, the tax rate on salaries. 

Bill Clinton likes numbers also.  Asked how they balanced the budget and eliminated the deficit during the 8 years of his administration, he answers, “It’s simple, one word.  Arithmetic.”  His Democratic Convention speech was a masterpiece of education, using numbers, facts, not ideology and lies, to paint a picture of the current economic mess and how Obama’s policies will get us out of it.  Almost all his numbers were confirmed as accurate by various fact checkers.  He has said since that he assumes the American people want facts and are smart enough to understand numbers.  His speech was very popular.  (I could look up some poll numbers to convince you how popular it was.)

Polls!  Everyday there’s a report on the number of people who think this or that, how many are likely to vote for him or her, approve of this or that.  I am pretty skeptical about polls, having answered a few myself on the phone and seen how skewed the questions are and small the samples.  But I was amused by the poll that showed that people were more disapproving of the lie Republican Vice President Paul Ryan told about his best marathon time (he shaved an hour off his official time) than about the date when the factory closed in his town (under George W. Bush’s watch, not, as he accused, Obama’s.)  That poll showed that a certain number of people disapproved of some made up numbers by Mitt’s number two.

Perhaps the only way to survive this onslaught of numbers is to laugh.  For years, Don Asmussen in the San Francisco Chronicle has done a funny cartoon strip about fake news headlines, called Bad Reporter.  Because of copyright rules, we can't print this past week's strip here. But check out: "Video shows Romney Claiming 47% of Clint's Speech Made Sense” with the subhead: "Factcheck: 17% of it Made”Sense,"  Asmussen’s fake head line this week.

I belong to that group in the last panel: "New Group Called 100 Percenters Sick of Election.  Finally, Unity."

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

Ask Not

Flags were at half-staff all over the US on Tuesday for the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, in remembrance of the thousands dead of 11 years ago.

On Wednesday the order came to lower the flags again, this time in honor of the 4 dead in Benghazi. 

Today, Saturday, they are still at half staff, in front of state buildings, schools, also shopping centers and homes.

A hard, scary, sad week here and abroad.  So much violence and hatred.  And such mean incitement to violence here in America.  A stupid hateful film poured gasoline on years of already burning lies and anger about religion, inciting young men all over the world to storm US embassies and old men in the US, supposedly Christian, to pour even more fuel on the fire. 

It appears that the anti-Muslim film, made six months ago by a Southern Californian so-called Christian Coptic pretending to be Jewish, got a new dose of publicity fuel from a Florida pastor who has previously burned Korans.  Then the Mormon-Christian presidential candidate thought he’d win votes by turning the flame up higher.

As Holden Caulfield said in Catcher in the Rye, “Some of the things that have been done in Jesus’ name would make him puke.”

So I feel a rant coming on.  Probably repeating myself, as I surely will all the way to Election Day.  Wake up and look around you, Americans.  We are not the only or best citizens of the world.  We are not the world’s cowboys (see last week – Clint.)  We were not founded as a Christian nation, nor are we all Christians.  And for those of us who are, surely we could honor our lord and savior a bit more faithfully if we never do what he never did; lie, incite violence and hate, kill, and lie some more.  We’ve got some good American history and values to stand for, and some horrible history and lies and violence to atone for. 

And as to how to respond to any death, but especially sacrifice for country, there’s a time to speak and a time to shut up. (After Romney’s arrogant, misinformed comments Roger Cohen wrote in his NY Times Europe column: “This September surprise has given the world cause to appreciate the cool head in the White House and worry about the hothead who aspires to replace him. Romney, in Jacques Chirac’s immortal phrase, ‘lost a good opportunity to keep quiet.’  His words reflected a shoot-from-the-hip, America-first approach to the world that will not fly in a time of deep interdependency. Two scarring wars have demonstrated that.”)

So I think again and again about what it means to be a US citizen these days.  And after watching as much as I could stand of the party conventions the past weeks, I could see there are at least two answers:  I am a citizen, that gives me certain rights; what’s in it for me - no one can tell me what to do.  Or: I am a citizen, that gives me certain responsibilities; I have work to do with my fellow citizens and my nation – we’re all in this together.

“As citizens, we understand that American is not about what can be done for us.  It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government.”

Many of us Americans heard in these words of President Obama at the Democratic Convention last week the echoes of President Kennedy’s inaugural speech over 50 years ago; “Ask not what your country can do for you.  Ask what you can do for your country.”

In his own inauguration almost 4 years ago Obama introduced the theme:

“What is required of us is a new era of responsibility – a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.

“This is the price and the promise of citizenship. This is the source of our confidence – the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall; and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served in a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”

 He returned last week to the theme of “the price and promise of citizenshp,” saying in Charlotte: “We also believe in something called citizenship – a word at the very heart of our founding, at the very essence of our democracy; the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations. Because we understand that this democracy is ours.

“We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.”

If you polled Americans, I doubt they would agree that there is a price as well as a promise of citizenship, responsibilities as well as rights.  Many of my fellow citizens define citizenship as membership card, a bestower of privileges, a key to the executive washroom, a license to own guns.  It’s about what’s in it for me.

Obama was sometimes called “educator in chief” early in his administration for his professorial speeches and conviction that ideas, such as responsibility, can actually change people and policies.  He is trying to teach us that citizenship is not just about privileges but also participation, promise as well as price.

To paraphrase the “land ethic” of environmentalist Aldo Leopold: “America (The land) is not a commodity that belongs to us, but a community to which we belong.”  (We might expand that community to the world; we are world citizens.)

To be a citizen is not about certain rights belonging to us, but a certain community, nationality, to which we belong.  I notice that Obama begins many speeches not with the usual “My fellow Americans..” but “My fellow citizens…”

Obama also said in his inaugural, “We remain a young nation.  But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to put away childish things.”  Thinking we can own something, like citizenship, keep it all for ourselves, without any responsibility for its care, health, availability, is a youthful, selfish folly.  To be an adult means we realize we’re all in this together.

Americans are getting another 9/11 wake up call this week, another push to put away childish things, another lesson in the school of citizenship.   Let’s hope we learn from the educator in chief’s classy classes about responsibility and community.

As my wise fellow columnist Kevin Brown here at the Back Road Café knows that Dietrich Bonhoeffer said about discipleship, citizenship has a cost as well as a joy.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

All American Clint

Clint Eastwood is my neighbor.  Well, we live in the same county, our kids are in the same school district and once I saw him pumping his own gas next to me at the local station.

That made my day.

So did his “speech” at the Republican National Convention last week; it made my day. 

Clint EastwoodIn an 11 minute improvised ramble he spoke to an empty chair that he pretended was President Obama, made rude and incorrect statements, and just barely endorsed Mitt Romney.  Press and public reaction were a mix of embarrassment, bewilderment, horror and delight. 

Those were my reactions too. 

Some of my delight was schadenfreude.  After three days of a GOP infomercial; totally scripted bland empty promises and outright lies, it was like seeing Emperor Mitt without any clothes. Clint was the true, actual, real GOP.  Like his party-mates, he was misinformed or outright dishonest (saying it’s time to elect a non attorney for President - Mitt actually is an attorney; saying Obama started the war in Afghanistan, etc.).  Unlike the automatons at the podium, he was just like many of the delegates there in Tampa; self-contradictory, out of touch, unprepared, an old white guy to whom black people are invisible.  And passive-aggressive, nasty; twice he had the “invisible” Obama say, “Go fuck yourself.” 

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show called his speech “The Old Man and the Seat.”

But as a neighbor, I sort of like Clint (we all refer to him by his first name.)  He is an active environmentalist and has purchased lots of scenic property in our very picturesque and very rich community and donated it to the park system to prevent it from being developed into mansions and gated communities.   He bought a funky old coastal restaurant/inn and restored it beautifully and plays piano at the bar some nights.  He funded the local youth center (very nice pool tables and recording studio.)  Annoyed at local politicians, he didn’t just criticize or try to play on his privilege; he actually ran for mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, population 3700, in 1986 and served an honorable term.

Read his Wikipedia bio. He has had a full and interesting life.  Many consider him a macho icon; his cowboy and cop movies, phrases like “Go ahead, make my day” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” are American memes.  And he’s a creative icon, especially as a director.  I was particularly impressed that he made two movies about the World War II battle at Iwo Jima, one from the American perspective and the other Japanese. 

Clint has described his politics as libertarian.  He says he is liberal on social rights (he supports gay rights, is pro-choice) and fiscally conservative.  He voted for John McCain in 2008, he says, because he was a war veteran, but that he didn’t agree with him on a lot.  He made an intriguing commercial for Detroit car companies that aired during this year’s Super Bowl that sounded pro-Obama and the auto bailout.  He’s a little hard to pin down.

But someone thought it was a good idea to have him speak at the Republican Convention, without vetting his speech or making him do what everyone else had to, use a teleprompter.  They thought that Clint would get attention, make the Republicans seem – what?  Hip? Macho? As loved by Hollywood as are the Democrats?  Who knows?  But the next day some newspapers, even though Mitt gave his acceptance speech right after Clint, featured Clint, and the chair. The Financial Times reported that 1.5 million people watched Clint’s speech the next day on YouTube; only 50,000 watched Mitt’s.  All kinds of “empty chair” jokes followed.

Our local weekly newspaper, the Carmel Pine Cone, scored an exclusive interview with Clint this week, his first after the Tampa soliloquy.  Headline: “Eastwood says his convention appearance was ‘mission accomplished.’ (A good idea to quote what George W. Bush proclaimed on the aircraft carrier years before the killing stopped?)

Clint tried to summarize what he meant to say: “ President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people…Obama has broken a lot of the promises he made when he took office…people should feel free to get rid of any politician who’s not doing a good job…It was supposed to be a contrast with all the scripted speeches, because I’m Joe Citizen…I’m a movie maker, but I have the same feelings as the average guy out there.”

Clint, and the sympathetic right wing Pine Cone editor claimed that the media’s critique of his speech was all a left wing conspiracy (even though Fox News was a part of the critique), How great, they said, that blogs and tweet-sphere were universal in their affirmation and adulation. Oh yeah? Try looking at the public comments on the New York Times story – not too positive or sympathetic. Part of that left-wing conspiracy I guess.

So I guess I would say this about Clint: Thanks, neighbor, for some good citizen things you’ve done here on the Central Coast of California. But I wonder why we Americans pay so much attention to the political views of actors? Who’s to say George Clooney or Sean Pean or Susan Sarandon or Clint Eastwood understands more about what’s best for the US than I do, or than a government professional does, or that I should give their opinion any weight at all? 

Because in that speech Clint seemed sadly a bit like Americans these days; like many in our country, he thinks he’s a young macho stud gunslinger, alone on the western frontier or bullying city folk he does’t like, when he might actually be growing a little out of it and nasty and senile. (We always talk about America as a young country – I think we are in at least a crazy adolescence if not a crazy dementia.) To All-American Clint multiracial people right next to him are invisible. He figured he could wing it; Americans are known for acting first, thinking later, if ever. And like a lot of my fellow citizens who pretend to be an Average Joe, he really loves being in the spotlight. It’s that American exceptionalism the Republicans revere; look at us, ours is the only way, pay attention to us, obey us

I hope that kind of American doesn’t shoot its way into the polls and the White House this fall. 

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

Madame Perkins has been in labor for eight years, but...

Two big national holidays here in the US this past week: Labor Day Weekend and Women’s Equality Day. 

Labor Day is much more familiar to Americans, I am sure.  Women’s Equality Day, always celebrated August 26, marks that August day in 1920 when the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution finally (after a 75 year struggle) granted women the right to vote.

Banks are still open August 26, no special bargains at stores.  Parades?  Not that I heard of, although long ago I did go to a Women’s Equality Day parade.  August 26, 1970, New York City. We were valiantly trying again to amend the Constitution.  This time seeking more than the just the vote.  We marched in support of a new amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment.  Full text: “Equal rights shall not be denied because of sex.”  That one failed; the necessary 2/3 of states wouldn’t ratify it.  I remember lots of scare tactics (required unisex bathrooms!) terrifying the southerners.

But Labor Day – now that’s a holiday we can get behind.  Always the first Monday in Sept.  A guaranteed three day weekend.  Back yard barbeques, all kinds of sales, and maybe a parade here or there. 

This holiday is only a little older than Women’s Equality Day.  1894, after the bitter Pullman Strike, railroad workers, President Grover Cleveland sought to appease union leaders with a holiday.  The date was picked to be as far as possible from May 1, International Workers Day, wanted no association with the Communists. 

We’re still pretty ambivalent about the rights of workers, even with the holiday.  Not quite as much as we fear women’s rights, but we can all support a day off from work and more encouragement to shop.  Sadly, many of our federal holidays honoring “good causes,” like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, 3^rd Monday in January, have become just  a long weekend for skiing and shopping.  But at least in my kids’ school they had some kind of lesson about Rev. Dr. King that week in January. Even though school now starts mid-August, (it used to begin after Labor Day) I doubt there is an August 26 unit on Women’s Rights.

Frances PerkinsSo to combine these two great American causes, rights of workers and women, I write today in honor and celebration of a remarkable American woman labor activist, Frances Perkins.  She should be the star of both Labor Day and Women’s Equality Day.  Perkins served as Secretary of Labor for 12 years in the Franklin Roosevelt administration, 1932-44, only one of two cabinet members to serve in all four of his terms.  She was the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet.  That made her the first woman to be in the possible line of succession for president. 

But we don’t honor Frances Perkins because she was the first woman anything; indeed she would scorn that.

We honor her because she created and helped enact so many rights and policies and programs for workers that we take for granted in the US. 

She created Social Security Insurance, which provides guaranteed income and services for the elderly (over 65), unemployed, disabled and survivors.  Only since the New Deal and Perkins does every retired worker, disabled worker, surviving spouse or child of a retired or injured or dead worker (i.e. all of us at some time) receive a Social Security check every month.  Frances Perkins open that account.

During her service as Secretary of Labor our government also enacted for the first time national child labor laws, unemployment insurance, minimum wage requirements, and many health and safety regulations..

Born in 1880, a New England child of some privilege, Perkins studied labor history and social work and began her career advocating for the rights of women workers.   She was an eyewitness to the horrendous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the worst industrial accident in New York history, whose 154 victims were mostly young women Jewish and Italian immigrants.  She came to state attention lobbying successfully for a law in NY State limiting the work week for women and children to no more than 54 hours.  New York Governor Al Smith convinced her to move from advocacy to policy in 1918, two years before she and other women could even vote, by joining the fledgling occupational safety part of his government.  Subsequent NY governor Franklin D. Roosevelt made her his Secretary of Labor, and then invited her to join his presidential cabinet.  She agreed, she said, only if they would work for social security insurance for retired and disabled workers and their dependents, and other worker rights.  She had to convince FDR over and over again to take courageous stands.  The New Deal legacy would be shallow without her hard won policies.

For a country enamored by the myth of rugged individualism and terrified of so-called socialism, this was a hard sell.  When she and FDR came into office half of all elderly people were in poverty, in large part because of the Great Depression.   Even then they had to fight for each bill.  Their same battle is being fought again today; Republicans for the past few decades, Romney and Ryan today, want to reduce or eliminate Social Security. Republicans in the 1990s decimated New Deal programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children under the so-called “Personal Responsibility Act,” and the Ryan-Romney budget plan would strip them further.

Both Perkins, a devout Episcopalian, and now the Christian Obama frame much of their advocacy for government aid in religious terms, the responsibility of a society to care for its needy and elderly, the least of these.  Ryan and Romney, so-called men of faith, follow a different gospel.  Their ignorant mantra is every man (sic) for himself.  They assert that we need little if any government at all and we have no responsibility for social services for the poor. 

Obama tries to remind people that no one succeeds completely alone; we’ve all been helped by education, roads, internet, safety regulations, all of which come from government. If you have a business, he said recently, you didn’t do that alone, you had a teacher, roads, etc. “You didn’t build that,” he said, referring to the roads and infrastructure.  Republicans took the quote out of context, sulked behind their government supported loans and bailed out cars, bragged that they are completely self made and blindly cheered at their convention this week, “We Built It!” in a convention hall built with federal funds for a millionaire candidate taking federal money to help pay for his campaign. 

Frances PerkinsReminds me of a story I read about Frances Perkins confronting the people of so-called faith of her own church who likewise claimed, “We built it!” An author describes it this way: 

“Don’t you think it’s wrong for people to get things they don’t pay for?”

The question came from a man seated in the honeyed glow of the Guild Room of one of Manhattan's most famous Episcopal churches. This gentleman had not paid to heat the magnificent edifice popularly known as St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue, nor had he donated its handsome furnishings.  Even the 1948 lecture he had just heard had been funded by a legacy. 

He was not thinking of those things, of course.  His question was about the morality of the income redistribution mechanisms created by the New Deal, and it was addressed to the woman who was their chief architect and advocate.

“Why no,” Frances Perkins responded. “I find I get so much more than I pay for.  Don't you?”  The woman who had conceived, birthed, nursed and nurtured the New Deal’s crowning achievement – the Social Security Act – was revealing the theological perspective that informed her long career advocating, shaping and ultimately implementing social policy.  She knew she had not paid for the earth she walked on or the parents who had raised her.  She had not “earned” the air in her lungs.  All life was an unearned gift from God, as she saw it.  What we “got” in her view, was a function of grace, not merit or its inverse correlate, sin.

“I came to Washington to serve God, FDR and the poor working man,” Perkins said.

The only reason I even know about Frances Perkins (and I should have read about her as a Women’s Studies major in college) is because of a bad imitation my father does of FDR every Labor Day.  FDR had a notorious NY Brahmin accent that is fun to mimic, and many heard his voice because he was the first President to speak weekly on the radio.  “I hate waaah (war).  Eleanor hates waaah.  Sisty and Buzzy (his two dogs) hate waaah.” 

My father comes from a NY business family that probably didn’t vote for FDR – too many of those rights for workers.  Today they would probably vote for Romney.  (He became a Democrat after Nixon and Watergate.)  So he enjoyed making fun of FDR and we would goad him to do it.  

Every Labor Day the FDR quote was, “Madame Perkins has been in laaybawh for 8 yeaaahs, and has yet to produce anything!” 

Writing this column I tried to find that quote, and all I could find was how much FDR admired and supported Perkins’ labor reforms.  Why would he say this mean thing about her and make a bad pun about her being in “labor?”

So I asked my 90 year father, “Where did you hear FDR say that?”   Oh, he said, FDR didn’t say that.  That was one of his many opponents, making fun of FDR (and of women in government, in labor), telling lies and misquoting what FDR had actually said. 

Politicians telling lies about their opponents?  Partisans making up quotes by their opponents?  Government trying to deny the rights of workers, and abandoning them in their old age or disability or orphaned state?  

Boy, I’m sure glad those New Deal laws passed so we don’t have those kinds of shenanigans and bad government anymore….. 

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter