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Seeking the Spirit of Social Action

By Henry P. Lewis
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Danbury
December 28, 2003

So, our Social Action Committee is off to a great start. Optimism is in the air. This is another step toward the realization of what many feel is one of the most important factors in our move to Danbury. We’re closer to the action. Now we’re organizing to capitalize on the opportunities that await us.

What is it that will help us be successful in these new efforts?

Well, for one thing, we have a ‘track record.” That is, almost all of us are involved in ‘social action’ programs. To name a few: Soup Kitchen, Homeless Shelter, AmeriCares, ARC, Knitting Ministry, UU Service Committee, UU/UN Office. I know I’ve left some out; but there are also the ad hoc programs that RE and others bring to us from time to time, and the many other areas of concern and volunteer work that many of us are involved in. The point is, we all apply UU principles to our lives in various ways. We are all inspired to do good things.

So, I think it would be helpful to examine that inspiration by giving it a name, and reminding ourselves of its dimensions so that we can use it for support in our good works.

I suggest that if we call that inspiration the Spirit of Social Action, it will provide a background for our activities that will make us more effective.

I use the word ‘spirit’ in the sense of ‘the soul’, the ‘elan vital’, ‘the vital force.’ Other synonyms may be applicable at times when we are emphasizing the action component of Social Action; words such as: ardor, enthusiasm, vitality, courage, dauntlessness, passion, zeal, and so forth.

However, on reflection, I think that ‘compassion’ is the word that would best describe the essence of our social action. Compassion.

Having said that, I confess that recently I was tempted to consider the word “outrage” as an appropriate synonym. I had read a column by Anna Quindlin in the December 1st issue of Newsweek. In her column she referred to “A New Kind Of Poverty.” She said that “America is a country that now sits atop the precarious latticework of myth. It is the myth that working people can support their families.”

I was reminded of The Great Depression that I lived through as a child. I lived in Manhattan on west 104th Street. In 1932 or thereabouts I walked along the shore of the Hudson River where there were a couple of miles of cardboard and tin shanties occupied by the homeless. My recollection is that these were people without jobs. I correlated homelessness with joblessness.

But Quindlin quotes Julia Erickson, the executive director of City Harvest, which distributes food to soup kitchens and food pantries, “Look at the Rescue Mission on Lafayette Street. They used to feed single men, often substance abusers, homeless.

Now you go in and there are bike messengers, clerks, deli workers, dishwashers, people who work on cleaning crews. Soup kitchens have been buying booster seats and high chairs. You never used to see young kids at soup kitchens.” She points out that “When politicians crow that happy days are here again because jobs are on the rise, these jobs include those that are held by one out of every four American workers, the ones who make less than $8.70 an hour, an income equal to the government’s poverty level for a family of four. Many, if not most, of these workers have no health care, sick pay or retirement provisions.

“Five of the 10 occupations expected to grow big in the next decade are in the lowest-paying job groups. And before we sit back and decide that that’s just the way it is, it’s instructive to consider the rest of the world. While the bottom 10 percent of American workers earn just 37 percent of our median wage, according to Beth Shulman, author of “The Betrayal of Work”, their counterparts in other industrialized countries earn upwards of 60 percent. And those are countries that provide health care and child care, which cuts the economic pinch considerably.”

Why do I feel outrage? Because I thought that the Great Depression that I lived through was a thing of the past. I am disappointed that our political system is exacerbating the pain of more and more people when it should be ameliorating that pain.

But I digress. “Outrage” is not the word of the day. The word of the day is “Compassion.”

And yet, that digression is a significant part of what Social Action is all about. And it calls for compassion, intelligently applied. So I return to “compassion.”

In a sermon at the UU Church of Berkely, CA, Jim Burneo helps us put compassion in perspective. He says, “Compassion in our culture is often viewed as a weakness, at best it is often thought of as simply being “nice” or “letting someone off the hook.” In his book The God We Never Knew, Marcus Borg asks us to see that; “The strength of compassion as a value can be seen by looking at its opposites: hatred, abuse, brutality, injustice, indifference, selfishness, self-righteousness (in religious or secular form), hardness of heart; racism, sexism, classism, militant nationalism, and so forth. To advocate compassion is to stand against these. Thus it is not a “weak” value that tolerates everything. What a difference might it make to adopt a politics of compassion ----?”

He goes on to say: “It is important to realize that compassion as a political value is a paradigm. Paradigms are not policies; instead, paradigms affect the way we see and provide a framework for our thinking. – Thus a politics of compassion is not a particular set of specific economic and social policies but a social vision that is to affect all our political thinking. How best to implement and incarnate that vision is to a large extent a pragmatic question of what works best to reach that goal.”

But even as I say this, I have that lingering feeling of outrage. While I hear talk of “compassionate conservatism” I don’t see a politics of compassion in effect in our political environment at this time.

For instance: my wife Betty called my attention to an article in the latest issue of “The Nation” magazine. Its author is Paul Krugman, and its title is “The Death of Horatio Alger.” It starts this way, “The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag (his words) that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socio-economic status of their father than they were a generation ago.

“The name of the leftist rag? Business Week. Business Week published an article titled “Waking Up From the American Dream.” The article summarizes recent research showing that social mobility in the United States (which was never as high as legend had it) has declined considerably over the past few decades. If you put that research together with other research that shows a drastic increase in income and wealth inequality, you reach an uncomfortable conclusion. America looks more and more like a class-ridden society. “

He further says, “Thirty years ago we were a relatively middle-class nation. It had not always been thus: Gilded Age America (ed: the time of the Robber Barons) was a highly unequal society, and it stayed that way through the 1920’s. During the 1930’s and ‘40’s, however, America experienced what the economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have dubbed the Great Compression: a drastic narrowing of income gaps, probably as a result of (the) New Deal policies (of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration). And the new economic order persisted for more than a generation: Strong unions; taxes on inherited wealth, corporate profits and high incomes; close public scrutiny of corporate management – all helped to keep income gaps relatively small. The economy was hardly egalitarian, but a generation ago the gross inequalities of the 1920’s seemed very distant.”

“Now they’re back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez – confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office – between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 per cent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they’re not an artifact of the stock-market bubble) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality.”

The Business Week piece attributes some of the difficulties of upward mobility to the “Wal-Martization” of the economy, that is, the proliferation of dead-end, low-wage jobs and the disappearance of jobs that provide entry to the middle class.

The article makes the further point that public policy is widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots by such policies as getting rid of the estate tax, so that large fortunes can be passed on to the next generation; tax rates are reduced both on corporate profits and on unearned income such as dividends and capital gains, so that those with large accumulated or inherited wealth could more easily accumulate even more; tax shelters that are mainly useful to the rich are created; and similar policies. Meanwhile, public policy on the spending side, (or should I say the non-spending side) is having a similar effect. Cutbacks on healthcare for the poor, on the quality of public education and on state aid for higher education. These make it more difficult for people with low incomes to climb out of their difficulties and acquire the education essential to upward mobility in the modern economy.

But I digress. Outrage is not the point of this talk. Compassion. Or maybe, compassion and anger. Outrage is anger, isn’t it?

Doug Kraft of the UU Society of Sacramento, in a sermon entitled “Compassion and Anger” said, “ . . . some things are common to anger and compassion.”

Kraft says, “ . . .they share an opposite. The inverse of anger is not love, it is indifference. The inverse of compassion is not anger, it is indifference. So anger and compassion are both the opposite of indifference, or lack of concern

So if we pay attention to the people in need in our society, and we pressure our government for a paradigm that incorporates policies of true compassion, perhaps we can make great, satisfying contributions to the welfare of our society.

We are most effective in Social Action when we act in community with others. In a sermon the Rev. Bill Hamilton-Holway said, ““Church is a place where we may come to shape ourselves, and therefore the world, with others. What makes this place different from secular non-profit organizations is that we understand shaping the world as a religious endeavor. It is rooted in our journeys as individuals to know meaning in our lives. It is rooted in the values that motivate us. It is rooted in our experience of being spiritual beings.”

He says that the church should support individuals in their growth as loving, compassionate, sensitive, justice-filled persons. He says we should support one another to call forth the greatness of one another.