On victory and defeat

I was reminded recently of this quote by Teddy Roosevelt.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

And that led me to one of my favorite poems by Marge Piercy...

To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

We live in a world of sound bites, instant gratification and momentary celebrity. But if we look around us, we see people who, every day, put their shoulder to the grindstone and move their world inches closer to wholeness and healing. As Roosevelt said, that work is as full of defeat as it is victory. But they keep on pushing. And as Piercy said, the work that is real is often as common as mud.

Certainly we need an uncommon vision and high ideals to strive for. But as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice." Its that relentless slow bending that requires work in the mud - sometimes defeating us and occasionally leading to victory.

I am reminded of a lesson some of my co-workers learned a few years ago when we started a program to work long-term with the families of young children who had demonstrated that they were on the path to delinquency before the age of 10. These children were growing up in poverty with family histories of criminality, abuse, drug addiction, and mental illness. The work was relentlessly discouraging and they needed to find the endurance to stick with it. What they discovered is that its important to celebrate the small victories - all while clinging to their high hopes for these children. As Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves says:

What is hope? It is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is the suspicion that the overwhelming brutality of fact that oppresses us and represses us is not the last word. It is the hunch that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe, that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual, and that, in a miraculous and unexpected way, life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and to resurrection.

But, hope must live with suffering. Suffering, without hope, produces resentment and despair. And hope, without suffering, creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness. So, let us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see.

Martin Luther King, Jr. never got to the mountain top and Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't live to see women's suffrage. But they continued to pursue their hopes - amidst both the victories and defeats.

The great Maya Angelou shares her story as a way of letting us know that the defeats can be as important as the victories.



And sometimes its the small victories that are the real success.

Success

To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.

Remembering Paul and Sheila

I was 10 years old when JFK was assassinated. I remember the day well. One of the questions my young mind asked as I watched the coverage on TV was why people were crying over the death of a politician.

Thirty-eight years later I understood. On October 25th that year, Paul and Sheila Wellstone were killed in a plane crash. I heard the news in the lunch room at work and ran to my office to listen to reports on the radio. I cried my eyes out.

Like many Minnesotans, I had the pleasure of meeting Paul and Sheila. But I can't say I was close to them. I just loved who they were and what they stood for. I knew the world was a bit darker place for their loss.

I still shed a few tears every year on this anniversary. That happened today especially as I read a tribute to Paul that was written 3 years ago by Ezra Klein.Here's just a bit of it.

Wellstone's populism was not an affectation, or a political posture. It was laced into the fabric of his personality. It's what made him different than other politicians. His measuring stick was not the poll numbers, not the editorial pages, not the political prognosticators, not the Sunday shows -- it was the farmers, the students, the seniors, the people. His fealty to them explains his frequent lonesomeness in the Senate. When the people are your judges, you can stand against the Iraq War in an election year, you can lose votes 99-1. You can fail to pass legislation, because you know the compromise would fail your constituents. "Politics is not about power," he would say. "Politics is not about money. Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning. Politics is about the improvement of people's lives. It's about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and the world. Politics is about doing well for the people."

Because of this, Wellstone had an immunity to the political trends that few politicians exhibit. When liberal was an epithet, Paul Wellstone wrote a book called The Conscience of a Liberal. When unions were in deep decline, Wellstone stood with them, and now the AFL-CIO now gives an annual award in his honor. After the Clinton health plan was crushed and Democrats retreated from health reform, Wellstone pushed for single-payer. While Clinton was chasing dollars to outspend and overwhelm Bob Dole, Wellstone was calling for full public financing. When progressives were marginalized and cowed by the right's cynical use of 9/11, Wellstone stood on the floor of the Senate, deep within the chambers of power, at the epicenter of cowardice and "responsible" hawkery, and roared on behalf of our ideals. That they were politically inconvenient never deterred him. "If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for," he said, "at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them."

Sometime I wonder why the world isn't filled with people like Paul. And then I remember that he's inspired people like Ezra, who did a wonderfully compassionate and courageous thing on his blog today. And I think of my friend, Pakou Hang, who is sending out the ripples every day.



She posted this Teddy Roosevelt quote on her Face Book page in memory of Paul.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood... who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly.

Rest in peace Paul and Sheila. We miss you...but the work goes on.

I love this picture!

Best political ad of the season...period

Thanks to Steve Benen and Bill Simon.

My response to Porochista Khakpour

Yesterday the New York Times published an ope-ed by Porochista Khakpour titled My Nine Years as a Middle-Eastern American. While she captures her own personal experience in the detail, I'm sure her thoughts and feelings speak for many Middle-Easterners in this country today.

A deep dark admission: lately — and by lately I mean this era I worked so hard for, when a liberal person of color, a man who resembles my own father, would be our president — I’ve found myself thinking secretly, were certain things better in the George W. Bush era? Was it easier to be Middle Eastern then?

Just six days after 9/11, at the Islamic Center of Washington, President Bush said, “Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind.” He added: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” Did that assurance mean more to white Americans coming from someone who looked like them?

Xenophobia and racism still abounded, but the lid stayed on the pot. Perhaps when Republicans held both the White House and Congress, conservatives weren’t sweating a thing; for them, people of color, along with all our white liberal friends, were lumped together in one misery-loves-company fringe. But now that the tables have turned, conservatives have positioned themselves as aggrieved victims. (I recall the advice of an older female relative: Always let men you’re in relationships with have all the power; it’s when they lose power and get insecure that your problems start.)

These words reminded me of those from Derrick Jensen in his book The Culture of Make Believe.

From the perspective of those who are entitled, the problems begin when those they despise do not go along with—and have the power and wherewithal to not go along with—the perceived entitlement. <...>

Several times I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, "normal," chronic state—where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised—to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized.

Another way to say all of this is that if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remains underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode.

So yes, the lid has come off the pot and things are exploding. Our ideals as a nation are being tested...are we a country of hate, consumed by fear and the illusion of revenge, or are we one that is still striving towards that more perfect union.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution — a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part — through protests and struggles, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience, and always at great risk — to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this presidential campaign — to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for president at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together, unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — toward a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

Khakpour ends her article with this heart-breaking story:

Every day, I lose America and America loses me, more and more. But I should still be in my honeymoon phase, since I’m actually just a 9-year-old American. And that’s my other association with autumn 2001. As luck would have it, my citizenship papers finally went through not long after the towers fell. That November, I was in a Brooklyn federal courtroom singing, along with a room full of immigrants, the national anthem that I hadn’t sung since K through 12.

I remember on that day, 9/11 leaving the foreground of my mind for the first time. I remember looking around that room and feeling, in spite of myself, a sense of optimism about the future. I remember feeling a part of something. I remember feeling thrilled at the official introduction of the hyphen that would from now on gracefully declare and demarcate my two worlds: Middle-Eastern American. The same hyphen that today feels like a dagger that coarsely divides had once, not too long ago at all, been a symbol of a most hallowed bond.

To Porochista I want to say I'm sorry...sorry that we are so far from perfecting our union today. But I also want you to know that many of us are out here wondering what we can do to embrace you and affirm that you are a part of us. We want to rekindle that sense of optimism about the future you felt nine years ago. Sometimes we don't know what to do. If we yell and scream like the haters are doing, we just add to the divide. And yet, to remain silent is to abandon our brothers and sisters like you.

So for today, I'll just say that I stand with you and that we lose America if we lose you.

A picture worth a thousand words

Reflections on August

August 28, 1963



August 29, 2005



What's goin on?



Don't let em take the fight outta you.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

and

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.