[Announce] Fw: " It is not Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who will save us. It is Dorothy Day." from Chris Hedges' Sept 28 column in TruthDig

[Robert Waldrop]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Frank Cordaro" <frank.cordaro at gmail.com>
TruthDig
Posted on Sept 28, 2008

Fueling the Fire of Real Change
By Chris Hedges

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080928_fueling_the_fire_of_real_change/

Turn your back on Wall Street. Walk a few blocks 
up from the gleaming
and soulless towers of disintegrating capitalism 
to the shabby, brick
Catholic Worker house at 55 E. Third St. Sit, as I 
did recently, in
one of the chairs in the basement dining room with 
its cracked
linoleum and steel utility tables.


"Works of mercy and contact with the destitute 
sustain the spark in
the ashes," William Griffin, who has been with the 
Catholic Worker for
34 years and writes for the newspaper, told me. 
"It is with the poor
and the indigent that you sense the imbalance and 
injustice. It is
this imbalance that inspires action. Generations 
come in waves. One
generation is inspired by these sparks, as Martin 
Luther King was
during the civil rights movement. These fires 
often fall away and
smolder until another generation."


The coals of radical social change smolder here 
among the poor, the
homeless and the destitute. As the numbers of 
disenfranchised
dramatically increase, our hope, our only hope, is 
to connect
intimately with the daily injustices visited upon 
them. Out of this
contact we can resurrect, from the ground up, a 
social ethic, a new
movement. Hand out bowls of soup. Coax the 
homeless into a shower.
Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly cast 
out on city
sidewalks, take their medications. Put your muscle 
behind organizing
service workers. Go back into America's 
resegregated schools. Protest.
Live simply. It is in the tangible, mundane and 
difficult work of
forming groups and communities to care for others 
and defy authority
that we will kindle the outrage and the moral 
vision to fight back. It
is not Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who will 
save us. It is
Dorothy Day.


Day, who died in 1980, founded the Catholic Worker 
in the midst of the
Great Depression with Peter Maurin. The two 
Catholic anarchists
published the first issue of the Catholic Worker 
newspaper in 1933.
They handed out 2,500 copies in Union Square for a 
penny a copy. The
price remains unchanged. Two Catholic Worker 
houses of hospitality in
the Lower East Side soon followed. Day and Maurin 
preached a radical
ethic that included an unwavering pacifism as well 
as a hatred of
unfettered capitalism. They condemned private and 
state capitalism for
its unjust distribution of wealth. They branded 
the profit motive as
immoral. They were fervent supporters of the labor 
movement, the civil
rights movement and all anti-war movements. They 
called on followers
to take up lives of voluntary poverty. The 
Catholic Worker refused to
identify itself as a not-for-profit organization 
and has never
accepted grants. It does not pay taxes. It 
operates its soup kitchen
in New York without a city permit. The food it 
provides to the
homeless is donated by people in the neighborhood. 
There are some 150
Catholic Worker houses around the country and 
abroad, although there
is no central authority. Some houses are run by 
Buddhists, others by
Presbyterians. Religious and denominational lines 
mean little.


Day cautioned that none of these radical stances, 
which she said came
out of the Gospels, ensured temporal success. She 
wrote that sacrifice
and suffering were an expected part of the 
religious life. Success as
the world judges it should never be the final 
criterion for the
religious and moral life. Spirituality, she said, 
was rooted in the
constant struggle to fight for justice and be 
compassionate,
especially to those in need. And that commitment 
was hard enough
without worrying about its ultimate effect. One 
was saved in the end
by faith, faith that acts of compassion and 
justice had intrinsic
worth.


Many of the old stalwarts of the movement do not 
place their hopes in
Barack Obama or the Democratic Party. They see 
their task as
sustaining the embers of social and religious 
radicalism. They hope
that this radical ethic can once again ignite a 
generation shunted
aside by a bankrupt capitalism.


"If you lived through the civil rights movement as 
I did, you would
want very much to vote for Obama," said Tom 
Cornell, who first came to
the Worker in 1953, "but I don't think I will be 
able to, given
Obama's foreign policy and his failure to promote 
a health care system
for all Americans. I can't vote for someone who 
leaves an attack on
Iran on the table."


Those within the Worker, however, worry that the 
looming economic
dislocation will empower right-wing, nationalist 
movements and the
apocalyptic fringe of the Christian right. This 
time around, they say,
the country does not have the networks of labor 
unions, independent
press, community groups and church and social 
organizations that
supported them when Day and Maurin began the 
movement. They note that
there are fewer and fewer young volunteers at the 
Worker. The two
houses on the Lower East Side depend as much on 
men and women in their
50s and 60s as they do on recent college 
graduates.


"Our society is more brutal than it was," said 
Martha Hennessy, Day's
granddaughter. "The heartlessness was introduced 
by Reagan. Clinton
put it into place. The ruthlessness is backed up 
by technology.
Americans have retreated into collective 
narcissism. They are
disconnected from themselves and others. If we 
face economic collapse
there are many factors that could see the wrong 
response. There are
more elements of fascism in place than there were 
in the 1930s. We not
only lack community, we lack information."


"I do not know if our hope lies with the Catholic 
Worker.
Institutions, even good ones, ossify. They can 
become trapped in the
deification of their own past and the rigid 
canonization of the views
of those who began the movements. But as our 
society begins to feel
the disastrous ripple effects from the looting of 
our financial
system, the unraveling of our empire and the 
accelerated rape of the
working and middle class by our corporate state, 
hope will come only
through direct contact with the destitute. The 
ethic born out of this
contact will be grounded in the real and the 
possible. This ethic
will, because it forces us to witness suffering 
and pain, be
uncompromising in its commitment to the sanctity 
of life."


"There are several families with us, destitute 
families, destitute to
an unbelievable extent, and there, too, is nothing 
to do but to love,"
Day wrote of those she had taken into the Catholic 
Worker House. "What
I mean is that there is no chance of 
rehabilitation, no chance, so far
as we see, of changing them; certainly no chance 
of adjusting them to
this abominable world about them—and who wants 
them adjusted, anyway?


"What we would like to do is change the world—make 
it a little simpler
for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves 
as God intended
them to do. And to a certain extent, by fighting 
for better
conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the 
rights of the workers,
of the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the 
worthy and the
unworthy poor, in other words—we can to a certain 
extent change the
world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell 
of joy and peace in
a harried world."