Religious Freedom to Discriminate?

Religious Freedom to Discriminate?

For centuries, people have used the belief that homosexual behavior is a sin to force gay people into abstinence or sham marriages; to criminalize same-sex conduct and imprison, torture, and kill gay men; and to condemn lesbians as witches and kill them. In America, fortunately, laws against homosexual conduct and laws barring same-sex marriage have been found unconstitutional. Nevertheless, even now, gay teens can be sent to “Christian” facilities to be brainwashed out of their God-given sexuality, as in the movie, Boy Erased.  Some enlightened states have banned this type of “therapy,” because it doesn’t work but instead causes depression and suicide. However, there is no federal prohibition against it.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 was designed to prevent government regulations from impinging on persons’ right to the free exercise of their religion. The law provides religious adherents with exemptions from general laws, for example, to allow them to wear religious haircuts or headgear despite laws or rules against them, or to allow them to observe their own religious holidays.

However, some Christians argue that their religious liberty gives them the right to discriminate against those who don’t share their rules. Thus, religious businesspeople wouldn’t be required to provide their services to all comers, so, no wedding cake for same-sex couples, or worse, no medical care for LGBT people. Religious employers seek to avoid the ACA’s mandate to pay for contraception.

In 2017, Trump signed an executive order directing the Attorney General to provide guidance to federal agencies in interpreting this law. The clear purpose of his order is to allow entities and people regulated by federal agencies to rely on their “religious views” to discriminate against women and LGBT people. For example, religious hospitals could refuse to provide abortions or could ban same-sex spouses from visiting their sick and dying partners, and Social Security employees could refuse to process benefits for a surviving same-sex spouse.

Such regulations would be monstrous. Of course, religious groups have the right to set standards for their own adherents, but it stops there. Their free exercise of religion does not allow them to impose their standards on outsiders, nor does free exercise allow adherents of any faith to discriminate against members of another faith or to exclude Muslim immigrants from the country. It seems to me that allowing such discrimination would violate the First Amendment by establishing that brand of Christianity as the state religion. America with a state religion would be a theocracy. I don’t want to live in any theocracy, let alone one that denies my right to exist.

Technology

Technology

Most of my life, I’ve been thrilled to witness and use new means of technology. My manual typewriter became an electric one, which then became a word processor, and then a computer. Then came machines that scanned the world’s knowledge and art into digital format and made it accessible everywhere, via the World Wide Web. Any question that comes to mind can probably be answered within a few taps of a touchscreen. I can carry an entire library in my shirt pocket; telephone books have become obsolete; and I can instantly get reviews of everything from movies to restaurants to doctors.

The benefits I get from these new technologies are abundance and convenience. All the knowledge and entertainment I can imagine and more fit into my pocket and are but a few clicks and a credit card away. I’ve become so lazy that to decide if I need to wear a jacket when I leave the house, I don’t open the door to check the temperature, I open an app that tells me the current temperature in every neighborhood of San Francisco. If I’m planning to be out for several hours, I open another app that tells me how the temperature is expected to change over that time period.

My problems with the online world relate to the quality of the information there, and what is being done with information about me. We may never know how much the 2016 election was affected by the Russians’ strategic deployment of disinformation about Hillary and leaked emails stolen from the DNC to the precise voters who would be most affected by them.

None of us is immune to being fooled by fake news. A friend had to tell me that something I shared with her was a fabrication. Nowadays, when I read a quotation that seems too prescient or learn of a misdeed that seems too evil, I go to a fact-checking site to be sure I’m reading something real, before believing it and sharing it with friends.

Which brings me to my other problem with Facebook. We think we’re the customers when we use the service to communicate with our friends and the world, watch videos, shop, and read the latest news. Not so. We’re the inventory. Facebook’s actual product is information about users – what we’ve liked, who our contacts are, what we read, and what we buy. Facebook’s actual customers are the people and companies who pay them for our information, so they can slot us into precise demographics to tell us and sell us whatever they please.

It isn’t just people’s purchases and votes that are affected by these fabrications. In 2018, the largest mass-killer of Jewish people in American history was prompted by online reading of right-wing conspiracy theories about the central American caravan of migrants and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Hate speech is not just politically incorrect; it is extremely dangerous.

The internet as a technology is neutral, but it gives harmful speech vastly increased volume and reach. And pictures and words that appear on screens may seem more likely to be factual than spoken words. Let’s be careful out there. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can incite people to use assault rifles.

Pocket Watch

Pocket Watch

There was a time when I really wanted to own a pocket watch. I’d worn a wristwatch most of my adult life. I’d considered using a pendant watch or a watch that pinned to my clothing, and rejected them. Somehow I’d been enraptured by the image of a powerful, wealthy, handsome man who wore a pocket watch on the end of a gold chain, who fished it out of his pocket and clicked the button on top to flip the case open.

I eventually bought myself a pocket watch. The case is embossed with the Statue of Liberty and sailing ships in the harbor on one side, and an eagle flying in front of a mountain on the other side. I also bought a snazzy chain to connect the watch to a clip that hooks through a button hole or over my waistband.

I wore the pocket watch for a while, especially on state occasions. I felt pretty cool clicking open the case to read the time. But that gratification was outweighed by the hassle of fishing the watch out of my pocket, getting it right side up, and clicking it open to tell the time, as compared to the ease of simply turning my arm to see my wristwatch.

Nowadays, I find it even easier to press the button on the ipod touch that lives in my shirt pocket to check the time, in part because the large digital read-out is easier to read than the analog face of my smallish wristwatch.

So, since ease of use is such a strong value to me, why did I want to use a pocket watch? Somehow it acquired for me an air of sophistication, wealth, and, of course, male privilege. If I couldn’t have that privilege, at least I could have the proper accessory.

A Very Uncomfortable Time

A Very Uncomfortable Time

When I was 15 years old, I was living in Berkeley with my father and brother in a house on Grizzly Peak Boulevard. My father and I each had a bedroom on the main floor, and Eric had one downstairs, next to the laundry room.

I was woken up one school morning by my father’s alarm clock. I went into his bedroom and shut it off, noticing that his bed had not been slept in.

I found him on the living room sofa, collapsed onto the newspaper, utterly silent. I poked him in the shoulder, and found it cold and hard.

It was clear to me that he was dead, but I had no idea what to do about it. After a few moments, I hear Eric’s shower go on. I called him on the intercom, “Get up here. I need you.” And up he came.

He thought there might be some hope, and called for an ambulance. The EMTs made a show of working on Dad, and Eric went with them to the hospital.

I stood in the driveway and wondered what to do. The mother of the family across the street had heard the ambulance and came out. After I told her what had happened, she brought me into her house to await word from the hospital.

When the call came, she spoke with the hospital. I told her she didn’t need to say the words; it had been obvious. I carried in my purse an address book, and we called Dad’s brother and his ex-wife, our mother, with the news.

He had died from a drug overdose, probably accidental. A closeted gay man and a doctor, Dad had self-prescribed all manner of psychoactive drugs. Mother had told us of his drug use, without explaining why it was up to us to deal with it. We had noticed that he sometimes passed out at the dinner table or was very hard to awaken in the mornings, and that his emotions were volatile. Once he stopped talking to us for several days. But we figured that was more or less normal.

I was in the throes of a crush on one of my women teachers at the time, and I had imagined her having to tell me that my father had died, and she would take care of me.  I felt guilty when part of my fantasy came true.

Mother borrowed a truck and came to take us to live with her in Santa Monica. She was ruthless in cutting down our possessions to what would fit in the truck. I would be separated from my home, school, friends, and much of my stuff. But at least I’d spent many vacations in Santa Monica, so there was something familiar about our destination.

I remember that our first day at Santa Monica High School was April 1. I was a straight-A student, so I settled in pretty quickly. I wrote the following poem around that time. It was published in a mimeographed literary journal called The Voltaire:

Fog, all around me,

Sheltering me

From my world that was

Torn apart.

When will the sun

shine again?

I can’t see

Through the fog,

Nor do I want to see

My world that was.

I look forward

To sunshine.

Upon what

Will the sun shine?

What will I see

When it rises again?

What?

What new road

Lies ahead,

Shrouded now by fog,

which will soon be revealed?

How I Wound up in Law School

Dana Goes to Law School

I chose to major in music at U.C.L.A. because I enjoyed singing and playing guitar. My high school guidance counselor apparently assumed that my future husband would support me. During my college years, though, I discovered that I was a lesbian, I wasn’t going to have a husband, and I would need a good career of my own. I also realized that I did not want to teach music and was not likely to earn a living as a performer.

So I needed to find myself a career. I took a series of career guidance tests, which showed that I would be able to do about anything I set my mind to, and that my interests were in “verbal, persuasive activities.” This made sense, since my love of reading had endowed me with a large vocabulary, but it didn’t narrow the field very much. My brother had been a year ahead of me in school, and I had usually followed and enjoyed his choices of electives. So I followed his grad school choice, too, and applied to several law schools in the U.C. system.

My first choice was Boalt Hall, which would return me to Berkeley, where I’d enjoyed living in the mid-60s. But Boalt was everybody’s first choice, and my music degree, albeit summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, got me only as far as their waiting list. I was accepted outright at U.C. Davis, which did not appeal, and at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, which was at least close to Berkeley. Its school year started a month before the other schools, and I had to pay a non-refundable acceptance deposit immediately, so I couldn’t wait for Boalt to decide. I prepared to move to San Francisco, where I knew nobody, so my excitement was tempered with a hefty dose of trepidation.

A friend drove me and my stuff to my new home, a tiny studio apartment in a building full of law students a few blocks from Hastings.

I was a devout Christian at the time, and made a point to attend the nearest church on the first Sunday. It was a Lutheran Church, not much different from the Presbyterian church I had belonged to in Los Angeles. I was made welcome, and soon found myself singing in the choir and exploring The City with other church-goers.

Law school was far more challenging than nearly any class I’d ever taken. The only courses I’d ever had trouble with were the upper-division English class I’d taken as a high school senior and college calculus. I had always been at or near the top of my class in school, but then so had all the other members of my law school class. I had to learn better ways of note-taking, because I had to be able to read and understand the notes to study them for the final and eventually for the bar exam. I got to know a few women in my law school class, and we formed a study group. Nevertheless, my nerves frayed, and I started having anxiety attacks.

I went to student health, and the doctor prescribed Valium. This was 1974 or 5, and a prescription for “mother’s little helper” was a badge of dishonorable weakness. Looking at the vial of pills shocked me into remembering my Christian faith. I remembered that God had brought me this far and was always with me. I had a good cry, thanked God for the reminder, and got my feet under me.

I graduated from law school with honors, passed the Bar Exam, and had a nice little career in legal publishing, from which I am now happily retired.

QEWW Public Reading, September 2018

Here's the piece I read at the end of my first cycle in the Queer Elders Writing Workshop that is sponsored by Openhouse:

You Gotta Give them Hope

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay person elected to political office in California. My path intersected his in the 1978 campaign against the Briggs Initiative. In a backlash against early ordinances banning discrimination against gay people, State Senator John Briggs had authored a proposition requiring school districts in California to fire gay teachers and any teachers who advocated for gay civil rights, in the classroom or elsewhere. When early opinion was strongly in favor of the initiative, gays and our supporters mobilized against it.

At the time, I was an officer in the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, a San Francisco coalition of gay rights activists within various religious communities – Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Jewish. We visited congregations and held services to counter the ignorance and invective that were being used by proponents of the initiative. Harvey Milk and Sally Gearhart were debating Senator Briggs. The No on 6 Campaign, the Bay Area Committee Against the Briggs Initiative, and similar groups all over the state joined the fray.

And we won. On November 7, 1978, Prop. 6 went down in flames, roughly 60% to 40%. And we celebrated. And there was backlash.

I was working for the California appellate court on November 27 that year. My desk was in a large room with windows overlooking the San Francisco City Hall. Somebody noticed a fleet of police cars converging on City Hall, and most of us watched for a while and wondered what was happening.

Eventually we learned that former Supervisor Dan White had brought a gun into City Hall and had killed Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Gay and straight, most of the city was in mourning. I joined a candlelight vigil outside City Hall that night, and lessened my grief by sharing it with friends.

Harvey had been a member of my synagogue, and I attended his memorial service. Eerily prescient, he had recorded a testament to be played in the event of his assassination. It included the line, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” A bullet did kill him, and nobody should lurk in a closet ever again.

My Tiger Misty

My tiny tiger Misty is a brown tabby cat. Her coat is desert camouflage embodied in warm, soft velvet.

Being a cat, she sometimes seeks my lap when I'm engrossed in something on my ipad. She wreathes herself around the device, trying to substitute herself for it. But I'm stubborn. She succeeds only in scenting it as hers.

Soon, though, I develop a free hand and the desire to stroke her fur with it. Like an old Greek fisherman with his worry beads, I soothe my fingers and mind with her luscious coat. She purrs her approval and writhes to present more itchy sites to my fingernails.

Tiger she is, and I her plaything. She's the boss and I her serf. She's the favored child and I her playground. My cat's companion and I, and she the queen of all she surveys.

Dana's Harp

Nancy and I met in music programs at our synagogue. We both sang, as service leaders, and for fun. We also both enjoyed reading, and we explored the Jewish novels of Chaim Potok.

His book Davita's Harp featured a female leading character, which appealed to both of us. The title harp was not a Celtic lap harp or a tall orchestral harp. Instead, it was a door harp, which is a musical instrument that plays itself. A wooden box with tuned metal strings stretched across a sound hole, a door harp has metal balls that hang next to the strings. The balls hit the strings when the door is opened and closed, making them sound. It's kinda like a wind chime for indoors.

Some months later, Nancy gave me a door harp for my birthday. Its sound hole was in the shape of a Star of David, the six-pointed star of Judaism. I greeted it with glad cries and mounted it on my front door as soon as I could. It hangs there, sounding its major triad when I open the door, to this very day.

Sealed with a Stamp

I left Berkeley towards the end of my tenth grade school year, because my father had suddenly died. Even though close friends had offered to keep my brother and me until the end of the school year, our mother decided that we needed to move down to live with her in Santa Monica immediately. So move we did, and started a new life in a city we only knew as a vacation spot.

At first, letters from my Berkeley friends were my lifeline. I drank in each letter over and over, for the bittersweet pleasure of the familiar past viewed from my barren new present.

I sent letters back sharing my new circumstances -- my new classes and teachers, the indignity of sharing an English class with my older brother, my lungs' painful adjustment to the smoggy air.

I decorated my letters with sealing wax in various colors. One seal featured my initial; another was a pattern of some sort, maybe a flower.

I put effort into my missives and appreciated every word I received. Gradually, though, the events of my friends' lives became increasingly distant, I dug into my own concerns, and we drifted apart.

My Book/s

My Book/s

I couldn’t possibly choose just one book I will always remember. I have always been a reader, first and foremost. I was reading so well by the first grade that I was skipped into second grade in the middle of the year.

Reading was the core of my education and career. I read pretty challenging stuff in law school, as a judicial research attorney, and as a writer, editor, and publication manager of legal tomes.

So when I read for pleasure, it’s usually mind candy. Unlike candy, though, books are talismans essential to my well-being. When I’m alone with myself, I’m in very bad company. Often anxious, I have at least once spiraled into a full-on panic attack when out alone without a book. Nowadays, I never leave the house without a library in my pocket.

When I was in elementary school, I inhaled Nancy Drew mysteries, Hardy Boys mysteries, Tom Swift adventures, and Robert Heinlein juvenile science fiction.

I lived with my father in my junior high years, and raided his library. The science fiction, James Bond thrillers, and Peanuts comics were the most accessible of his books. Every now and then I’d tackle something different, like Gunter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum. I managed to reach the end, but had no idea what the book was about. I had more success with Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, which was the scientific version of his best-selling book Games People Play. His division of our interior mindscape into parent, adult, and child has lingered with me – as well as the game he entitled: “Why don’t you …” “Yes, but ...”

My mother got me hooked on British murder mysteries written by women: from Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh through Josephine Tey and  P.D. James. Her A.A. literature didn’t appeal to me.

While in college, I got into children’s literature and Christian authors, especially The Chronicles of Narnia, where the two genres intersect. I also loved Wind in the Willows, the Little House on the Prairie and Little Women series’, and anything written by John Stott.

In San Francisco I explored the Jewish side of my heritage by reading Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and the Chaim Potok novels. Later I got into Buddhist books by Sylvia Boorstein and Pema Chodren.

I occasionally read non-fiction, mostly self-help and popular science. But my pleasure reading consists mostly of novels with women protagonists (preferably by women authors, since I’m a devout female chauvinist): cozy mysteries, science fiction, and fantasy. I made an exception for the Harry Potter series, since the author is a woman and she is so good. I loved the Sookie Stackhouse vampire series and the Kitty Norville werewolf series. Knowing that a book I enjoyed is part of a series makes me feel warm and wealthy, since that means I can spend more time in that world, with those characters.

If I were forced to choose a single book I would always remember, it would be Aunt Dimity’s Death, by Nancy Atherton, because I love it so much that I reread it every several years. The book is charming and easy reading, and it combines several of my favorite types of stories: rags-to-riches, fish-out-of-water, cozy mystery, ghost story, and romance. It also presents a mother/daughter relationship that I wish I’d had. The book is the start of a series, so new adventures with my friends are published every few years.

OK, I read to escape reality. You gotta problem with that?

Parade Button

I still have the parade button from my first gay pride march. Against the background of a brick wall, black letters say "1979 Gay Freedom Day Parade and Celebration." That was 39 years ago, before the alphabet soup of LGBTQI and before the term "pride" was used.

The parade commemorated the 1969 Stonewall Inn riots, and the goal of the parade and movement was freedom, first from the laws against homosexual conduct that allowed police to arrest and beat up gay men and lesbians for daring to simply exist in public. And second from the concept of homosexuality as sin and disease, which justified shunning and medicalized torture in attempts to change the way God made us.

We who marched in the parade were angry about this mistreatment, but afraid that marching might make things worse. Coming out in public could lose us our jobs, friends, or family. Coming out is less risky nowadays, but still can be hazardous to one's livelihood or health.

Looking at the button makes me proud of how far the gay rights movement has come. But I'm afraid of the hatred and bigotry that have been unleashed by the 2016 election. We've come so far, but our boat is so small and the seas are rising.

Uniforms

Uniforms

I’m a sucker for a man in uniform. But not in the way you might think.

I was a big fan of the TV show JAG. It was an action and courtroom drama about military lawyers. The male lead was a Navy Commander and the female lead a Marine Colonel.

My favorite part of the show was studying their various uniforms. They were blue or white or khaki, short-sleeved or long, with T-shirts showing at the neck or stupid bowties for the women’s uniforms. Once in a while, one of the men would wear a sweater.

I tried to figure out the rules for when each uniform would be worn. Was it all the wearer’s duty station or activity? How much did the weather matter? What were the options when one was too hot or too cold? And what about dress uniforms? The Navy officer had spiffy dress whites, but our lady marine had to wear an evening dress at fancy events.

I was just fascinated by having a rule book to consult that took the decisions away from dressing. I’m told that Emily Dickinson wore a white dress every day to spare herself having to choose what to wear. She saved her brain power for her poetry.

I’m no Emily Dickinson, but I wear a sort of uniform to simplify my life.  Choosing clothes does not rank high in my priorities.

My criteria for clothing are comfort, variable warmth, pockets, and, finally, color coordination. My uniform is blue or black jeans, T-shirts under long-sleeved cotton or flannel shirts, and corduroy overshirts. The various shirts come in shades of blue, purple, and pink, so nearly everything matches. Each morning I choose the next clean shirt, match it with a T-shirt and a corduroy shirt, match socks to my pants, and I’m done.

Happy Pride!

I celebrated LGBT Pride season fully this year.

I perused my catalog to the Frameline Film Festival and bought tickets to six programs: two documentaries, two groups of shorts, and two feature films. I arranged to sit with a friend at five of the six shows, and had lunch with that friend before one of them. The films were absorbing, informative, and thought-provoking. I also caught some LGBT films for free on TV.

I was watching films at the time of the Dyke March, so I missed that this year. But I went to Dolores Park the day before for a youth/senior lunch, and battled my introversion enough to have a few conversations with some of the young'uns there.

On Gay Day itself, I donned a "GEN OUT" T-shirt and rode in a trolley with other elders at the front of the parade; Openhouse LGBT senior services organization was contingent number 5. I really enjoyed waving a rainbow flag out the open window and yelling "Happy Pride!" to the onlookers (some of whom responded in kind) until my voice gave way. Best of all was hearing my name called by a friend in the crowd and remembering his name in time to call it back to him.

After leaving the trolley, I saw some wonderful Pride T-shirts on sale on Market Street, and am kicking myself for not buying one or two. Maybe they're on the web somewhere . . .

Earlier that week, I did buy and wear a rainbow decorated leather bracelet and a rainbow bowtie. And got a rainbow-dyed fluffy foxtail keychain that's decorating my shooting stick/cane seat.

Seriously, though, we're going through hard political times where we need to celebrate our freedoms while we have them. And we need to nourish coalitions with all other groups who are under threat, and do all we can to preserve those freedoms.

My Neighborhood Cat

My cat Misty is an indoor-outdoor cat. She came to me that way, and I have experienced how unhappy she is when I have to confine her indoors for medical reasons. She gets in and out through a cat door I had installed next to my back door.

The cat door is locked, so I don't get visits from other cats or raccoons or rats. It unlocks when Misty touches it while wearing a key fob on her collar. When she loses her collar, I need to find it if I don't want to replace the collar, the key fob, and her ID tag.

These items being troublesome and costly to replace, I have accompanied them with a tracking tile that I can locate with an app on my phone. When the tile is close enough (its range is 50-100 feet), the app notifies me and the tile itself starts to play a musical tune. I use it most often to locate Misty while she's wearing the collar and I need to take her to the vet.

Twice in the past three months she has come knocking on her cat door without her collar and I have had to let her in the back door (and out again, and in again . . . ). The first time this happened, the tracking tile didn't work. In addition to a limited range, it has a limited life. It needs to be replaced every year or so, and I had heedlessly ignored a warning of its imminent expiration when it crossed my screen. I looked for the first collar in my back yard and asked my tenants to look for it. No dice.

So I bought her a new collar, adorned it with a backup cat door fob and the ID tag from my previous cat, and ordered new tracker tiles and cat door fobs. When the new tracker tiles appeared, I put one on her lovely new collar.

It was only another month or so before she came a-knocking at the cat door without the new collar. Grrrr. I fired up the tracking app on my phone and walked around the backyard. No luck.

Every so often, one of my neighbors stops me on the street to report seeing Misty in their backyard, or that she came into their home for a visit. So I figured she must have dropped the collar in one of their backyards. With the limited range of the tracker, though, I would not be able to find it from the sidewalk.

So I crossed my fingers and headed up my street towards neighbors who knew Misty. A few houses up the hill, I saw a vaguely familiar neighbor talking with someone else. When their conversation was over, I hailed the woman. Told her that my cat might have lost her collar in her backyard, and could I come and scan for it. She led me into her yard, the tracker went off, and we could hear the tile's music playing from the backyard next door. My neighbor, being taller than me, looked over the fence and saw the collar on a table in the yard. So we went next door and asked the ladies to retrieve the collar from their backyard. They did so, and we had a nice chat about how cats dislike wearing collars and how some have figured out how to use bushes to pull them off.

I rejoiced in having neighbors to help me take care of my pet, and made a mental note to promptly replace the tracker tile when I am warned that it may be  it running out of juice.

What is Community?

Today's buzzword is community. What is community? How is it created? What circumstances foster it? How is it revealed?

The word "community" comes from a Latin root that means "common." A community is a group of people with something in common. More specifically, it is "a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics and which either is perceived or perceives itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists."

I come to the question of community as a member of the so-called LGBT community. Outsiders may see the LGBT community as a monolith, but it contains many sub-groups who see themselves as communities: political activists, artists, the leather community, etc. And any one person can be a member of several overlapping communities depending on her neighborhood, gender presentation, occupation, activities, religion or lack thereof, and so on.

I find it helpful to separate two kinds of community: communities by identity and communities of caring. By identity, I am a retired older lesbian living in San Francisco, and my affiliations include a synagogue, a brunch group, and two support groups.

How is a community of caring formed? Good question. Some communities of identity include caring for each other as an element of their identity, such as religious congregations and extended families.

In my experience, a community of caring develops when members of a community by identity allow themselves to depend on each other. When they explicitly or implicitly agree to come to each other for support, and have a reasonable expectation of getting help.

I saw this happen when members of my brunch group had surgery, and the others visited them, sent and brought food, helped them with chores, and encouraged them. We take each other to medical procedures and the emergency room. We call each other to listen when we just need to vent.

Pretty much any community of identity has the potential to develop into a community of caring. As I see it, the key is for members to express openness to supporting each other. For as many of the group as are willing to explicitly agree to help each other to the extent of our ability. And to express this agreement not just once, but regularly.

And then, in any group needs will develop. If the members are in contact with each other, and believe that they have a mutual aid agreement, they will ask each other for help and receive it, and the group will grow stronger and closer with each need met.

Corporate Citizens

Remember Mitt Romney saying that corporations are people? If they have the legal rights of individuals, they should at least have the same responsibilities.

But no. The law views corporations as profit machines without personal liability. They are encouraged, if not required, to subsume any concern for their employees or customers, or the environment, to the insatiable need for shareholder profit. Not only must each year be more profitable than the previous year, but it must be more profitable by a larger margin than the difference between the two previous years.

These are not sustainable goals. There are only so many customers who are willing and able to pay ever-increasing prices for anything. And when companies try to make the same products more cheaply, the quality drops, or automation robs people of jobs, or off-shoring moves the jobs overseas and the quality may drop, or the environmental damage caused by the company worsens. And corporations cause much poverty and mental and physical illness by demanding ever more work from people who are given fewer resources to do it with, or less control over how to do it, or fewer benefits like health insurance or pensions for doing it, or no job at all.

I think that the laws governing corporations need to require them to bear the same responsibilities they now have to their shareholders also to their employees and customers, and the environment. And these laws should be enforceable by anyone affected by corporations, and egregious violators should face criminal penalties including prison and corporate dissolution for violent corporate side-effects such as mine disasters, poisoned rivers, and huge explosions.

Nowadays, corporations are like toddlers running around with guns. They kill people all the time, but they’re not expected to do any better, and they’re not punished or rehabilitated. This must not continue.