Political Prose

Thoughts on politics and prose from Victor Tan Chen, the founding editor of IIn The Fray.

“Season’s Greetings, from Ferguson.” Mike Tigas, via Flickr

The Big Picture of Baltimore, Ferguson, and North Charleston

Ferguson protest underneath Seasons Greetings lights
“Seasons Greetings, from Ferguson,” November 29, 2014. Mike Tigas, via Flickr

Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute says we need to remember the big picture of race relations in Baltimore:

The police behavior is something that should be remedied. It’s a terrible criminal operation on the part of the police departments. But it doesn’t start with police departments. When you have a low-income population concentrated in the area, little hope, unemployment rates in places like inner city of Baltimore … two and three times the rate for whites, well, you get behavior in those kind of communities that reinforces police hostility. It becomes a cycle of misbehavior and police aggression, and it’s attributable to the concentration of disadvantaged families in very crowded inner-city communities.

When an unarmed black man dies after a confrontation with police, there is a natural tendency to focus on racist police officers or racist police departments. We saw this after the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and we saw it, too, after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Walter Scott in North Charleston. Without a doubt, there are plenty of bigoted bad apples to be found, as seen in the shockingly racist emails unearthed in the Department of Justice investigation into Ferguson’s police department. But we also need to consider that big picture, or what sociologists call social structure: institutions like the economy and political system and the roles that people take up within them. After all, the modern-day factors pushing down poor African American communities—and pulling them into hostile encounters with police—involve more than just racial discrimination (or at least discrimination of the plain-vanilla variety).

Here is a handy chart that illustrates what I mean, using the examples of Ferguson and North Charleston—two cities with a few striking similarities.
Ferguson vs North Charleston

As Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson points out, systematic racial discrimination was what originally put African Americans in their place—stuck in segregated neighborhoods and blocked from educational and job opportunities (disclosure: Wilson was my advisor in graduate school). That past has lingered on today. In the latter half of the last century, the sorts of racially motivated housing policies that Rothstein discusses worsened the plight of the people left behind in cities like Baltimore.

On the other hand, Ferguson gives us an example of policies that were not explicitly racial, but that nonetheless helped trap many African Americans in poor, crime-ridden, aggressively policed neighborhoods. Beginning in the 1950s, decisions to situate new highway extensions and other infrastructure projects within low-income neighborhoods resulted in the razing of once-vibrant communities. Again, African Americans were hit the hardest. In the St. Louis metro area, the expansion of Lambert–St. Louis International Airport in the eighties all but destroyed the black community of Kinloch, located near Ferguson. “Many of the residents displaced by this wasteful construction project,” Jeff Smith writes, “have ended up in Ferguson—specifically, in Canfield Green, the apartment complex on whose grounds Michael Brown tragically died.”

More generally, policies about where to build airports and route highways may have racial motivations behind them. (“We might ask,” Wilson writes, “whether such freeways would have also been constructed through wealthier white neighborhoods.”) But larger structural changes that have had little or nothing to do with race have also harmed African Americans disproportionately. Beginning in the eighties, cities across the country were devastated by downsizing. Corporations shipped jobs overseas in droves, and the federal government sharply cut direct aid to cities and trimmed industries that once sustained many cities—in North Charleston’s case, closing Charleston Naval Base, once the largest employer in the state. As Wilson notes, African Americans have not been the only ones affected by these seismic economic shifts. But they have been particularly vulnerable because of their low levels of skill and education relative to whites, a gap that has made it more difficult to find good jobs to replace the ones their communities lost. Few jobs and high poverty, in turn, lead to more crime, which leads to more potentially violent confrontations with police.

Beyond their need to clamp down on crime, however, the police have other, more unseemly incentives nowadays to get in the faces of the citizens they are sworn to protect. A lackluster local economy has pushed many cities to become creative about generating revenue. In Ferguson, the city’s various streams of cash have dwindled in recent years—except for fines and forfeitures. Traffic tickets and the like, it turns out, have made up for Ferguson’s budget shortfalls in recent years. As the Department of Justice report made clear, however, the push by city officials to “ramp up” ticket writing has worsened racial tensions: “Many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.”

The kinds of structural changes that have hammered cities like North Charleston and Ferguson and Baltimore—and cities across the country, for that matter—have made the situation on the streets all the more toxic and volatile. Body cameras and DOJ investigations are a good first start, but the problem, as usual, goes much deeper.

Sources for the chart

North Charleston: Census data, City of North Charleston (naval base, city council, history), Post and Courier (demographics, traffic stops), New York Times.

Ferguson: Census data, New Republic, Associated Press, USA Today, NPR, US Department of Justice, City of Ferguson.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Separatist fighters survey the steppe after recapturing Saur-Mogila from Ukrainian forces. Sergei Kopylov, via joyful-life.ru

Best of In The Fray 2014

The following are the best pieces published in In The Fray this year, as chosen by the editors:

Commentary: Unearthing Another War, by Michael Long

News: The White Death, Revived, by Octavio Raygoza

Photo Essay: Photographer without Borders, by Jo Magpie and Onnik Krikorian

Culture: The Gateway Author: A Conversation with Novelist Sherman Alexie, by Susan M. Lee

If you like original stories like these—stories that further our understanding of other people and encourage empathy and compassion—please make a tax-deductible donation to our nonprofit magazine before the end of the year.

From all of us at In The Fray, best wishes for the new year.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

A Nepalese porter takes a wooden door up to the Everest base camp.

The Lethal Snows of Everest

Today, twelve Sherpas died in an avalanche on Mount Everest, the worst accident in the mountain’s history. (Four are still missing.) The Sherpa community, an ethnic group in Nepal renowned for their mountaineering skills, has long guided foreign visitors up the world’s tallest peak. “Sherpas bear the real burden of climbing Mount Everest,” American mountaineer Conrad Anker told National Geographic. “They’re the ones who take the biggest risks.”

Last year we published a story by Stephanie Lowe that described the growing dangers of the mountain and the concerns of the Sherpa guides, whose very job is to risk their lives on Everest’s slopes.

From the article:

More worrisome, the mountain’s slopes have become crowded, a situation that veteran mountaineers deplore as dangerous. More than 200 people have died on Everest, and even though fatalities happen less frequently these days, the recent surge in climbers has meant that more than a quarter of those deaths have occurred since 2000. There is a very narrow window between May and June when Everest’s slopes are relatively less perilous, and during that time hundreds of climbers can crowd the so-called “Death Zone” — altitudes above 26,000 feet, where oxygen becomes scarce and mental faculties quickly deteriorate. (Climate change may also be making the climb more lethal, as the mountain’s layers of ice and snow melt and leave the path rockier and more treacherous.)

Last year, an expedition went up Everest to clear debris and retrieve the abandoned corpses of previous climbers. The five-person team ended up having to wait four hours in the Death Zone, as climbers going up “Hillary’s Step” — a sheer rock wall just below the summit — jammed the path down. A South Korean climber died, one of Everest’s four fatalities that day.

Nima Sherpa, a twenty-nine-year-old medic, ticks off the many afflictions that beset those who venture into Everest’s unrivaled altitudes: frostbite, snow blindness, hypothermia, delirium. The Sherpa guides who risk their lives climbing the Himalayas’ toughest peaks cannot dwell on these dangers, though: they have families to support. “The pay is good, and this is their work,” he points out.

And yet that is, perhaps, part of the problem. “When your family needs that money,” another guide says, “sometimes you don’t insist a weak climber turn back.”

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

 

Best of In The Fray 2013

Out of everything we published this year, our editors chose the following pieces from each section for being standouts among their peers. As we see it, they best represent what In The Fray is all about: stories that further our understanding of other people and encourage empathy and compassion.

Commentary: How to Say ‘Divorced’ in Spanish, by Alexandra Levine

News: All I Know Is Here, by Scott Winter and Shelby Wolfe

Photo Essay: Rough Guides: Sherpas for Hire in the Himalayas, by Stephanie Lowe

Culture: Born Again: A Conversation with Writer Joy Castro, by Mandy Van Deven

Blog: Love like Exclamation Points: Growing Up with Mental Illness, by Joshunda Sanders

Your support ensures our nonprofit, volunteer-run magazine can continue to publish this kind of insightful and moving content: original reporting, photo essays, personal narratives, and reviews that make us think differently about the world, and perhaps ourselves. Please make a tax-deductible gift today.

From all of us at In The Fray, may you and your loved ones have a peaceful holiday season and a healthy and happy 2014.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

 

Support Stories of Inspiration and Change

Nepalese porter on a trail

I am writing to ask you for your support. For twelve years, In The Fray has published stories that further our understanding of other people and encourage empathy and compassion. The staff work hard — for me and others, on a strictly volunteer basis — to bring you original reporting, photo essays, personal narratives, and reviews that we think are timely and compelling on a global scale.

Our small nonprofit urgently needs your help to continue our mission to be a forum for real, honest discussion and provocative, informed storytelling.

Your gift of:

  • $50 will pay the honorarium for one hardworking writer.
  • $75 will pay the honorarium for a feature article with photos.
  • $100 will pay the honorarium for a writing team.

For me, In The Fray is a labor of love. Over twelve years, it’s been one of the greatest satisfactions in my life to edit and mentor dozens of writers and artists, learn more about countries and places I’ve never been to, and pass along to our readers insightful and moving stories about real people — stories that challenge them to think differently about the world. Just this past year, we published:

While any contribution goes a long way in helping to support In The Fray, we are asking that you donate $50 dollars today. Help us so that we can continue to give stipends to our contributors, who work from around the world and spend weeks and even months reporting and writing about stories that matter.

Harvard sociologist and National Medal of Science recipient William Julius Wilson (who just donated himself) has said that In The Fray is at “the front lines where identity and community are undergoing tremendous flux, climbing into the trenches to give a voice to often invisible movers and shakers, or just plain strugglers.”

I want to ensure that these voices continue to be heard. Please make a donation to support not just my work, but that of the many dedicated editors, writers, and artists who give this magazine its vibrant, caring heart. Thank you for your help, and I hope you continue reading.

Donate

Sincerely,

Victor Tan Chen
Editor in Chief and Cofounder

p.s. Please support our donor drive on social media: retweet our tweets and add your name to our Facebook campaign!

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

 

‘Two Fragile Souls in the City’: Contributor Joshunda Sanders at TEDCity2.0

Joshunda Sanders, standing with microphone, at TEDCity2.0In The Fray contributing writer Joshunda Sanders recently spoke at TEDCity2.0, a conference focused on the challenges and innovations that cities across the world are experiencing today. Joshunda gave a moving talk about her mother’s struggle with mental illness (a story she also told for our blog), and the ways that cities can help, and hinder, the lives of the mentally ill — particularly those who are poor and homeless.

Joshunda’s mother resisted therapy and medication for her bipolar disorder, internalizing society’s view (especially prevalent within the African American community) that mental illness is a personal weakness. In her relationship with Joshunda, she veered between euphoria and depression, loving attention and violent abuse. The family ended up homeless because of her untreated condition, and Joshunda’s childhood was marked by evictions, stays in homeless shelters, and a perpetual hunger. Fortunately, their hometown of New York was generally benevolent in its benefits and its attitude toward the homeless — providing Joshunda with free breakfast in the summers when school was out (often her only meal of the day) and free transportation to and from shelters — even though it never really met their needs for food and housing in such an expensive city.

There are compelling reasons, Joshunda adds, that so many homeless individuals congregate in cities:

After my brother Jose got killed by a bus, my mother moved to the suburbs. So we lived in Chester for the first few years of my life. Chester is outside of Philadelphia. Most families there, in the suburbs — which are considered the heart of the American Dream — had cars, but because we couldn’t afford a car, we had to rely on public transportation. Often, without carfare to get into the core of the city, we would end up languishing in the isolation of the suburbs, and it was a little bit nightmarish. Sometimes the lights would be off, or the water would be off.

And one of the things people forget is the surprising truth about the visibility of the mentally ill in cities … there are real resources for them there. It’s not just the density and public transportation, but there is also this equal-opportunity solace from the cultural vibrancy of a city. So I urge you to think about that the next time you see someone who is mentally ill in the city. Before you think of them as a problem, consider how both they, and we, are transformed by our witness of them in the city. Think of me and my mom, just two fragile souls trying to make it through the city, with what little that we had.

Here is the video of Joshunda’s talk, which begins at the 49:09 mark:

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

 

Violence against Women: An In The Fray Retrospective for International Women’s Day

To celebrate International Women’s Day, tonight In The Fray tweeted links from stories we’ve published over the past decade that relate to violence against women. We joined thousands of other individuals and groups in a twenty-four-­hour, global tweet-­a-thon to raise awareness about gender-­based violence. In case you were asleep during our time slot, here are the links we tweeted:

Breaking the Silence, by April D. Boland

When Rape Becomes Normal, by Anna Sussman and Jonathan Jones

Naked Feminists: A Conversation with Director Louisa Achille, by Laura Nathan-Garner

Gender Outlaws, by Emily Alpert

Genocide Is Not a Spectator Sport, by Anustup Nayak

Sisters of Fate, by Sarah Marian Seltzer

Here are the tweets:

 

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

A fifties-era Buick parked on a street in Cuba's westernmost province, Pinar del Río. October 1999. (Alastair Smith)

Best of In The Fray 2012

My apologies for the procrastination — it’s an occupational hazard of volunteer work — but here are the editors’ picks for the best articles published in In The Fray magazine in 2012. (Actually, since December 2011, when we relaunched the site after a year’s hiatus.)

Commentary: The Road Less Traveled, by Lita Wong

News: Freed, but Scarred, by Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald

Photo Essay: Capitalism Reborn: An East African Story, by Jonathan Kalan

Review: Havel: An Authentic Life, by Jan Vihan

If you like the thoughtful, empathetic, international journalism that we believe these articles represent, please consider making a donation to In The Fray. Any amount helps. Thanks for your support!

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Born This Way, by Rob York.

The Good, the Bad, and the Tax-Deductible

Rev. Daniel Payne and the Open Doors Community Church at the 2012 Korea Queer Culture Festival in Seoul
Born This Way, by Rob York.

Check out Rob York‘s new piece, Born This Way, about an American pastor who, from a barroom pulpit in Seoul, preaches a message of Christian love and acceptance of homosexuality, leading his mostly gay congregation in a David-and-Goliath struggle against South Korea’s conservative Christian establishment. Also featured on the site is The Chicago Way, an essay by Nicole Cipri about the long and brazen history of corruption in that city — a “place so crooked,” the Chicago Tribune once lamented, that “even the reformers are on the take.” If you like these or the other stories we’ve featured throughout the year, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to our nonprofit, which very much needs your support to continue publishing into the new year. Happy holidays!

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

 

American Idols

The Grapes of Graft, by Karen Schaefer.

The stories recently featured on the site — The Grapes of Graft by Karen Schaefer, Guitar Hero by Cherise Fong, and The Cajun Cellist by Eli Epstein — have something to say about virtues often forgotten in today’s competitive, frenzied society: humility, patience, hard work with no immediate gratification.

New York Times columnist David Brooks has made the case that today’s society has lost the sense of humility that once tempered the greatness of the Greatest Generation. Even on the day that the Allies defeated Japan, what was striking was the absence of gloating, Brooks says. Public pronouncements conveyed humility, a simple gladness that the suffering had ended, and a rejection of the tempting belief that the victors were God’s chosen. The Christian faith of the time saw such pride as the worst of all sins, Brooks says:

… what pride does is it estranges you from God. It makes you desire to be your own God.  It weakens the resistance to your own weakness inside and it makes it hard to tap the larger blessings of life, which probably come from outside yourself, from your family, your friends, your neighbors, and your creator.

Even the politicians and celebrities of that era were largely obedient to this faith, Brooks says, believing it to be unseemly to promote themselves or think too much of themselves. For many — Brooks mentions presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower — that belief had been inculcated from an early age. In tight-knit communities that taught kids to remember where they came from from and to never get “too big for their britches.” In bible passages that reminded them that “he that ruleth his spirit” is better than “he that taketh a city.”

Perhaps some of this was false modesty, but the contrast with modern attitudes is striking. In 1950, a Gallup poll asked, “Are you a very important person?” Twelve percent of high school seniors said yes — compared to 80 percent in 2006. Brooks offers some other statistics that describe modern society’s bitter cocktail of self-regard. Troubling levels of narcissism. An obsession with fame. An inflated sense of our own abilities.

In other words, American Idol. Not to pick on that hit show, but, diminished ratings aside, it remains an apt symbol of today’s values, for better and worse. On one hand, Idol reflects the principles that makes the global economy so dynamic and exciting: the relentless search for talent (of the mass-marketable kind) and the reassuring optimism that anyone with ability and drive can make it. On the other hand, it peddles the delusion that anyone, regardless of ability, can make it — and that they should even try. That’s the guilty pleasure of the show’s first part, when we laugh at talentless rubes who somehow believe in their genius. But the “somehow” should really come as no surprise: in 2006, 51 percent of twenty-five-year-olds said that being famous was the most important goal they could have.

As Cherise Fong’s review of the documentary Searching for Sugar Man makes plain, Sixto Rodriguez is the anti-Idol. A Detroit singer-songwriter hailed in the seventies as a genius by music critics and a prophet by apartheid dissidents, he never made it big in the U.S. market, but never seemed to care. He went back to Detroit and took up a career in demolition and construction work. “Nothing beats reality,” he said, when his fans finally tracked him down. “Keeps your blood flowing, keeps you fit.” One reason his story is so compelling is that his humility and yearning for privacy are so out of place in an entertainment industry that increasingly sells the extroverted personalities of its artists — via tell-all interviews and confessional tweets — while focusing its marketing juggernaut on a few big bets, crowding out everyone else. Humble people aren’t usually good at selling themselves, after all.

The breathtaking scale and connectedness of today’s world markets has made the likes of Lady Gaga and LeBron James into global superstars, growing the power and allure of celebrity. Technology helps, too, in that today’s aspiring celebrities just need one viral YouTube video to achieve notoriety. Oftentimes, truly talented people — neglected or fallen along the way — rise to the surface of this crowdsourced pond. But the ease of instantaneous fame makes us forget that much of it is just novelty — a quirky skill or salacious episode that draws clicks — while enduring fame requires exceptional ability but also an even more exceptional drive.

In today’s superstar culture, artists like Sean Grissom seem like anachronisms. In Eli Epstein’s profile of him, we learn that Grissom is a classically trained cellist who has played Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. Yet he still spends his days in New York’s subway stations, busking for stray bills and change. His performances underground help develop his craft, he says. “It’s important to be able to play for everybody,” he says. Craftsmanship, patiently paying your dues, slogging through the day-to-day grind of practice to achieve perfection — all of this is at odds with a marketplace that instantly grants a staggering stardom to the hint of promise.

With the rewards so high, and everyone else around them (adults included) grasping for wealth and fame, no wonder today’s young people come across as materialistic and self-centered in the surveys. And yet they might be happier, and their chances to make a real impact might improve, if they waited and let their talents develop before jumping into the latest get-retweeted-quick scheme. Attention can come too early, and criticism can be too cruel. People need the time and space to make mistakes, think crazy thoughts, invent and reinvent themselves.

Karen Schaefer’s profile of Cleveland writer and businessman Mansfield Frazier tells such a story.  When he was young, Frazier saw himself as an outlaw, and he counterfeited credit cards across the country. He was arrested and spent years in prison. Once released, he turned his life around by doggedly pursuing his passion for writing, working his way up to writing for the Daily Beast. Now, in his latest incarnation as an entrepreneur, Frazier is transforming his poor, crime-ridden Cleveland neighborhood by bringing urban farming to its vacant city lots. His first venture: a vineyard.

Properly understood, humility is not about retreating into some corner and hiding your face. It’s not about hating yourself or resenting other’s success.  It’s about taking yourself less seriously — maybe even reaching that potent state of mind where you lose yourself to your work — so that you can achieve something of genuine and lasting importance. Working hard at your given skills. Giving something of yourself to your family and community. Recognizing your failings and striving to be a better person. Humility in this way leads us down the path to craftsmanship and compassion, and hopefully, too, to a broader perspective on this life and its blessings. Seen from that mountaintop, the goals of fame and wealth seem nothing more than idols.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Sunset on a stretch of the Pripyat River, in the radioactive exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. (Andrew Blackwell)

Don’t Save the Planet

Sunset on the Pripyat River in the Chernobyl exclusion zone
Sunset on a stretch of the Pripyat River, in the radioactive exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. (Andrew Blackwell)

In ITF‘s interview with Andrew Blackwell, the author of the book Visit Sunny Chernobyl talks about his travels to the world’s most polluted places. One point he raises is that there’s no way to return the environment to the “pure, pre-human phase” of its existence — and that this is a misguided ideal to begin with.

Inside the U.S., in the environmental movement, there is this foment right now with traditionalists, who draw their spiritual energy as it were from an idea of “pure nature” and restoring as much of the environment to a pure, pre-human phase as possible. That’s not the literal goal, but that is sort of the ideal that drives their entire enterprise.

Then you have these modernist folk, who believe that that is an impossible ideal: holding that ideal actually will leave you to miss out on all kinds of opportunities and will waste your time and energy on causes that aren’t worth it and harmful. They also believe that, yes, ideally it would be great to have that idea of purity and wildness at the center, but we are so far past that being the reality that there has to be something else motivating environmentalism. And what that is, is a recognition that human civilizations are part of nature and that there is no way of knowing what it means to have a pristine environment — and that it doesn’t exist anyway in an era of climate change.

Also, it’s just another form of separation. We’re still seeing nature as separate from human civilization, and that has been half the problem right there. And so the goal really is to find an integrated idea of what a healthy environment is.

Perhaps it says something about humanity’s self-centered view of the world that the catchphrase for the environmental movement is “save the planet.” Planet Earth doesn’t need saving. If life can survive in the pitch-dark, pitiless abyss of the deep ocean, or recolonize remote islands after volcanic explosions wipe the landscape clean, or — as Blackwell points out — thrive in irradiated zones where human beings now fear to tread, then you can imagine that life will eventually adapt to whatever nightmare scenario Homo sapiens visits on its terrestrial neighborhood. (Of course, species higher up on the food chain will vanish — as they already are on track to do — but give the Earth a few more billion years, and perhaps complex life can evolve once again even on an inhospitable, dangerously polluted planet.)

As Blackwell points out, the environment in the modern age is never “pristine.” And that seems to fit with the way of nature, with its (evolutionary) love of mixing and hybrid forms. Nature revels in the “impure.” As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes, flowers arise from mud; the idea of “purity” is in our minds. Regardless of what we do, nature will find a way of dealing with it, because it is, at heart, impure and impermanent.

The point is, life on Earth doesn’t need us; we need life on Earth. Other species on the planet can play a long game, and wait us out, with time and evolution on their side. We can’t. And yet in the United States and many other countries, the popular will is weak to do something about climate change and environmental degradation more generally.

In part, it may be a question of how we frame the problem. Two of the most potent symbols of climate change are melting glaciers and starving polar bears — not the kind of imagery that does a good job of drawing people to see the very real threat to their daily lives. Ironically, even phrases like “saving the planet” tend to make environmental problems appear distant from everyday, “real” concerns. They make environmentalism seem like something you do off in a forest somewhere, away from other people: campaigning to protect far-off waterways and species, crusading like some kind of modern-day monk on behalf of a utopian, preindustrial past. In reality, the core concern of the environmental movement is the most pragmatic of goals: ensuring that we human beings have the food, dry land, and clean water and air that we need, say, to live.

Perhaps it’s time to change the name of “Earth Day.” It’s not a day to celebrate some abstract ideal. It’s a day of judgment. It’s not about the Earth and its survival. It’s about human beings. It’s about whether we are smart enough to value the neighborhood we’re lucky to live in — or content to watch it burn around us.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

 

The Center Cannot Hold

The Shahbad Dairy Slum: Shoes
Saving Souls, by Benjamin Gottlieb.

The stories now featured on the site touch on many issues, but one theme they have in common is the role that religion plays in driving people to get passionately involved politics and activism — and how difficult it is to find secular ways to kindle the same fire. In Saving Souls, Benjamin Gottlieb profiles an enterprising humanitarian group that is busily educating poor children in Delhi’s slums. But the work of COI and other evangelical Christian groups continues to draw controversy in India, a once-colonized nation now booming economically and working mightily to assert its own cultural identity. In Losing Zion, Rob York reviews the book The Crisis of Zionism, which argues that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dying, ruined by extremism in Israel and the apathy of the liberal American Jews who could help bring about a broad-based peace movement.

Religious groups have been almost unmatched in their ability to train activists and build social movements. In America, the most obvious recent example is the pro-life movement and the cultural warriors it has drawn from the pews of evangelical, Catholic, and other congregations. But the civil rights movement, too, acquired its power and breadth by filling the streets with churchgoing protesters, and filling its rhetoric with the biblical language of freedom, struggle, and redemption.

Wherever people congregate, they organize. Social scientists talk about how churches (and other houses of worship) serve as reservoirs of social capital — the web of relationships that connect people and bring about various benefits, including the ability to rally around political causes. Generally speaking, this is great for democracy. And many religious groups have managed to find a balance between doing God’s work and respecting views that diverge from their own. But in America, Israel, and elsewhere, it seems the people getting inspired and engaged come from the extreme, intolerant ends of the political divide, trapped in their own dogma and their own sets of facts.

I used religion as a jumping-off point for my comments, but really the problem is not religion, but fundamentalism of whatever kind — religious or economic or nationalist or otherwise. The Tea Party, for example, is crusading on behalf of an uncompromising economic fundamentalism that verges on religious fanaticism, with its own patron saints in F.A. Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat, and Ayn Rand — ironically, a mirror image of the earlier cult of communism. But religion appears to motivate many of these true believers, too, and may help explain the movement’s success in organizing. On the question of Israel and Palestine, too, the same dynamic seems at work: the more devout and dogmatic speak louder.

Perhaps the recent wave of global protests against corruption and austerity — for example, the indignados demonstrations in Spain, or Occupy Wall Street and its related movements  in America — will help balance the scales. Churches and synagogues have been heavily involved in the organizing of the Occupy actions across this country, reminding us that the religious right is not the only voice of faith in the streets and on the megaphone.

That said, younger Americans seem to be turning away from religion, while the secular ways that ordinary people have traditionally gotten involved in politics are in decline. Labor unions have been dwindling away in America for decades — the one bright spot in recent years was public-sector unions, and the recent failed Wisconsin recall election may have been their Waterloo. Political parties rely increasingly on big donors and independently wealthy candidates, while the old political machines that groomed leaders out of local wards are disappearing.  Young people continue to rally to various causes on college campuses, but it will be hard to fill in the hole left by these institutions, which could organize in a sustained, concerted fashion and appeal to broad segments of the population.

This is yet another reason that we can expect politics to become more partisan and extreme in the coming years. The hard-liners are hungry for power, while more reasonable men and women stand by and watch. It brings to mind words by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

The center cannot hold, as Yeats wrote. And things didn’t end too well in that poem.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen