Social Justice Sermon
Hal Bertilson
May 2, 2004
Wynona Ward. You perhaps saw the segment on Bill Moyers’ NOW in November 2002? The piece was called Wynona Ward: Lawyer: Have justice Will Travel. She operates a Law Firm on wheels that provides legal services to victims of domestic violence in rural Vermont. Too often the distance and social pressure hides the abuse that is occurring (The belief that “My neighbor’s business is my neighbor’s business”).
Her marriage to boy on the right side of the tracks was her way out of an abusive family. Her father abused her and her mother. When she learned years later that her brother was charged with abusing a little girl it brought back painful memories. She studied and worked to get her brother convicted.
She had learned so much that people told her she should go to law school and she did. Wynona Ward spends 30-40 hours per week providing legal services all around rural Vermont and 30 to 40 hours per week grant writing and fund raising. She employs two attorneys, a paralegal, and an administrative assistant. She and her husband, Herald, live a simple life where she pays herself only about $25,000 from the grants. Winona Ward: Have Justice Will Travel.
Usually we think of violence as direct physical violence, but peace psychologists have become increasingly concerned about structural violence, an insidious form of violence that is built into the fabric of political and economic structures of society. Structural violence kills people slowly by depriving them of their basic needs. Life spans are curtailed when people are socially dominated, politically oppressed, or economically exploited. Structural violence is a global problem, reflected in vast disparities in wealth and health, both within and between societies (Christie et al., 2001).
Johan Galtung, President of Transcend Peace University, says that one way to define structural violence is to calculate the number of avoidable deaths. For instance, if people die from exposure to inclement conditions when shelter is not available to them, then structural violence is taking place. Similarly, structural violence occurs when death is caused by scarcities in food, inadequate nutrition, lack of health care, and other forms of deprivation that could be redressed if distribution systems were more equitably structured. Structural violence is endemic to economic systems that produce a concentration of wealth for some while exploiting others, political systems that give access to some and oppress others, and hierarchical social systems that are suffused with ethnocentrism and intolerance. Structural violence occurs whenever social structures and institutions produce oppression, exploitation, and dominance.
How is it that people, who are morally principled, can live their lives without giving much attention or thought to the pervasive problem of structural violence. Research shows that people employ mental processes that limit their scope of justice to include only certain people, thereby perpetuating the socially unjust conditions of structural violence. Much of that scholarship is looking carefully at women and children, because they are disproportionately harmed by structural violence worldwide. An emerging problem of the twenty-first century is globalization, the worldwide push for free markets that leave in their wake enormous inequalities on a large scale. Globalization is fuelling vast disparities in wealth and global division of labor in which people in some countries profit and engage in the work of the head while others suffer and toil with their hands. Militarization continues to a be an important source of structural violence, generating vast inequalities in coercive power and fueling the potential for episodes of violence, not only through war but also by supplying arms to smaller countries and insurgents around the world. . . . . (Christie, 8-10)
While the concept of structural violence highlights the distinction between direct and structural violence, the relationship between direct and structural violence is circular. For example, the man who physically abuses a woman is enacting a dominance hierarchy that is supported b y patriarchal narratives in the society. At the same time, his violent act reinforces the structural arrangements that puts men in a dominant position over women. Direct and structural violence operate together forming an interlocking system of violence.
Structural peace, on the other hand, is defined as the absence of structural violence. In “Toward a Psychology of Structural Peacebuilding” Cristina Jayme Montiel, defines Structural Peace as a system marked by egalitarian configurations wherein decision-making powers over resource allocation are distributed equally in a society. Structurally peaceful social systems are marked by equitably-distributed decision-powers in the production, allocation, and utilization of economic, political, and cultural resources. Structural peace conditions contain social differentiation, but the intergroup variations are horizontal rather than vertical (Christie, p. 285). It is this structural peace that we are working for when we work with other members of the community for social justice.
Last Tuesday, for example, we received the following email message from John Blevins, our UUA Trustee from the Prairie Star District with a report on the April 25 March for Women’s Lives—A report we also heard this morning from Candles of Joys and Concerns from Kathy Heltzer’s participation in the March.
John said--Hi, I've just received this note from Rev. Linda Olson-Peebles, UUA Trustee from the Washington DC area, and who was heavily involved in coordinating events at the Arlington, VA [UUA] church. Most of the names she mentions, if you don't know them, are current or past Trustees, moderators and UU ministers. Carol Mosely Braun I assume you already know of. I know there were at least two bus loads of [UUA] folks who went from the Kansas City metro area!
The message from Rev. Linda Olson-Peebles reads:
Thanks for the good wishes from you all who couldn't be with us in DC this weekend. It was truly a marvelous gathering - over a million people!
From the Board, along with Bill and Gini (that would be UUA President Bill Sinkford and his wife), Lyda Adair and I were at all the events, and Charlie Ortman, Megan Dowdell, and Calvin Dame, were able to join us at the march itself. Denny Davidoff and Matt Moore were also with us, as were thousands of UUs from all over the country. (Denny Davidoff is a past Moderator of the UUA)
Saturday evening's rally at All Souls was marvelous, with Ginny and Bill doing an outstanding job, and our keynoter Carol Mosely Braun bringing us to our feet! Afterwards, about 20 of us went to the Capitol Reflecting Pool to join an interfaith prayer vigil. It was moving to be there, in the quiet midnight, under the moon, Lyda and me with Meg Riley, Bill, Gini, Denny, and UU ministers Rosemary Bray McNatt, Liz McMasters, Ginger Luke and her daughter. (I can visualize that can you? The Capital Reflecting Pool at night is so beautiful and inspiring). The email goes on: Sunday itself was amazing - I have been at marches, but this was the biggest yet. It is hard to describe what a million people look like - and sound like! We had a BIG blue banner, and as we marched we gathered hundreds and hundreds of blue shirts behind us - UUs glad to be together walking with such a great assemblage.
Many many kudos must go to Meg Riley, Clara Barton intern Kierstin Homblette, and the UUA staff, who did such a marvelous job bringing UUs together! Deb Weiner and photographer Nancy documented it all. They worked very hard - I want them and you to know it was worth it!
I would like to turn now to other examples of structural peace—examples that will broaden the scope of what we mean by structural peace.
Dwelling in compassion right where we are. (Skog, 2001, 25-27). When Tom Chappelle, CEO of Tom’s of Maine, began to develop openhearted, environmentally sound approaches to business, some of his detractors thought his profits would go soft along with his heart. But Chappelle was convinced that love of others and the environment is fundamental to good leadership and good business. And good leadership, vision, and commerce can be first about caring.
“In my darkest days, I was working for aims that were too narrow for me. I was working for market share, sales growth, and profits. It was a sense of emptiness. I was to some degree depressed, undirected, unconnected to myself,” said Chappelle.
After much soul-searching and studying, Chappelle decided that in his heart he was actually a “formalist”—someone who looks at the world as a series of “I-thou” relationships. If you do business as a formalist, you treat people as you’d like yourself to be treated.
What shifts in thinking, what actions do you need to make to treat others as you’d like to be treated? What could help you shift from ego about yourself and how you are viewed, to concern for others and how they are treated? Instead of asking, “What’s in this for me? What would it take to have you ask, “What’s in it for everyone?”
Tom Chappelle decided to structure a workplace that honors the heart and spirit of his employees, his customers, and the environment. He decided to only produce, manufacture, and sell products—like natural toothpastes, soaps, and shampoos—that have a minimal impact on the natural world. He decided to see and treat his employees like human beings. Tom’s of Main supports flexible work arrangements for its employees and offers them free financial planning and management services, stress-prevention workshops, and reimbursement for wellness classes, such as yoga or meditation. The company also has ongoing training programs in work-life issues and value-centered leadership.
What about those fears about soft profits? For several years, Tom’s of Maine has seen 20 to 25 percent annual growth. I took this story from Susan Skog’s book Radical Acts of Love: How Compassion is Transforming Our World. It spoke to me personally. In high school I took a psychology course that I just loved. However, I didn’t take a single psychology course in college because I knew that to do anything professional with psychology one had to have an advanced degree and I knew I wasn’t smart enough to get a doctorate in psychology. Years later, in the 1960s I found myself going to lunch with my Arthur Andersen public accounting firm colleagues to hear conversations about the price of pork bellies and other business things that I wasn’t interested in when I wanted to talk about the Freedom Marches, the Pentagon papers, the Jack Mendelsohn issues in this morning’s Bill Sinkford reading, the issues described in this morning’s reading from John Lewis’ book Walking With the Wind, and getting out of Vietnam. It was then I found my lost heart and returned to college to earn my doctorate in psychology.
I’ll share here another vignette from Radical Acts of Love that spoke to me (p. 156). Trying to be sensitive to the woman’s feelings, Geske gently asked her, “Why did your raise your hand? Have you been the victim of a sexual assault? And the woman hesitated, and said, “No. I really haven’t. It’s okay.”
But Geske sensed the conversation needed to go deeper. “I said, ‘It’s okay. It’s really okay. Tell me why you raised your hand.’ And then the woman finally told me she wasn’t really a sexual assault victim, but that for five years her father had molested her. Because there had been no intercourse, she didn’t think she had been sexually assaulted. You could just feel the compassion in the room for this woman. The lawyers quickly said, ‘Judge, you can excuse her.’
But in slowing down enough to listen to the woman’s story, Geske’s heart intelligence kicked in. “Something told me to wait. My heart said I should stay with her for a few minutes,” Geske said. She told everyone else to leave the room. And then she asked the woman, “Have you told anyone else this story before?” And the woman said, “No.”
Geske told the woman that right in that building they were sitting in were professional counselors who could help her, counselors who spent their lives helping people who’d been victimized and harmed by their mothers and fathers. And the woman agreed to see them.
“This was just such a lesson to me,” Geske said in our interview. “It showed the importance of always being in attuned to those around you, taking those grace moments so something good can come out of something so bad. How easy it could have been to miss that moment.”
How often have we missed many such grace moments? If people continually come into our lives as our teachers, how often we must be missing the lesson. I chose this story because I have had to learn to be a listener that goes deeper.
Moving to a different narrative of work for structural peace, with a different point--social justice requires us to consider and analyze so that we may understand the forces that must be changed. For example, the materialist argument applied to South Africa during apartheid was that race had little to do with apartheid policy. Apartheid was based on a white capitalist strategy to control economic power. (Christie, 303) It seems to me likely that this insight informed the reformers in South Africa that their boycotts would eventually be successful.
According to Manfred Steger’s analysis of Gandhi’s perspective on power, the most valuable contribution of Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent power lies in its critique of dominant discourses of power based on a psychology of fear which equates power with violence. Gandhi believed that the most effective way to change unaccountable power networks was to withdraw popular obedience. (Christie, 316)
Gandhi’s political thought is expressed satya (truth, being), agraha (firmness, force, power), and ahimsa (nonviolence). Gandhi considered himself a spokesperson for the marginalized and downtrodden and in that way, it seems to me, has much to tell us about seeking structural peace.
My final example today of work towards structural peace is Amnesty International. It began in May 1961 as a purely grassroots, bottom-up organization for the purpose of freeing prisoners of conscience. The position of Amnesty International grows out of the membership, through resolutions at national and international meetings. The Urgent Action Network organizes letter-writing campaigns. Letters start piling up. About one-half the time, conditions get better. Torture stops. Clothes are returned to the prisoner. Better food is provided. The prisoner is released.
As in the reading from Gandhi this morning, “it is possible to live in peace.” As in the John Lewis reading from Walking With the Wind, it is possible to change oppression. May each of us reflect on the ways that we can work toward structural peace and social justice.
Closing Words: May each of us reflect on the ways that we can work toward structural peace and social justice.
References
Christie, D. J., Wagner, R. V., & Winter, D. D. (2001). Peace, Conflict, and Violence: Peace Psychology for the 21st Century. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Skog, S. (2001). Radical Acts of Love: How Compassion is Transforming Our World. Center City, Minnesota: Hazelden.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth
Promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person