r e f l e c t . . . k c o l i v e b r a n c h

NOTE: This sermon comes courtesy of the Sustainable Sanctuary Coalition.

By Terry Wiggins
All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, Kansas City, MO

“In reality, most people don’t change when you tell them they should, they change when they tell themselves they must.”  So said New York Times columnist Tom Friedman.  I want to share some information that might enable you to change if you determine that you want to.

I’ll start with an issue of Ode magazine from our church Library.  On the cover:  “Close to home / Truly fresh food is back in style as we rediscover the pleasure of markets and nearby farms / Indeed, Local is the new organic (but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your coffee and bananas.)”

The article points out that even as farmers of Nebraska are going broke, the state spends hundreds of millions on food grown out-of-state.  The apparent abundance on the fields of America’s breadbasket and in America’s supermarkets is in contrast to the economic hardship that farmers are feeling.  Big ag and big oil are profiting.

It’s not a new thing that the economics of agriculture in this country are haywire, but — oil companies you ask?  Yes, indeed.  Fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides are all made from petrochemicals.  Farm machines run on oil.  And our food is transported an average of 1500 miles to reach us.

What’s a healthy response to this situation?  We want one that can support our farmers, our communities, and is enjoyable and healthy for our children and ourselves.  One alternative is farmers’ markets.  Kansas City is very lucky to have not just one, but 3, ORGANIC farmer’s markets.  And I really don’t know how many farmers’ markets there are in total in the metro. Even if the food you purchase at a farmers’ market or roadside stand is not organic, it’s still better to purchase locally produced food that doesn’t leave the farmer inadequately compensated.  Nor does local food require the packaging, refrigeration, and transport that generate huge amounts of waste and pollution. Nor does it have the additives and preservatives in order to endure the journey, nor does it encounter as many opportunities for contamination.

Another alternative to supporting “Big Ag” is to buy a CSA.  CSA stands for “Community Supported Agriculture”.  The basic principle is that you buy a share of your farmer’s production.  CSAs work in a variety of ways.  Some collect the money up front, so they have money to buy seeds.  Some have you pick up at the farm or at a store or at a location in your neighborhood, and some deliver to your house.  But the key is cutting out the middle people.  The farmer is guaranteed a fair price.   You get more nutritious and tasty food right off the farm.

And if investing in local or organic food — yes, it will seem like investing, because it’s often pricier than industrial food – doesn’t seem political enough for you, I present you the issue of CAFOs.  CAFO stands for Confined Animal Feeding Operation.  These are the factory farms where the pigs and chickens are permanently confined in pens or cages, from birth through slaughter.  The cows are fattened up in feeding lots.  The animals are fed lots of hormones and other chemicals.  Besides being cruel for the animals, CAFOs are dangerous in that they create more manure than the local fields can absorb, so they pollute the air and water around them.

I close with words of Wendell Berry that I found in Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture:

“[What I propose] is a revolt of small local producers and local consumers against the global industrialism of the corporation.  Do I think there is a hope that such a revolt can survive and succeed and that it can have a significant influence upon our lives and our world?

“Yes, I do.  It is now possible for farmers to sell their products at a premium to local customers.  This market is being made by the exceptional goodness and freshness of the food, by the wish of urban consumers to support their farming neighbors, and by the excesses and abuses of the corporate food industry.”

By Ryann Kuykendall

This April my husband I found out that I was pregnant.  Twenty one days later our doctor told us that our baby’s heart stopped.  Our baby was due December 15, 2008.  For days I debated with myself if it was right to share my story of joy and loss.  Because many others mourn loved ones and maybe someone reading this will find comfort I decided that it was right.

The second I knew I was pregnant, I fell in love and became a different person.  The wonder and awe filled my every thought and move.  Even house spiders became almost sacred to me. Because she might be pregnant, I couldn’t throw the spider outside.  All life took on a new perspective.  Now I see the grace in death.

Each person grieves differently.  In graduate school, Jessica, my best friend worked at Solace House on State Line Road as a grief counselor.  Jessica felt called to because her brother died when she was 18 years old.  The first time I visited her, I sat on a couch waiting for her and silently watched heartbroken people come to her for answers or comfort.  I asked her what she told people and she told me that she would wait to see how they dealt with their loss.   Sometimes she would cry with them and sometimes not.  The one thing she did know was that each person handled loss differently.  The wonderful example of Jessica finding strength and beauty in the death of her brother is a testimony to her faith.    She gave others a place to rest their spirits.  Her example of grieving while giving thanks is one of my greatest inspirations.

The spider I couldn’t bring myself to throw outside rests in the corner of the stairway to our basement.  The washing machine and dryer are in the basement so I pass that little brown spider many times a week.  I was right not to throw the spider out because she is pregnant.  Childish as it may seem, I smile when I pass her and her swollen belly.

That is what has gotten me through these last few weeks, finding beauty.  Friends and family say prayers for us and send cards to let us know they are there for us.  My purple irises and pink peonies are almost in bloom. The oak trees in front of my house make a lush green canopy.  I can feel love of God in all of these things.  My life blossomed right along with my flowers and trees this April.

No one thing or prayer can heal the pain my family and I feel.   God never promised us happiness through a child.  Before the loss of the baby, I never understood how others found peace that some day in Heaven loved ones will be rejoined.  However, knowing that one day will I be able to hold my child, there is a tremendous comfort. Despite my loss, the blessing of my short time with my child was my greatest gift.

NOTE: This letter was sent to the Kansas City Star and provided to the Olive Branch for posting.

By Henry Stoever

The Border Patrol has found some 4,200 dead bodies in the U.S. desert since 1995 as migrants seek entry to support their families, says the relief group “No More Deaths” of Tucson, AZ. NAFTA cancels tariffs on U.S. goods, allowing cheaper U.S. produce to flood Mexican markets, driving Mexican farmers off their land and to the U.S. to seek income for their families.

On April 28, 40 protesters, mostly Catholic Workers, gave witness at the Federal Building in KCMO, and I was one of six arrested for “blocking entrances and walkways.” We demand immigration reform. We reject the criminalization of humanitarian aid to immigrants. We object to raids, deportation, family separation. Europe has a guest worker program; why don’t we? To paraphrase Reagan’s challenge to Gorbachev, we say, “Mr. Bush, tear down that border wall.” How we treat immigrants strikes to the core of our values and souls.

NOTE: “Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?” is no longer playing in Kansas City. The video is expected to be released this fall. 

By Matt Smithmier

He’s arguably the most wanted man in the world. But in the new documentary “Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?” director Morgan Spurlock tackles the question that the United States military has been asking for seven years.

Back in better health after his fast-food experiment in “Super Size Me,” Spurlock is still the slightly sarcastic, regular-guy journalist on a mission. This time, instead of a global corporate empire, he’s taking on terrorism and its uncomfortable cohort the “war on terrorism” – another sort of global empire.

Motivated by the upcoming birth of his first child, he sets out on a journey to find bin Laden, the Sept. 11 puppet master and leader of al-Qaida, with the hope that the world will be a safer place for his new kid once the ringleader is found. “If I’ve learned anything from big-budget action films, it’s that complicated world problems are best solved by one lonely guy,” he declares to the camera in the introduction.

Because this is a Spurlock film, we get plenty of zany effects and antics to accompany us on the journey. Thankfully, however, as we get to the meat of the movie, Spurlock gets a little more serious and we can really see what we’re here to see – that the real issue is not where bin Laden might be but why and how a bin Laden ever existed in the first place.

After completing extensive security training and a battery of vaccinations, Spurlock takes us to all of the hot spots: Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan. He talks to people on the street, journalists, students, tribal leaders, even children. He doesn’t waste time proselytizing to his audience about his theories (for the most part), and he doesn’t have to. The voices of the people who live in the thick of this environment spell out the story quite effectively. The film feels less like an opinion piece and more like a day-in-the-life exposé.

And while Spurlock talks to many locals who are ashamed of bin Laden’s actions and blame him for the war in their backyard, he doesn’t shy away from finding those dissident voices, even tracking down relatives of some of the 9/11 hijackers. He asks all of them not only where he can find bin Laden but also what they think of America and 9/11.

It’s no big spoiler to reveal that Spurlock doesn’t actually find bin Laden. But what he does uncover is infinitely more illuminating of the pressures and motivations that drive extremism, which ensure that this “war on terror” is nowhere close to being won – or lost.

With supporting testimony from some of his interviewees, Spurlock proposes that much of the unrest is actually due to America’s actions through the last several decades, including our financial and military support of authoritarian leaders who restrict their citizens’ political voices and oppress the local culture. As a result, Islamic fundamentalism was able to grow by leaps and bounds by seemingly offering the only real avenue to freedom and activism. “Extremism nourishes itself from darkness,” one interviewee says.

Spurlock has a couple of theories about what’s causing the darkness today. While he is very grateful and respectful of the U.S. military’s presence in the region – including their safe escort into Afghanistan’s Taliban country so he could interview locals – he questions the destruction and lack of promised rebuilding that drives a wedge between the American government and the local residents. He also visits the Gaza Strip and wonders if the ongoing conflict between Israelites and Palestinians isn’t actually fueling the need for terrorism. If peace in the region was declared tomorrow, would there really be a need for bin Laden?

It seems a little strange to report that a film about such a dire and threatening topic actually leaves you with hope. But in fact, Spurlock manages to inspire with his documentary, showing viewers firsthand that the majority of the people who live in such a war-torn landscape are not the extremists that we should fear. They are people who want peace – not only for their own families, but for the United States as well as the entire world. Spurlock himself changes his own mission – from catching a madman to make the world safer for his unborn child to discovering the reasons for the fear and hatred so the world will be safer for everyone’s children.

The film leaves you with the hope that these “ordinary” people will eventually win out over the extremist on all sides, that humanity will someday right itself, dissolving fear and hatred with understanding and hope. But like most complex problems, treating a symptom – in this case catching bin Laden – does nothing to cure the root cause. And it will take more than a declaration of “Mission Accomplished” to change the hearts and minds of the rest of the world.

By Megan Hope

Charles Ferruzza thought he was doing the right thing.

As the local food critic rushed into Cosentino’s Market in Brookside, he was stopped by one of several petitioners. “I don’t remember exactly what he said,” said Ferruzza, “But he alluded that the petition was about fighting discrimination—instead of encouraging it.”

Only later did Ferruzza learn what he’d signed his name to: a ballot initiative that would end affirmative action and other programs in Missouri designed to address race- and gender-based barriers to equal opportunity in public education, public employment, and public contracting. This means programs that try to boost the participation of minority- and women-owned businesses in public contracts, minority scholarships to Missouri junior colleges and universities, and even publicly funded mentoring programs aimed at women scientists or Latina girls could all be outlawed by an amendment to the state constitution. The amendment is deceptively called the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative (MoCRI).

MoCRI petitioners are trying to gather close to 140,000 signatures by May 4 so the initiative can appear on November ballots. The canvassers, many from other states, are paid $3 to $4 per name collected. Missouri, Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, and Oklahoma are all targeted this year as affirmative action battlegrounds by Ward Connerly, a wealthy California businessman. Connerly and the American Civil Rights Institute he spawned have already succeeded in banning affirmative action programs in his home state, Washington, and Michigan.

Recruiting the Minutemen

As the deadline for MoCRI signatures nears, Connerly is planning for a surge of canvassers to be deployed to the Show-Me state. In an e-mail last week to the conservative National Review Online, he called for “25 individuals who are committed to equal treatment under the law to travel to Missouri. All expenses will be paid and there is the potential to earn big bucks to collect signatures.”

The call to clipboards is being forwarded widely among alleged white supremacist and anti-immigrant groups, including Californians for Population Stabilization, the Betsy Ross Patriots, and the Minutemen. In an e-mail to Minutemen members, Stuart H. Hulbert, a longtime Connerly ally, wrote, “The tie-in with immigration issues is very strong. About 3/4 of all immigrants and probably more like 90% percent of illegal immigrants are immediately eligible the minute they cross the border or get off the plane, on the basis of their ‘race,’ for preferential treatment by all sorts of federally mandated programs.” Much of the content of Hulbert’s email was circulated by Jeff Schwick, head of the San Diego Minutemen, along with a claim that Connerly had personally contacted Schwick to recruit his “standup guys and gals” for detail in Missouri.

Although Connerly denies contacting or even knowing Schwick, civil right activists say harnessing anti-immigrant fervor only makes sense. “[Connerly’s supporters have] targeted states where there’s a white majority electorate and a vocal, if small, extreme anti-immigrant right wing,” said Shanta Driver, who runs By Any Means Necessary, a coalition that defends affirmative action. For anyone who believes that undocumented immigrants are walking off planes and into government-contracted jobs, the notion that affirmative action is unjust isn’t much of a leap.

California: Post-affirmative action laboratory

Connerly and the supporters he readily claims—including Rupert Murdoch, Joseph Coors, the Heritage Foundation, Kansas City businessman John Uhlmann, MoCRI Executive Director Timothy Asher, and others—envision November 4 as a “Super Tuesday for Equal Rights,” when multiple states can simultaneously vote to prohibit “discrimination” and “preferential treatment.”

But it isn’t just their lofty ideals of “justice” that motivate these right-wing conservatives and big-business buddies. Connerly, an African American and former University of California regent, has spent most of his career (and made his millions) consulting and lobbying for the building and construction industry, a network of business and interest groups that have long opposed affirmative action programs.

Since California Proposition 209 banned affirmative action programs in the state beginning in 1997, statistics show women- and minority-owned businesses have suffered. Their share of Department of Transportation contracts dropped from 27.7 percent in 1994 to 8.2 percent in 2002. Connerly doesn’t deny the effects, but celebrates what it means for the firms he works with, who no longer have to comply with affirmative action requirements. “It improves their bottom line not to have to go through this stuff,” he told Ms. Magazine earlier this year.

Other changes in California are evident, too. Although publicly funded gender-targeted health screenings (like breast cancer detection) and women-only domestic violence shelters in California have survived, not all programs have fared as well. When UMKC sophomore Sayra Gordillo attended a student conference in California earlier this year, Latinos told her that minority enrollment in state universities had dropped. “The people I talked to in California told me, ‘You have to fight [the MoCRI] as much as you can,’” she said.

Missouri fights back

Indeed, “Missouri has pushed back like no other state,” said Donnie Morehouse, Associate Director of the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri. “We’ve worked together like we’ve never worked together before,” he said, pointing to the diversity of labor groups, business people, faith bodies, community organizations, students, and others on both sides of the state who have united to stop the MoCRI. The WeCAN (Working to Empower Community Action Now) coalition has been organizing volunteers across the state to go to petitioning sites and educate would-be signers by distributing “Think Before You Ink” leaflets and talking to them.

WeCAN is also tracking complaints by people like Ferruzza who say they were deceived or misinformed by canvassers. Missouri state law prohibits the use of deceptive tactics in petition circulation; Morehouse is hopeful that the number of deluded signers will at least attract the attention of Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. In Michigan, where Connerly’s initiative passed in November 2006, hundreds testified that they had been misled or lied to by petitioners. A coalition of groups in Colorado supporting civil rights is considering filing a legal challenge about deceptive canvassers, and, petitioners in Oklahoma have been accused of being untruthful or vague.

The MoCRI and Connerly’s other campaigns take advantage not only on the good intentions of people who support genuine civil rights, said Morehouse, but also on widespread misconceptions. Many people think affirmative action policies involve quotas or set-asides, he says, but that isn’t true. “It’s about reminding ourselves that there are people out there we may not be thinking about.” Morehouse likened affirmative action to using a Rolodex, but having a systematic way to move names from underrepresented categories of the population to the front—people that an employer or admissions officer might not otherwise think of contacting.

Gordillo recalled a white female classmate who believed she had been discriminated against for being white. Gordillo was sympathetic, but explained that affirmative action policies have actually benefited white women more than any other group of people. “I told her, we can make reforms to affirmative action—there are things we can do to fix it, but we can’t fix it if it’s eliminated.”

Capitalizing on ignorance

At a WeCAN hearing about affirmative action held in Kansas City in February, Terry Jones, professor of public policy and political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, testified that the damage done by decades of slavery, segregation, denial of education, and glass ceilings in Missouri has not yet been reversed.

“To pretend that in 2008 all whites and people of color have equal opportunity is to deny history…Mr. Connerly’s proposal banning affirmative action was bad public policy for California, Washington, and Michigan—the three states which have adopted it. It is much, much worse for Missouri. Unlike the other three states, which never legalized slavery and stayed on the more polite side of Jim Crow practices, Missouri’s past–its constitutions and laws–are littered with racism.”

“We’ve left ourselves vulnerable to efforts like MoCRI because of our ignorance about affirmative action and immigration,” said Morehouse.

Missouri House Bill 1463, as an example of misinformation about immigration, would require all state colleges and universities to certify that they do not enroll any “illegal aliens.” As a legislative update by the Missouri Association for Social Welfare explained, “The argument that an ‘illegal alien’ would be taking up a spot that could have gone to a ‘real Missourian’ is bogus, because most of our state colleges do not have enrollment limits, so accepting one student absolutely does not mean excluding some other student.”

The legitimate economic frustrations of Missourians and other Americans will never be alleviated by pretending, as Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute does, that “Race has no place in American life or law.” The reality is that women and people of color still face unwarranted obstacles.

People like Sayra Gordillo know those obstacles. “It’s been hard enough already,” she said. “But if the MoCRI succeeds, it’s going to get harder.”

Volunteers throughout Missouri are needed to stop the MoCRI. To help, contact Lara at the Jobs with Justice-St. Louis office at 314-644-0466 , Aaron at 314-497-854, or Amy at 314-265-3927. You may also contact Megan Hope at 913-244-4762.

Note: On Saturday, April 26, Maryada and Walt Stanton, humanitarian activists from No More Deaths border action and Casa Maria Catholic Worker in Tucson, Arizona, will share their experiences of offering direct hospitality to people struggling with oppressive immigration issues. It is presented as part of the Midwest Catholic Worker Immigration Retreat. (For more information go here.)