Despite having sustained a serious head injury some years ago, Father Andrew Greeley, who died on May 29, 2013, was a priest to the end. “We know he is blessed and he’s blessing us,” said Greeley’s niece, Eileen Durkin.
Author Archives: Fred Yi
Cambodia Garment Worker Justice
FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Back in the 1990s, Cambodia, impoverished and rebuilding after its genocidal Khmer Rouge years, took steps to give its new garment industry a competitive leg up. It agreed to a system of fair labor standards with a minimum wage rule, a limit to working hours, unions to represent workers, and freedom of expression. All would be open to international inspection. Today, there are perhaps 400,000 garment workers in more than 300 factories in and near the capital, Phnom Penh. They are subcontractors to brand names and retailers in Europe and America.
Beginning from scratch less than two decades ago, Cambodia’s garment industry has grown into the largest export earner for this country. Three out of four dollars that come into Cambodia come from the garment factories.
The key question is how much all this has benefited workers, almost all of whom are female. Many factories have been plagued by labor unrest. Occasionally, it’s been violent. There have been frequent reports of faintings on factory floors. The unions cite unhealthy conditions and workers weak from malnourishment.
CHEA MONY (Trade Union Leader): Workers have very low salaries, only $61US per month. You cannot afford to live on that day to day. It’s legalized slavery.
DE SAM LAZARO: Chea introduced us to these workers. Like most of their colleagues, they are young, rural migrants living in tight, shared quarters, supporting extended families back home.
SOY NAKRY (Garment Worker): We have to pay for the room, electricity, water.
VONG SOPHAL (Garment Worker): In the evening, we just buy some fish and make some soup. Sometimes we have to keep part of it for breakfast.
DE SAM LAZARO: Chem Savet supports a farm family in a rural province 60 miles away, including her husband, her parents, and two-year-old daughter.
CHEM SAVET (Garment Worker): I can only see her once a month. When I go home she really misses me, so she hugs me, especially when I must leave one day later. One time she put some of her clothes in when I was packing. She wanted to come with me.
DE SAM LAZARO: The standard six-day, 48-hour week plus overtime leaves little time for travel to see family. Factory managers aren’t sympathetic during family emergencies, they complained, and many employees are on temporary instead of permanent employment contracts.
FEMALE GARMENT WORKER: Previously, we saw a lot of strikes, but those haven’t happened recently in our factory because there are a lot of newcomers.
DAVID SCHILLING (Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility): The minimum wage clearly is not sufficient for workers to meet their basic needs. We’re talking food. We’re talking clothing.
DE SAM LAZARO: David Schilling is with the New York-based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. It’s a shareholder activist group that wants to add a moral voice in global economic matters.
SCHILLING: Whether you’re talking about all the Abrahamic traditions, the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, at the core is that concept of the human dignity of the person. So you’re taking that and then you’re moving into the realities.
DE SAM LAZARO: Ken Loo represents Cambodia’s garment factory owners. He sees a very different reality for workers.
KEN LOO (Cambodia Garment Manufacturing Association): They’re not whipped, you know. They’re not chained. They come to work willingly.
DE SAM LAZARO: He says most garment workers make more than the $61 minimum wage; closer to $90 dollars a month, he says, higher with overtime. That’s more than policemen, teachers, or most civil servants, he adds.
LOO: We have to put things in context. The per capita GDP of Cambodia for last year as announced by the World Bank was $908. The average common factory worker earns 40 percent more than national per capita GDP. If you use that as a gauge, I think any worker in America would be glad to get 40 percent more than national per capita GDP.
DE SAM LAZARO: Cambodia’s minister of commerce says factory owners have little wiggle room because they are no more than contract tailors.
CHAM PRASIDH (Cambodian Minister of Commerce): They do not own the fabric. They do not own the brand. They just import the fabric, cut, sew, pack, and then sell.
DE SAM LAZARO: Prasidh could impose higher wages in the factories, most of which are owned by investors from China, Taiwan, Korea, and Malaysia. But he says that would be suicidal.
PRASIDH: There is a lot of demonstration to ask for living condition, ask to increase the minimum wage, and what happen? The investor just packed their sewing machine, and they go home!
DE SAM LAZARO: Or they go to another country?
PRASIDH: They go to another country so we have to compare that, our price with Bangladesh. We have to compare our price with Pakistan or India, yeah, or even with China.
DE SAM LAZARO: San Francisco-based Gap is the largest buyer of garments made in Cambodia. It also buys from dozens of other developing nations. Spokeswoman Bobbi Silten says Gap, which owns the Old Navy and Banana Republic chains as well, has no plans to leave Cambodia.
BOBBI SILTEN (Gap Foundation): We have very longstanding relationships with many of the vendors in Cambodia. It’s been one of our top ten sourcing countries for the last ten years. So we are very committed to being there, and we think that the labor standards that they have put in place is one of the reasons why we continue to stay.
DE SAM LAZARO: Ken Loo says buyers may talk up the labor standards. But in 2008, when the global recession began, many, including Gap, cut back in Cambodia. At the same time, he says, Bangladesh—with lower pay and labor standards—saw no drop in business.
LOO: It just confirms our knowledge that, indeed, compliance of labor standards is the icing on the cake. Price is the cake.
PRASIDH: It is a race to the bottom, and Cambodia—to survive we have to create something special.
DE SAM LAZARO: Jill Tucker says Cambodia does have a special competitive advantage since buyers want to be associated with ethical labor standards. Tucker heads an agency supported by the UN and the US government that conducts factory inspections for compliance with the labor standards.
JILL TUCKER (Better Factories Initiative): In the olden days, by that I mean maybe ten years ago, it was more of a cat-and-mouse game than it is now, and the really smart producers, I think, realize that, you know, you need to treat your workers well to retain your workers, and that it’s just not worth it to not treat your workers well.
DE SAM LAZARO: She cites this factory, run by a Taiwan-based company, QMI, as a good example. There’s plenty of air and light and, managers say, good labor relations. All ten thousand of QMI’s workers are on permanent contracts, and wages here range from $90 to as much as $150 a month. That’s still below what unions say is adequate. But Tucker says demands for higher wages, however justified, are a tough sell given realities in the US, the biggest market.
TUCKER: I really wonder if American consumers are willing to pay significantly more for their apparel.
DE SAM LAZARO: Really?
TUCKER: Yeah. The cost of apparel has only dropped over the past decade. None of us are paying more for our garments than we were 10 years ago.
SILTEN: We do need to think about what consumers are willing to pay, where we can source these goods to achieve, you know, get the math to work for everyone. From a macro standpoint I think it’s a very complex issue.
DE SAM LAZARO: Gap’s Silten isn’t sure if consumers would pay more for ethically produced garments. The Interfaith Center’s Schilling says retailers like Gap, pressured by competitors and Wall Street investors, aren’t likely to ask them to do so. More likely, he says, campaigns by activist groups should bring a greater awareness of worker rights issues as they are now on environmental ones.
SCHILLING: There’s more and more advertising around, you know, sort of ecologically sound products. I think more and more that’s going to happen within the social space as well.
DE SAM LAZARO: That would bring greater awareness of the plight of workers in Cambodia and more urgently other nations that don’t subscribe to fair labor standards, and Schilling says it could not happen fast enough.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.
The Mission Continues
VOLUNTEERS MARCHING: Left right, left right, left right…
LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: These are all vets from all branches of the service—Iraq and Afghanistan vets embarking on a new mission for themselves and their communities—today, trading their military uniforms for a blue shirt.
SPENCER KYMPTON (The Mission Continues): (speaking to veterans) I want you to stand up now if you believe that you have more to give and that you’re an asset to your country.
SEVERSON: This is an orientation session for a rapidly growing non-profit program called The Mission Continues which enlists veterans to serve their communities in over 37 states so far. It was founded in 2007 by Eric Greitens, a former Navy Seal and commander of an Al Qaeda targeting unit. The unit was hit by a truck bomb and it was after visiting his injured comrades that Greitens got the idea for starting The Mission Continues.
ERIC GREITENS (The Mission Continues): And when you say to them, tell me what you want to do when you recover, every single one of them said to me, I want to return to my unit. They all said I want to return to my unit. Now the reality was, for a lot of those men and women, they were not going to be able to return to their unit. I said tell me if you can’t go back to your unit right away, tell me what else you’d like to do. Every single one of them told me that they wanted to find a way to continue to serve.
SEVERSON: Greitens had made a significant discovery about the dark space so many veterans find themselves in when they get home. It’s not so much that they feel unwelcome. They feel unneeded.
NATASHA YOUNG: I was depressed. I was doing a lot of self-pitying at the time. That’s when I came across The Mission Continues.
SEVERSON: Natasha Young was in the Marines for 12 years, a Gunnery Sergeant medically discharged a year ago with cancer and PTSD.
YOUNG: There was no shortage of organizations offering free items like movie tickets or…that’s not what I needed. I needed someone to say that, you know what Staff Sergeant Young, you’re still needed. You have valuable, tangible skills that you can still utilize in your community.
SEVERSON: There are 72 vets in this group out of over 700 who applied. Getting accepted as a Fellow is not easy. Spencer Kympton, the 2nd in command of The Mission Continues is a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot.
SPENCER KYMPTON: You have to be able to demonstrate that you’re not done serving, that you have a particular passion to serve in the same way that you did when you raised your right hand and said you’d support and defend the constitution of the United States.
SEVERSON: The vets who are accepted are hooked up with local nonprofit organizations in their communities.
KYMPTON: Whether that’s mentoring low-income kids, or building homes for the impoverished, or training service animals for people with disabilities, you know those are positive role models for those communities.
SEVERSON: For their 6 months of volunteering, they receive a stipend of roughly 7000 dollars from The Mission Continues which receives it’s funding from foundations and companies like Target, The Home Depot and Southwest Airlines.
On this day, before they return to their communities, they’re bussed to the Trinity River, south of the Dallas skyline, for a final group effort, to clear brush and create an overlook along a newly opened trail. Eric Greitens says what we see here is an example of how military training can work in civilian life.
GREITENS: There’s a tremendous set of skills and abilities which they bring back from their military service that they can now use here at home. They’ve all learned what it takes to work with a team and accomplish a mission. They’re all used to being held accountable. They know what it takes to inspire people in difficult circumstances; they know that success doesn’t come easy. So they bring back those skills and also those attitudes which they can apply in a civilian context.
ROBERT BROWN: You take a bunch of veterans and you put them on an objective. It’s gonna get done one way or another.
SEVERSON: Robert Brown was discharged from the Marines in 2004. He was suffering from a traumatic brain injury and PTSD.
BROWN: I was an RP. I was a Religious Programs Specialist. Worked with the chaplain, so I worked with suicide guys. We had several attempts. Then…
SEVERSON: You needed some help yourself?
BROWN: Yeah.
GREITENS: What happens for a lot of veterans when they come home, especially when they get back to their community is that they can go to a very tough and hard place and they start to wonder what’s next for me and they ask themselves why did this happen to me.
BROWN: I had no idea what I was going to do. It made me homeless. I had no money, nowhere to go. And then I finally had enough courage to go back home and hung out with family but that wasn’t working very good, you know, people’s got their own family and kids.
KYMPTON: When you’re in the military, you’re part of something that other men and women to your left and right are part of alongside with you. And it’s a life, it’s a family. So when you leave that very distinct environment, a piece of you is missing.
BROWN: This is the best I’ve felt. I’ve lost 73 pounds. You know, I’ve still got the issues but you know I’ve got some purpose and focus now.
GREITENS: When we make these decisions that we’re going to commit ourselves to making a difference in the life of one person every single day, what happens is we actually build a whole generation of citizen leaders.
SEVERSON: Greitens started The Mission Continues along with a couple friends using his combat and their disability pay. He could have chosen a higher-paying career. He is a Rhodes Scholar, has a PhD from Oxford, and has authored two books.
GREITENS: I believe that for all of us to have a good life we have to live with a combination of courage and compassion, and I also believe that for all us to have a good life, we have to live for something that is larger than ourselves.
(speaking to veterans): Every generation of Americans who has fought, every generation of Americans who has served, has suffered.
SEVERSON: Greitens is no stranger to public service. He’s done humanitarian work in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. He says his religion has motivated him.
GREITENS: I think there are a couple of key lessons that come from Judaism that shaped my life. One of them is the idea we have a duty to repair the world and all of us should play a role in our lives in trying to repair the world and to make the world better for the next generation.
SEVERSON: The world appears to be a better place for many of the vets who have gone through The Mission Continues. A study by the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis found that over 70 percent of Fellows have furthered their education, and 80 percent have found civilian employment.
UNIDENTIFIED FELLOW: Delta Class, atten–hut! We are fellows of The Mission Continues.
FELLOWS: (together) We are Fellows of The Mission Continues!
KYMPTON: These folks have already once signed on the dotted line and said that they are willing and able and ready to serve. We’re just saying, “Serve again.”
SEVERSON: The Mission Continues has now graduated over 500 Fellows and plans to recruit far more of the 5 million who have served in the last ten years.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Dallas.
Bobby McFerrin; Decline of Buddhism in Thailand
We talk with Grammy-Award-winning artist Bobby McFerrin about his Christian faith, his music, and his new album “spirityouall.” We also travel to Thailand to ask if Buddhism is giving way to consumerism and materialism as the country modernizes and prospers.
Decline of Buddhism in Thailand
LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: There’s a struggle going on inside Thailand. It’s between two powerful influences. One side can be found in places like this; the other in crowded spaces like this. For now it seems that one side is falling behind.
This is Professor John Butt, senior advisor to the Institute of Religion at Payap University in Chiang Mai.
PROF. JOHN BUTT: It’s a real clash with modernity, with social change, and it’s been very intense. The changes that took place in America and in Europe have been extended over a couple of centuries; here it’s been a couple of decades.
SEVERSON: This is a country where almost 95 percent of the population is Buddhist, where the constitution mandates that the king be a Buddhist, and where there are temples almost everywhere.
PROF. BUTT: I think probably this is one of the central if not the central Buddhist country in the world.
SEVERSON: It’s a country that has recently seen a remarkable rise in economic prosperity. There was a time not that long ago when it would have been difficult to find a mall, let alone one so crowded. The roads would have been clogged with motor scooters, and the fancy cars belonged only to diplomats and the very rich. Not anymore. The Thais have embraced consumerism with gusto.
This is An Jang Sang, professor emeritus at Chiang Mai University.
AN JANG SANG: Some of them may be interested in materialism, consumerism, but deep down in their heart they are still Buddhists.
SEVERSON: But he agrees they’re not going to the temples, also known as wats, as much as they once did.
PROF. BUTT: In the past the wat was not just the religious center, it was the life center of the village community. The social life took place there, counseling, respect, authority for the monks. That’s, I think, decreased tremendously.
SEVERSON: And not as many are going to the Buddha to offer their prayerful good wishes for all living things. Some are giving more in donations, but Phra Boonchuey, the assistant abbot at this large temple, says too many are just donating to buy good karma.
PHRA BOONCHUEY: Because now they are coming to the temple just only to offer the offering in order to please, you know, their life for their own benefit.
SEVERSON: Phra BoonChuey is on a mission to get Thai Buddhism back on track.
PHRA BOONCHUEY: And so we have to do many things, you know, to bring people, you know, back to the religion.
SEVERSON: That would include bringing back the monks themselves who have been disappearing. In the past, almost every young man would become a monk, leading a monastic life, some for a few months, some for a lifetime. But in the last 30 years it is estimated that the number of monks has fallen by more than half. Mr. Vinai, our tuk-tuk driver, served as a monk for over a year as a young man.
(to Mr. Vinai): Did you like being a monk?
MR. VINAI: Yes. Yes.
SEVERSON: Do you think every young man should be a monk?
MR. VINAI: No, no.
SEVERSON: He says not every young man should be a monk because some care more about shopping.
(to Mr. Vinai): How many boys do you have?
MR. VINAI: I have two.
SEVERSON: Were they monks?
MR. VINAI: Yes.
SEVERSON: His last boy served only 15 days.
It’s about 5:30 in the morning, and the first monks are showing up to collect alms, their food for the whole day. Sometimes there’s only one meal a day, often followed by some sort of community service, and then there are the hours of chanting, study, and meditation. It’s not an easy life. Professor Butt says he once asked the young men in his class how many had been ordained.
PROF. BUTT: If I had asked that question a hundred years ago, I would have gotten close to a 100 percent yes, that they had ordained as a novice, maybe a short period of time, but they had done so. I went five years before I got one positive response, who had ordained.
SEVERSON: One reason for that might be the Thais have been practicing family planning, and if there is only one boy in the family, and the choice is school, making money, or ordination…
PRHA BOONCHUEY: You may not want him to be a novice or to get ordination.
SEVERSON: A big factor is that in the past many boys became monks to get a free education at the temple. Now Thailand offers 12 years of free public education and far more are attending secular schools. Scandals have also contributed to the diminishing numbers of monks, scandals revealed by social media. Pictures of monks at parties with women, drinking alcohol, watching porn, driving expensive fancy cars. Things monks are not supposed to be doing.
MR. VINAI: Not whiskey, not beer.
SEVERSON: Cigarettes, no cigarettes?
MR. VINAI: Nah, no.
SEVERSON: No women?
MR. VINAI: No women.
SEVERSON: No partying?
MR. VINAI: Yeah, no party.
SEVERSON: It’s not that there has been an epidemic of scandalous behavior, but what there is seems to find its way into the media. Justin McDaniel, the chairman of the department of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, was once a monk himself in Thailand.
JUSTIN MCDANIEL: It has a big impact in the press. I think it also has a big impact that if somebody was on the fence about being a monk or nun, that this is kind of relatively a legitimate excuse you could give to your mom for not doing it: well, look at the way monks act.
SEVERSON: Professor McDaniel argues that Thai Buddhism itself is not in decline, that it is gaining considerable traction in the Western world, and that the Thai people themselves are debating it more, which he says is a good thing. He skeptical that there really is a crisis.
MCDANIEL: I’ve never heard any professional religious person, rabbi, monk, priest, imam ever say everything is fine. You know, it’s always we’re in a state of crisis, and we’re in a state of crisis so you should be coming more, and you should be giving more money, you should be becoming a monk or you should be reading more books.
SEVERSON: He would find some disagreement here in Chiang Mai. Phra Boonchuey, for instance, thinks monks need to be taught more critical thinking instead of just memorization, and that the benefits of meditation need to be emphasized more. He wants Buddhists to get back to their basic precepts, such as abstaining from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and drinking alcohol. He would also counsel them to consume only what they need and to avoid the trappings of materialism.
PHRA BOONCHUEY: Think before [you] consume.
SEVERSON: There is a branch of Buddhism that’s flourishing. It’s called Dhammakaya. One way to explain Dhammakaya is that it is to Buddhism what the prosperity gospel is to Christianity. In other words the traditional value of selflessness has been replaced with “bigger is better.” The more you give, the more you get. Professor Butt says in some ways consumerism is becoming a religion of its own.
PROF. BUTT: This is the most pervasive and maybe becoming deeply rooted and growing the fastest of any religion in Thailand, and it’s consumerism. This is the way that one identifies one’s life, by what you own. The old thing was “I think, therefore I am.” Now it’s “I buy, therefore I am.”
MCDANIEL: I don’t see consumerism as somehow a-religious. And I don’t see modernity as somehow a-religious. I think that there’s many ways of being religious. I think when we say that consumerism or modernity is somehow a sign of secularism, I think that’s a very particular way of looking at religion.
PROF. BUTT: We’re living in a new world, and religion is a response to life, to what it means to be human, and when that changes, as I said earlier, religion has to change too or it dies. It’s put in a museum.
SEVERSON: No one is suggesting Thai Buddhism is heading for a museum, but many agree that it might need some new packaging.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Boy Scouts and Gay Ban
DEBORAH POTTER, correspondent: The Boy Scouts of America has long argued that homosexuality is incompatible with its basic principles. As a private organization, its right to exclude gays was upheld by the Supreme Court a decade ago. But the issue has remained divisive.
Pascal Tessier, for one, hopes the scouts will lift the ban.
PASCAL TESSIER: I’ve had wonderful experiences with all the other boys and learning all my life skills and becoming a leader and all that.
POTTER: Pascal is now 16 and just a few steps away from becoming an Eagle Scout, the highest rank in scouting. He’s also openly gay.
TESSIER: Right now I’m on the line. I could get a letter any day saying I’m not part of scouts anymore. I’m kicked out. I would…that’s it, that’s the end of it. That’s the end of ten years of scouting.
POTTER: The policy change proposed by the Boy Scouts of America would affect more than two-and-a-half million boys. Most of them—70 percent—belong to troops that are sponsored by religious organizations. And the reaction from faith-based groups has been mixed. The Mormon Church, the largest single sponsor of scout groups, is on record as saying that homosexual acts are sinful. But it surprised many by giving its blessing to the Boy Scouts’ proposal just weeks before the vote. United Methodist churches, like Metropolitan Memorial in Washington, DC, supported the change from the start. Senior Pastor Charles Parker is a former scout and father of a seven-year-old boy.
CHARLES PARKER (Senior Pastor, Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church): I think the scouts are actually wrestling with the same thing the church is wrestling with in terms of an erosion of membership over the years, and if they really want to communicate to a new generation of folks, my son is not going to understand bigotry towards homosexuals and wouldn’t be part of a group that was bigoted. So if we want a new generation of scouts, we’ve got to do this.
POTTER: Opponents of the proposal to accept gay scouts say it flies in the face of a basic tenet of scouting: the oath boys take to be “morally straight.”
Boy Scouts reciting oath: “To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.“
Family Research Council video: “Over 100 million boys have taken the scouts’ oath.”
POTTER: The Christian conservative group Family Research Council produced a national webcast to rally the opposition.
CHRISTIAN SACRA (Eagle Scout) (from “Stand With the Scouts” video): Changing the scout policy on homosexuality really brings up concerns of making sure the scouts live by the scout oath and law, when really we’re supporting an idea that goes against it.
PASTOR ROBERT HALL (Calvary Chapel Rio Rancho, NM) (from “Stand With the Scouts” video): The problem is that we as churches are setting a moral code in people’s lives, as we’re the conscience of the nation. And we have all our scout volunteers sign our statement of faith. And it’s within that environment we’re all in agreement of what we believe, that we’re training our boys and teaching them to honor God and to be, as you say, “morally straight.” And that would be incompatible with this change in scouting. We could not continue our relationship with them.
POTTER: To Pascal Tessier, the concerns makes no sense.
TESSIER: Sexuality does not have a place in scouts. It’s about having good morals and be able to be a good person. So I think that bringing sexuality into it doesn’t have any effect. Your sexuality doesn’t affect your morals.
POTTER: And some supporters of admitting gay scouts say the policy change doesn’t go far enough. The Boy Scouts have drawn the line at 18, still refusing to accept gay adults as scout leaders.
PARKER: I think the issue of trying to intellectually justify that being gay and being a scout is fine, but being gay and being a leader is not fine is an odd one, because on some level you’re training scouts to be leaders, and so if you’re training gay scouts to be presumably gay leaders, but then you don’t want gay leaders in the scouts, that’s sort of an odd message to send.
POTTER: Some troops undoubtedly will leave the Boy Scouts of America if the new policy is approved. But the organization faces a possible economic backlash if it retains the ban. Measures are under review in several states to withhold funding or tax breaks from the scouts unless the ban is lifted.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Deborah Potter in Washington.
Boy Scouts reciting Scout Benediction: “May the great Scout Master of all great scouts be with us until we meet again.”
Sequestration and the Poor
LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Head Start kids, three and four years old in Baltimore. They’re singing now, but will they be singing when the much-ballyhooed sequestration fully kicks in? Come July this particular Head Start program will lose over 100 thousand dollars in government funding.
ERIC STEGMAN: It’s an enormous setback and I think a lot of what we’re seeing now is that sequestration is real.
SEVERSON: Eric Stegman is an analyst for the Center For American Progress and an expert on sequestration and poverty.
STEGMAN: You’ve got so many different cuts hitting families from so many different directions it’s going to be really hard for families to stay on their feet especially if they have trouble finding employment and other things they need to do to support their family.
SEVERSON: The sequestration is the law approved by Congress and the president to cut 85 billion dollars out of federal spending. The cuts will affect only discretionary spending, like defense, government agencies and a lot of programs that will impact low income families in particular. It’s the cities that will bear the brunt of the cuts and few big cities will be harder hit than Baltimore, Maryland.
MAYOR STEPHANIE ROLLINS BLAKE: All of the things that are put in place to hold up the families are, you know, slowly one by one being pulled out.
SEVERSON: This is Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rollins Blake.
MAYOR BLAKE: Every time we talk about a cut you’re talking about many people who don’t have an expensive lobby that is in Washington, DC. It’s an economic justice issue, a social justice issue, this is about what’s right for our country, and that we are a country that doesn’t just pretend to care about the vulnerable but that actually cares enough to do what’s right.
SEVERSON: Baltimore is by no means the poorest big city in the U.S. but it’s poorer than many. Bill McCarthy is the Executive Director of Catholic Charities in Maryland.
BILL McCARTHY: If you think about the city of Baltimore, 20 percent of our city lives in poverty. One of every four children in our city lives in poverty. We have an unemployment rate of about 11 percent. And if you go to segments of our city like West Baltimore the unemployment rate is 60 percent.
SEVERSON: There are a number of churches trying to help the poor in Maryland, but by far the largest aid organization is Catholic Charities with over 2000 employees and 15,000 volunteers like these working here at Our Daily Bread pantry that will serve over 300,000 meals this year. When paychecks run out, the line is a block long.
MAYOR BLAKE: Many of these people are the working poor. I mean coming out of the great recession has been tremendously difficult because you have people who had once been employed and many of those people found themselves out, you know trying to figure out what to do.
STEGMAN: Throughout the year, the average recipient of long term unemployment insurance is going to see their checks cut through the year by about $450 dollars and when you’re already living on very little and trying to find a job, you do end up going to the food banks and other places to get assistance.
McCARTHY: There’s a story behind every number, there’s a face behind every number. I see those faces everyday.
SEVERSON: The number of people in Baltimore waiting for public housing, which faces huge cuts, is already 35,000. Education for poor and disadvantaged kids will be cut several billion. Funding for public safety is on the chopping block.
MAYOR BLAKE: That would be devastating, you know, as we are finding the resources to become a safer city. We need more resources not less.
SEVERSON: Nationwide over 600,000 women and children will be cut from the special supplemental nutrition program. These are only a few of the hits on the poor. Cuts also for Meals on Wheels.
STEGMAN: For most of the recipients, this is the only food that they get. And I think another thing that people don’t understand is that Meals on Wheels is a program for very hungry low income seniors and people with disabilities.
SEVERSON: For people like Michelle Rositzky sequestration is like a train barreling down the track straight at her.
MICHELLE ROSITZKY: Ever since we heard about it, it’s been weighing on our mind and worried about it every single day, wake up and find out one day we won’t be able to bring our kids to Head Start and we have to worry about everything else.
SEVERSON: Each day she picks up her little girl Natalie from Head Start about 2 in the afternoon which allows both Michelle and her husband to work. Without Head Start, she would have to stay home. Funding for day care help for low income moms is also targeted.
ROSITZKY: Our bills are pretty big as everyone’s bills are. We won’t be able to pay our electric bill, we won’t be able to pay our water bill. It will be hard to make sure we have food in the house for the kids, and with four kids you know, it’s a lot.
MARY GUNNING: In the morning, when the children, some of the children when they come in, they’re very hungry. They will eat several bowls of cereal. I mean for a three-year old that’s fairly unusual. I mean they depend on us for the food.
SEVERSON: Mary Gunning is the director of St. Jerome’s Head Start program where Michelle brings Natalie. She’s already reduced her staff hours and other programs to meet the sequestration cuts.
GUNNING: I don’t think people understand already that, you know, you talk about being down to the bone, well we are, whatever is inside the marrow, that’s where we are. I mean we have made massive cuts in our program already while trying to still be able to retain services for families and children.
SEVERSON: Studies have shown that a greater percentage of kids who go through Head Start go on to college.
MAYOR BLAKE: The cuts that we’re making to the most vulnerable will have long term personal impact but they’ll have extremely long term economic impact if we don’t insure that someone graduates from high school then we should start to prepare for the likelihood of them being in the justice system and that’s far more expensive.
SEVERSON: When sequestration first became law, the intent was it could not be tampered with. That changed when air traffic controllers were forced to take a day off and there were flight delays, passenger complaints and Congress was just about to board airplanes to go home for recess. Suddenly, in a rare display of bipartisanship, Congress fixed the delays.
STEGMAN: It really says something about Congress’s priorities and I think a lot of struggling families in the country are asking Congress where are they in their priorities. Because air travelers are important but struggling families across the country are every bit as important.
MAYOR BLAKE: It seems almost trivial you know that that would rise to the level of requiring an emergency session while families in need, it seems like their voices go unheard.
McCARTHY: Our budget is a moral document, it sets those priorities in terms of what we value as a society as necessary and important. Whether it’s a project in the Defense Department or putting our airline traffic controllers back to work at the same schedule without considering the poor and those that are marginalized is frankly immoral and very concerning.
SEVERSON: Congress is now considering the possibility of tinkering with the defense budget so the sequestration won’t hurt critical Pentagon programs. There has been very little debate about easing the cuts on programs that are critical to the poor.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Baltimore.
Mike McCurry on Fixing Politics
BOB ABERNETHY: This commencement season, when graduates are encouraged to go out and change the world, we have a Belief and Practice segment on a man with a new graduate degree who wants to do nothing less than change the political climate of Washington, D.C. He is Mike McCurry, an old Washington hand, and we caught up with him last Monday as the Washington National Cathedral opened its doors for the commencement ceremony of the Wesley Theological Seminary.
Choir singing: “The glories of my God and King, the triumphs of his grace.”
ABERNETHY: Mike McCurry is a United Methodist who was press secretary for President Clinton at the White House in the 1990s. Later, he worked in public relations and also served on the board of the Wesley Theological Seminary.It was then that he decided to get a graduate degree, a Master of Arts, and try to change the way Washington works.
Commencement Ceremony Announcer: Michael D. McCurry, with honors.
MIKE McCURRY: i think the single biggest missing ingredient in our political system right now are real relationships of trust, you know, human relationships where people really think about and care about each other. And that’s right where the church has to be. To me, that’s what the church is about.
I’m a guy who comes out of the world of political communications and how we express things in the media. I think we have got to tone it down a lot.
I want to be very clear. We’re not talking about taking church dogma and putting that front and center in the way we do policy-making. We’re not saying there ought to be a theocracy here. But I think there are ways in which people who are guided by the spirit, and who have a deep respect and love for God, treat each other a little bit differently.
Part of the study of scripture is that business about loving your neighbor as yourself. Well, there’s not a whole lot of that kind of love in Washington. But we are a community, and I think there are ways and with various faith traditions—Christianity, obviously, in my case, but others as well can bring us to a point where there’s a little more spiritual bonding that can happen in this town.
ABERNETHY: I asked him whether he could imagine that happening in Congress.
McCURRY: It’s hard sometimes, you know, it would require a lot of prayer, probably.
ABERNETHY: Later, McCurry acknowledged his sense of mission.
McCURRY: I wanted to take courses at the seminary, first and frankly, out of intellectual curiosity. But the more I did it, the more I felt some sense of call, that God was putting on me a challenge to see if I could do something about this broken world of politics that I’ve worked in for so long, to do something to create a little more civil discourse in this country.
ABERNETHY: And that’s what you’re going to do?
McCURRY: That’s what I’m going to use my degree to do.
Mike McCurry Extended Interview
“I think the single biggest missing ingredient in our political system right now are real relationships of trust, human relationships where people really think about and care about each other. And that’s right where the church has to be.” Watch more of our conversation with recent Wesley Theological Seminary graduate Mike McCurry about how religion can promote more civil political discourse in Washington.
Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism; Prison Nonviolence Project
We look at the challenges facing those who decide to leave the confines of the tight-knit ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, and we visit a program in San Quentin prison that helps inmates deal with the emotional pain at the root of their criminal behavior through meditation and contemplation.
