Chris Hedges: Fueling the Fire of Real Change

from Truthdig:



Fueling the Fire of Real Change
Posted on Sep 28, 2008

By Chris Hedges


Turn your back on Wall Street. Walk a few blocks up from the gleaming and soulless towers of disintegrating capitalism to the shabby, brick Catholic Worker house at 55 E. Third St. Sit, as I did recently, in one of the chairs in the basement dining room with its cracked linoleum and steel utility tables.

“Works of mercy and contact with the destitute sustain the spark in the ashes,” William Griffin, who has been with the Catholic Worker for 34 years and writes for the newspaper, told me. “It is with the poor and the indigent that you sense the imbalance and injustice. It is this imbalance that inspires action. Generations come in waves. One generation is inspired by these sparks, as Martin Luther King was during the civil rights movement. These fires often fall away and smolder until another generation.”

The coals of radical social change smolder here among the poor, the homeless and the destitute. As the numbers of disenfranchised dramatically increase, our hope, our only hope, is to connect intimately with the daily injustices visited upon them. Out of this contact we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement. Hand out bowls of soup. Coax the homeless into a shower. Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly cast out on city sidewalks, take their medications. Put your muscle behind organizing service workers. Go back into America’s resegregated schools. Protest. Live simply. It is in the tangible, mundane and difficult work of forming groups and communities to care for others and defy authority that we will kindle the outrage and the moral vision to fight back. It is not Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who will save us. It is Dorothy Day.

Day, who died in 1980, founded the Catholic Worker in the midst of the Great Depression with Peter Maurin. The two Catholic anarchists published the first issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933. They handed out 2,500 copies in Union Square for a penny a copy. The price remains unchanged. Two Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in the Lower East Side soon followed. Day and Maurin preached a radical ethic that included an unwavering pacifism as well as a hatred of unfettered capitalism. They condemned private and state capitalism for its unjust distribution of wealth. They branded the profit motive as immoral. They were fervent supporters of the labor movement, the civil rights movement and all anti-war movements. They called on followers to take up lives of voluntary poverty. The Catholic Worker refused to identify itself as a not-for-profit organization and has never accepted grants. It does not pay taxes. It operates its soup kitchen in New York without a city permit. The food it provides to the homeless is donated by people in the neighborhood. There are some 150 Catholic Worker houses around the country and abroad, although there is no central authority. Some houses are run by Buddhists, others by Presbyterians. Religious and denominational lines mean little. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080928_fueling_the_fire_of_real_change/

These are the ones who would turn-off some church-charity campaigns.