I occupy the “feature presentation” spot in today’s order of service not because I am an expert on the subject, but because I came up with a title at a meeting of the Sunday services committee. I thought it an appropriately ironic response to the day before the Labor Day holiday, but none of the experts was free on the Sunday when our new minister, Matt Alspaugh, was scheduled to be out of the pulpit. Matt’s opening service last week on “Making Changes” took, as he put it, a “left turn” into the issue of health care, so I want to take a leaf out of Matt’s book and ask a similar series of questions on the theme of the day: (Please raise your hand if your answer is affirmative to the following questions)
- Have you or someone close to you lost your job in the current economic downturn?
- Are you personally acquainted with a person who is unemployed and hasn’t been able to find a job?
- Have you yourself experienced unemployment at some time in the past?
We live in a society where the question “Who are you?” or “What do you do?” is first and foremost answered by the identification of one’s status in the workforce – at least such is Robert Fulghum’s central theme in the reading that Diana Burkhart found for this service and read just now. Whether or not we are “employed outside the home” (a euphemism introduced by the Women’s movement to eradicate the assumption that “work” is defined as having a job and the elements of social recognition attached to it), the issues of personal identity are central to our faith. Indeed, our first principle is affirmation of “the worth and dignity of every person.” As has been recently pointed out by some pundit I heard on NPR, the importance of one’s form of gainful employment is so critical that personhood, at least in terms of access to health care, has come to be defined by the existence of an insurance policy that is most likely to be supplied by one’s employer. Any “public option” smacks of socialism. So many forms labor are apparently not sufficient qualification for personhood in the health care system.
My grandfather, whose Socialist credentials dated back to 1910 when he served as President of the Intercollegiate Socialists Society of Columbia University, was fond of repeating “Brains never created a cent of economic wealth.” -- despite the fact that his gentlemanly existence, and subsequently mine, surrounded us almost exclusively by members of intellectual professions. I grew up with the belief that the timing of our Labor Day in the USA, the first Monday in September, had something to do with official fears associated with May 1st as the “Workers’ Day” in most of Europe. Our resident Labor historian Diane Barnes (current vice-resident of this church) clarified for me that, while Labor Day was indeed put in place as a means of appeasing workers in the face of labor union activism, it was not originally schedule in counterpoint to the Socialist holiday:
“Actually, even more cynically it was a ploy to get political support from workers. In the late 1880s through early 1890 there were a series of very big national strikes in various industries, but especially on the railroads. Workers in New York "took" a holiday in Sept.1892, parading and marching around the city. Grover Cleveland, who as President was particularly harsh in crushing strikes, saw this as an opportunity to look like a friend of the working class. In 1894 there was a huge strike at the Pullman factory in Chicago, and Cleveland sent the US Army to crush the strike. Almost as soon as he did this, he pushed a bill through Congress that officially declared the first Monday of September "Labor Day." He still lost the 1894 election!Back to my history: While my socialist grandfather pontificated over cocktails to his friends and acquaintances, I grew up at the height of the Cold War Era. My earliest memories of television are associated with the McCarthy hearings. I was born in the state of New Hampshire, whose motto is “live free or die.” We Americans define our freedom in terms of right to free speech, assembly, etc., and consider these freedoms the essence of democracy. I nevertheless grew up with a fascination for the land that was claimed to be the worker’s paradise (Russia) – although my own interests had more to do with the language, and more specifically, the revolution in theatrical practice begun at the turn of the 20th centuryby director Konstantin Stanislavsky than the political revolution masterminded by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
When my educational path took me to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, and eventually led to my tenured position here at YSU, it was with a sense of romanticism that I came into contact with the grimaces of organized labor and the aftermath of its unsuccessful struggles with the steel industry. I was fascinated by the appearance as a speaker at YSU in 1988, shortly after I had joined the YSU faculty, of Gus Hall, the long-time President of the American Communist Party, whom I had watched on Russian television in Moscow at the 25th Communist Party Congress in 1976 (I was studying in Moscow at the time). I had mistakenly assumed that Gus was a fiction of Communist Party Propaganda. At his YSU talk some 20 years later, poor Gus inveighed against the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), telling the Youngstown audience “I told Gorbachev that he was on the wrong path” Gus urged nationalization of industry in this country while these policies were being dismantled in the country whose language and culture were my field of study and teaching.
The Constitution of the USSR – Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union, guaranteed Soviet citizen a right to work. The flip side of this constitutional right, however, was the fact that being unemployed for more than three months was illegal. A central event I learned of from the dissidents and Russian immigrants who composed the Russian teachers I encountered in the US-- three waves of refugees from the USSR to the USA-- was the trial and exile of poet Joseph Brodsky (subsequently Nobel Laureate and Poet Laureate of the USA), whose chief crime was writing poetry without a license.
The Soviet Union considered itself the “most democratic nation on earth,” and this was not merely the stuff of propaganda. In that society, “freedom” was defined as “freedom from” want, and therefore a guarantee of basic PHYSICAL needs: found, shelter, work, and health care. The benefits which the state was able to provide may have served OUR AMERICAN propaganda, but many on the lower ends of the economic scale in this country might argue that the lack of access to health care, housing, food, renders freedom of speech virtually meaningless. “Freedom to”, however was more controlled: all forms of employment were to be in service to the state, and writers were first and foremost “ideological workers.”
Joseph Brodsky had left school to go work in a factory to support his parents, and began to write poetry without benefit of higher education. His writing never qualified as “literature of dissent,” but it was not comprehensible to the masses” – the requisite to being a published poet in the Soviet Union and gaining membership in the Writer’s Union, which in absence of a capitalist economy, was the source of all social and economic benefits a writer could gain. As an adult, even though Brodsky was extremely erudite by virtue of self-education and earned a reasonable salary as a free-lance translator, he was, by official definition, a “work-shirker.”
The transcript of Brodsky’s trial was one of the first manuscripts that circulated widely in “samizdat” (the underground “self-publications). Brodsky the poet was sentenced to seven years’ exile in a labor colony. He had the temerity to answer the judge’s question that the right to write poetry was not grant by any governmental authority, but by “God,”—not the best answer to give in the courtroom of an officially atheist state.
Now, some 20 years after Gorbachev’s glasnost opened his country for the publication of all manner of free speech, the return to autocracy under Putin-Medvedev is preferred by a large majority of the population who suffered from mass unemployment brought on by the perestroika or “restructuring” its government and industry. While we no longer consider ourselves a globe divided into two poles, we generally note, I believe, that “The Great Society” that arose in our society in the post-War era to deal with the needs of the underprivileged is also reaching levels of crisis. So a critical aspect of making changes both globally and locally of that change is to allow freedom to redefine what constitutes our human identity. Where do we stand vis-à-vis the hierarchy of needs, and how do we negotiate “worth and dignity” of every person” in the interconnected web of existence of which we are all a part?
