Scranton Coal Mine Revisited

This year my son, Joseph, and I went to the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour. It was my second visit. I had gushed to my college-aged son and everybody else who would listen what a eye-opening experience this had been last year. (See article below)

I left very upset. No, not at the way people, especially children, had been treated by the "Christian" coal mine owners but the way the whole labor struggle had been eliminated from the Tour. A new little-orphan-Annie hard-knock-life film in the new yuppieized visitor center mentioned NOTHING about the mine workers fight for labor justice. The film sounded like labor unions never existed. In a retro faith-based initiative it mentioned that only "churches" and other local organizations were sources of help to the miners and their families. But I reassured my son that the tour guide would set things straight. Well, he turned out to be what I can only describe as a retired carnival barker. He gave a hurried mumbled tour that again avoided any reference to the labor union or the historical strike of 1902. What a disgrace!

Were the recent coal mine victims in Utah union members?

Archeologism

Taking past practices as inherently better than present practices is archeologism. When "liturgical reform" was prompted by the occasion of the Second Vatican Council, many rituals were picked artificially from different sources and times. They were imposed immediately in an authoritarian manner. Think of the rediscovery of Pompei as an example: works of art and sculpture were looted out of context and placed in various palaces. Pretty stuff but not living art.
Another example from a story my friend Dan told me. Dan is active on his parish council. In one recent meeting someone was talking about the "responsorial psalm" after the first Scripture reading. They wanted to get more "response" from the worshippers and reminded everyone that this responsorial was an ancient liturgical practice revived in the new liturgy. Dan simply responded (!), "Why do you think they dropped it?".

I Didn’t Know Washington D.C. Was This Isolated

January 6^th I mailed a formal first-class letter to the new Senator from Pennsylvania congratulating him on his election and urging him to show leadership in opposing killing newly conceived unborn babies to get their body parts (embryonic stem cells). I tried to remind him that “embryo” is simply a clinical term for a stage in our human lives just as “adolescent” or “adult”.

As of February 12^th I had received no reply so I emailed his Washington office. I had written early before Senator Casey even took the oath of office to allow time for the postal anti-anthrax scanning and the set-up of his new office. But I thought five weeks was enough. February 14^th I called directly to Washington. The office staff acted as if the first-class letter I had sent was a non-issue. The fact that they neither had the letter nor cared about answering it was something they expected me to think was understandable.

The administrative officer working for Senator Casey said that the Senator had released a statement on January 22^nd and it should be on his website. As we were both looking at the site she realized that it had not been posted. She assured me that she would email it.

As of the 22^rd of February the statement was not on the website so I called again. This time I got the press assistant. She seemed to understand my concern. She emailed the statement below. (The administrative officer had apparently emailed the document but my AOL spam filter must have dumped it.)

This statement was printed to be handed to the Right-to-Life marchers when they went to the Senator’s office. No press release was given to the press for the rest of the public.

Scranton Coal Mine

You know the song …

Sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter don’t you call me
Cause I can’t go –
I owe my soul to the company store.

A few months ago I went to the coal mine tour here in Scranton, PA, with my wife and my brother-in-law. Historically and morally it was an eye-opening experience. If you had said to me before this tour that coal miners and even children had been exploited by mine owners I would simply have nodded in agreement. This is an accepted assessment of a general historical situation. While after the tour I certainly appreciated the almost impossible situation of the coal miner’s family, I was truly astonished at the amount of unrelenting child abuse. Children were not only employed in the dangerous coal sorting work outside the mine but were constantly injured and killed down in the mine as part of the standard workforce. One job: lead the coal hauling mule through the tunnel. If the boy and mule died… the family would owe the company the price of the mule. These boys were often employed because their father had died working for the mine. That gets us back to the opening lyric.

A miner was required to excavate eighteen tons of coal in order to get any pay for that day. Yet nearly everything he need to work and live had to be purchased from the company store. Hence you always fell into debt. When a man died working for the mine a company lackey would bring his body to his home. The widow would then have three days to pay off his debt or give a son to the mine to prevent her family from being evicted from her company house.

Economic Zen - Neti, neti - Not capitalism not communism.

How are things different for us today compared to these mine workers? What does it really mean to be “employed” in our society? First, it means you do not have the means to support yourself – you do not have the independent business, trade or wealth to buy food, clothing, shelter, etc. for yourself or your family. You need to ask someone else for the work necessary to make a living. If someone cares to employ you for their business they know they have you at a disadvantage. Whether your pride admits to it or not, you have the status of a beggar. Do what your employer demands or lose the means to care for yourself and your dependents. But is it not fair? Did your employer force your parents to be poor or have no family farm or business or force you to have no trade? The employer is simply offering a fair exchange: work for food. Are there no homeless shelters? No welfare? Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?

When researching this article I read about indentured servants in colonial America. I had thought there might be a useful comparison. There was a comparison but not the one you might suspect. Many indentured servants were far better off than most modern American employees. When their period of indenture was completed, these individuals were often able to buy their own farm or business. What is the percentage of American workers who can work for an employer for seven to ten years and then be given the means to buy their own business? A much, much lower percentage than among indentured servants it seems.
We are longer-lived coal miners.

The story of how we became coal miners is the history of the industrial revolution. But it is not the history of mass production but of the ownership of the means of mass production. Researchers in the past decade discovered an interesting historical anomaly – Henry VIII of England in his zeal to attack the Catholic Church destroyed a monastery where the monks had developed mass produced modern steel for their tools. Imagine (better than yoko-onoized John Lennon) a world where the means of mass production was owned not by wealthy individuals or phony corporations but by villages, monasteries, neighborhoods, families? We would not need to be exploited as assets by private capital but struggle to work together as neighbors and family.

Private capital should remain private. When a private individual or “corporation” can virtually buy the whole life of another human being (laborers, clerical workers, coal miners, slaves), private capital by definition has exceeded its rightful place and encroached on the res publica. This usurpation damages our shared community. This is political – in the Aristotelian sense of the right ordering of society. No one should be able put a mortgage on themselves or another.

While private capitalism engorged on the power of modern mass production is abusive, the anti-matter solution of State ownership proposed by Marxism is simply changing the bosses and not the real status of the worker. The difficult road to journey is to promote anything that returns ownership to natural human communities where that community cannot shirk its responsibilities to its members. Profit and enterprise are still very necessary - not the profit intended to expand individual riches but the profit necessary to maintain a natural growth in family, village, etc.

We look at the enormous needs of our family or friends or the world and it is easy to become discouraged. At the risk of being “preachy”, remember the multiplication of the loaves. Start doing some determined good and let God worry about the rest.

How To Crash The Party In Heaven

Comes Judgement Day I have a suggestion about how to sneak into heaven. Have you noticed that when people go to church the right side tends to fill in first? I think this has something to do with our predominate righthandedness. Now imagine the great plain on Judgement Day: people are running in to fill up the best spots, mostly on their right. But when our Lord Jesus comes to face the crowd in judgement those on the right will be on his left. The gospel says that Jesus will separate those on his right and left; the charitable on his right going to heaven and the selfish on his left going to hell. In other words those who depended on their own right will be on the left.

Well, our Lord’s standard of loving service may be too high for someone like me. Here’s my two part plan to get by. First I am going to try my best to practice humility in this life. Why? I don’t think there is any guarantee that the intellectual concept “I must remember to go to the left, Jesus’ right” will survive the experience of death and judgement. I want to be so practiced in humility that I will automatically let everyone in ahead of me and be forced to go to the few places left on the left. (This “automatic” tendency of the will is a virtue.) The second part is this: I want to pray to Jesus’ mother Mary as much as possible. After several billion people have filed past our Lord and I am close to the Gate, I want to wave at Mary the Queen Mother and say “Hail, Mary!”. I hope she will then recognize my voice and give me at least a faint smile. Jesus will see this and think anyone who’s a friend of his mother is alright with him and let me pass.

Global Smoking

My natural tendency is to doubt popular analysis of public issues. The popular misconceptions about “population explosion”, abortion “rights”, two-party “democracy”, etc., etc., shows the public is easily misled by whoever owns the media. So when the popular media chants together about the dangers of global warming I am on my guard. I listen very carefully to any voice raised in disagreement. My caution is re-enforced when proponents of the idea of human activity increasing global average temperature engage in alarmist rhetoric. Heidi Cullen of the Weather Channel originally seemed to suggest that anyone who disagreed with the above idea should have their credentials revoked. Later she said that she would listen to others – once – and then move on. A recent episode of her show was promoted with the blurb that the Florida Everglades were “on the brink of extinction”. The phrase “on the brink” in a promo does not imply that forty or fifty years from now the Everglades will vanish, it seems to warn of their disappearance in four or five years. The Everglades, just like the Mississippi delta, have been severely damaged by mistaken water management. They are not going to disappear tomorrow if corrective action is taken.

Yet despite my misgivings I sense the issue of global warming is historically comparable to the issue of tobacco smoking. If you ceaselessly pump toxic smoke into your lungs and bloodstream you can expect negative consequences. If we ceaselessly pump pollutants and greenhouse gases you can expect negative consequences. Those who oppose this general concept of cleaning the environment remind me of those scientists and businessmen who downplayed the dangers of smoking to health. Doing things to make our energy production and consumption less damaging to the environment is the same as quitting smoking.

Feature: The Falling Boy

1.

When I was eight years old I remember walking up to our second floor apartment starting to cry. My mother at the door looked at my wet eyes and asked, “What’s the matter?” I told her I had seen another boy walking with his big sister and he was constantly falling to the sidewalk. No one, not even his sister, would help him. My mother just looked at me and said, “Why didn’t you?”

My tears stopped and I was stupefied. I had expected my mother to be sympathetic with my tearful sentiments. Instead her remark pointed out that I had the power to help someone and I had failed even to see it.

Was it her intention to hurt my self-esteem? She did not follow up her comment with any lecture or discussion. She had no desire to ridicule. I received a short to-the-point medicinal shot that lanced misused sentiment and made me realize that I was empowered to help someone and not just feel sorry for them. Here, perhaps, is the beginning of why we hesitate to give or receive correction. We will see our unpleasant reflection in a mirror – our pride challenged and our weakness exposed. How much more comfortable are the confines of a false man-made image of ourselves, of others and of the world.

We don’t like medicinal shots. What a harsh world if we were to expect everyone every time to be a doctor administering some medical procedure. Ah, but I’m willing to take my medicine and become a better person! But do we really want our eyes opened? I wish I could say that my mother’s “Why didn’t you?” was a life changing moment. With no exaggerated self-deprecation I estimate that ninety-nine percent of the time after the incident of the falling boy I was still blind to the way I could help others. Thomas Merton once wrote that we do not seek the truth but the half-truth that justifies us. It is painful to face ourselves and even more daunting to take up the task of healing or strengthening.

2.

We don’t want to make the difficult journey all the way to truth. We tire easily and want to settle for a substitute, an idol, a Golden Calf. We are reassured and made comfortable when joined by so many other worshippers of the Calf. I enjoy the security of being with the crowd. They confirm my subjective opinions and my self-image. The crowd protects me.

Not only am I reassured and protected by my fellow Calf-worshippers but I seem to make physical and emotional profit from them. With others at my side I can laugh and mock the falling boy, immune to dangerous sentiment and sharing the intoxicating drink of our normalcy.

At this point we not only dislike facing the truth but we begin to fear being cast out of what we see as normal human society. Perhaps not only to be cast out but attacked. And with long exposure to this intoxicant comes addiction. We don’t just get drunk once and regret it. We need the intoxication all the time whether alone or with companions.

Addicts are hostile to attempts to moderate their habit. Most of us seem to react with instant anger to any evaluation pointing to any mistake or problem. Even after we are told we are good and right in every way but one, we usually ignore all the positive compliments and focus solely on the single negative. We see it not as a healthy opportunity but as an undeserved piercing insult.

Falsity can be inebriating at first but it always ends in some kind of harm. Yet so can overdosing on “honesty”. The power of being critical, realistic, honest gives me a high. I stand upon a mountain looking down. Uttering lies about another person is so obviously tawdry – far beneath me! I’m going to inform you! “Did you know he used to…?” The taste of “telling the truth” about someone in order to subtract from that person’s attraction by detraction is sweet. It is our most frequent and entirely overlooked misuse of “being honest”.

3.

Originally I only wanted to think and write about the puzzle of why we don’t speak the truth to each other. Sure, I realized immediately that what is objective reality and what we think is true are not necessarily the same. Yet the personal moral question that perplexed me remained – why do we withhold our full understanding, knowledge and insights from other people? But my notes and reflections were abruptly silenced just as my childhood thoughts on that second floor landing. I realized how “honesty” was most often arrogance and it had frequently distorted my perception of the real situation. Forty-six years after “Why didn’t you?”, I was still focused more on other’s behavior and not my own. I was staggered again. I had forgotten my role. I assumed and hid in a misshapened version of my mother’s: Why didn’t he? Why didn’t she? Why don’t they?

When you worry about how the rest of the world responds, it distracts you from your own response.

4.

Jesus said not to try to take the speck out of your brother’s eye until you take the plank out of your own. People forget that he did go on and say that once the plank is removed then you can see to take out the speck.

How do I remove the plank, take out the speck?

Who would deny that conducting any surgery, especially eye surgery, on someone else is easier than on one’s self? I’m going to have to ask somebody to help remove that plank from my eye. I don’t want to overbuild on the hyperbole of Jesus but going to try anyway.

- Knowing I have a log jutting out leaves me cautious in approaching my brother’s speck. I don’t want to poke his eye out or smack him in the head with my plank.
- Knowing I have a plank and getting help pulling it out might teach me some skills necessary to operate on Brother or Sister.

Again, only somebody else can really assist us in getting out something stuck in the eye of our moral vision. While the company of the Calf deludes us, it is only through others that we come to know the truth. My mother showed me the difference between a helping hand and ineffectual sentimentality. I need the example and instruction of others. Who has enlightened you?

The cliché is that we cannot see the back of our head. In fact, we cannot fully see our physical or mental state without the mirrors provided by other people. We cannot even become self-aware without the presence and language given to us by others. Self-awareness is not the result of mere complication. Some imagine that the increasing evolutionary size and ability of physical brains (applied now also to artificial brains) leads, like critical mass, to human consciousness.

We simply wake up as from a dreamless sleep and are self-conscious? No one need speak to the first self-aware creature, “Awake”? This is the same logical fallacy as the self-creating universe. Someone who has never achieved any particular level of awareness ultimately needs the agency of another’s look, word, picture, sign or sound to enlighten them.

5.

The difference between those intoxicated with the drugs of falsehood or arrogance and those whose eyes are full of specks and planks is that the first group have damaged judgment that requires them to reach a point that sobers them while the second group have basicly sound judgment once the impediment is removed. This second group are not usually Calf-worshippers but a fraternity capable of mutual correction. There is no fraternal correction of the Calf people, only casting pearls before drunken, stumbling swine. Members of the cult of self can be compared to domesticated animals because they live caged between birth and death. They see only what this temporal span can hold and that leads humans to every kind of physical, mental and spiritual violence.

When a person recognizes and accepts the difficulties of journeying to the promised land of the truth, they become free. This is not the faux substitute of mere “independence” – freedom from Egypt, freedom from Rome, the British, slavery, etc.. This is the free man or woman who leaves the limited world of self and is alive in the real world of Creation.

Perhaps a surgeon could kidnap someone off the street and, restraining them, perform successful surgery. But moral correction needs cooperation. I have been both a stumbling pig and a resigned patient. Looking at me, or anyone, it may be very difficult to tell which at what time. So, since most of us most of the time are morally uncooperative, many instances of attempted fraternal correction have left us with a bad taste in our mouth. This negative pavlovian training makes us excessively shy about offering correction to others.

How can I tell if I’m helping a brother or sister with a speck? Or arrogantly showing my power to step on another person by harsh judgments? Or throwing a pearl to a pig? One possible clue is that arrogant Calf-worshippers want to attack those who differ. Speaking for myself, I have rarely approached others with the gentle, skilled hand of fraternal charity. Finger-pointing, fault-finding are the hallmarks of being judgmental. Using our abilities to help others when they come to us or are legitimately placed in our care is love.

There is a lot of unnecessary and /or poor surgery in the world.

“Facts” should not be used as weapons. We use insight and knowledge according to the patient’s need. Kindness and courtesy are medicinal.

Do we need to say anything at all? Do we need to be “blunt”? Jesus spoke first of “sleep” when he meant death. Sometimes people really have no need to know some fact. Why disturb them when they might not understand this “fact” or be able to do anything about it? I certainly have to stop myself from pasing on “facts” that only serve to scandalize or slander. Sometimes people have no right or need to know what I know. I don’t tell them a falsehood. Yet, must I volunteer extra knowledge to correct their ignorance or misunderstanding? Cardinal Newman’s debate with Charles Kingsley in 19th century England on equivocation expands our sense of the care we should take in dispensing the medicine of truth. Need we voluntarily surrender every fact to others even when it could hurt us, them or someone else?

Being truthful does not require emotional public nudity. Simply to strip ourselves in public of all personal private thoughts and secrets is destructive. There is a difference between not speaking up out of fear and not revealing all out of concern for the ability of another to understand or benefit. The analytical realist often is not being realistic. Analyzing something or, worse, someone is frequently the dissection after death. The living whole needs to be communicated and received in order to be understood. Everyone will nod when this is said but most of us will return to the superficial look which ignores the subject or the analytical stare which eliminates the subject.

6.

You may have noticed that the incident of the falling boy was more about orthopraxy (doing what is true) than orthodoxy (knowing what is true). There was no dispute that the boy should be helped – I just didn’t realize I should be the one giving the aid. But what help to others could the falling boy offer? A silly question – after he recovers then he can find his own ways to assist others. And what if he never recovers and is always falling? Or he thinks he is always in danger of falling?

Many of us suffer from what I call the drowning man syndrome. A man gulping his lungs full of water cannot consider the needs of people standing on the shore. We are so desperate to get the necessities of life that we feel we can’t look to the needs of others. This attitude can continue in our souls even after we are comfortably aboard the life raft. I’m still drowning, I’m still struggling to support myself or my family, what can I really do for others?

What are a few loaves and fish among so many?

7.

I won’t speak the truth because of self-serving doubt – “How can I be right and know the truth?” So I will keep silent and feel very humble – as the truth is ignored or attacked. I will suppress urges to speak the truth because of hopelessness. Again I address the dumb idol in my heart – “Why should I? It will make no difference.”

The task is arduous and we refuse the effort. Or we take the “lazyman’s load” and want to rush the work of explaining our understanding.

Our pride convinces us to be always right. We want to win the debate, win the election, win the job, not speak the truth.

Sometimes, like very young children we innocently speak the truth as we understand it in our hearts. Why did Jesus say that we must become like little children to enter the kingdom of God?

Sometimes, like martyrs trusting in God, we stand and witness.